Passengers arriving at Heathrow this summer could face lengthy delays at passport control as immigration staff are being redeployed from their normal roles to collect biometric data off Olympic athletes arriving in dedicated passport lanes.

Visiting athletes have been encouraged to supply biometric data – such as fingerprints and photographs – in advance but those who do not will need to have the information taken by border staff.

The information will then be checked against immigration and security watch-lists of terrorists and criminals stored on a database.

But the Border Agency have warned the process, which will costs more than £2 million, could result in normal passengers being delayed passing through border control.

At the very time long passport control queues are being blamed as the root cause of the border control scandal, most registration booths for the technology designed to eliminate such waits have been closed with no sign they are to re-open.

Iris recognition scanners have been introduced at several British airports in recent years to allow regular fliers to skip queues and reduce overcrowding at security gates. Yet despite the very public spat between Border Agency boss Brodie Clark and Home Secretary Theresa May over how and why security checks came to be watered down to ease three-hour log jams for passengers this summer, seven of the nine facilities for new applicants to sign up for the fast-track system are not open.

Three of four offices at Heathrow are closed, as are both at Manchester airport, the solitary one at Birmingham, and one of the two at Gatwick.

Officially the enrolment office at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is still taking new registrants, but it has been reported that the office there has in fact also been closed for the last four months, though the UK Border Agency denied this yesterday.

The scanners themselves remain open. Yet with users of the system being required to renew their records every two years, even the estimated 385,000 current users are threatened by the office closures, meaning the number of people being forced to wait in long queues for conventional passport security is only likely to increase.

The FT carries a similar story.

Mr Hastings reports Biometric equipment manufacturers’ view that obstruction by Borders Agency staff is causing declining use of Iris scanning, but in an interview with Frontline magazine in India, Dr Edgar Whitley advances a different theory:

If there is a sudden good sunshine, very noticeably the room is brightened up. So, you need to potentially adjust your iris-capture device to allow for those kinds of set-ups. But we know from the experience of airports that iris devices often have problems in operating at their full performance level; airports are designed by architects, and architects use lots of glass and open space, which allow for light to come in seamlessly and brighten up the space. This creates a lot of problems for iris recognition systems.

Theresa May suppressed a Home Office report that found changes to the DNA database would make it harder to catch murderers and rapists, according to Labour.

The House of Commons is expected to pass the Protection of Freedom Bill on Monday. Under government’s plans only adults convicted or cautioned will have their DNA stored indefinitely. Those charged but eventually cleared will see their DNA stored for up to five years.

But Labour have said unpublished Home Office research showed that 23,000 people every year, who under Labour’s system would be on the DNA database but under government plans will not be, will commit further offences.

Labour also say the report showed 6,000 of those a year will go on to commit crimes including rape, murder and manslaughter.

The analysis of the Home Office report was conducted by the House of Commons library for shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper.

She said the initial report was given to crime minister James Brokenshire by officials in July 2010, but ministers then chose not to publish its findings.

A broad catch-all discretion enabling police to keep the DNA of innocent people indefinitely for reasons of national security should be scrapped, MPs and peers have said.

Ministers have failed to provide a justification of why this power is necessary and proportionate, the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) said.

Its report on the Protection of Freedoms Bill, which is due to go through its remaining stages in the Commons next week, said the proposals regarding the retention of DNA should be reconsidered.

Home Secretary Theresa May has said the plans to curb the state’s right to intrude in private lives would see almost one million innocent people have their names removed from the national DNA database.

Under the Government’s plans only adults convicted or cautioned will have their DNA stored indefinitely, while those charged but later cleared will see their profile stored for up to five years. But the committee warned this would create “a significant risk of incompatibility with the right to a private life” and called for further evidence to prove it was justifiable.

The Bill would also “create a broad ‘catch-all’ discretion for the police to authorise the retention of material indefinitely for reasons of national security”, the committee warned.

“We are concerned that the minister has not provided a justification of why this power is necessary and proportionate, particularly in light of specific measures targeted towards retention in relation to counter-terrorism and immigration,” the report said.

The JCHR web page describing the report is here, and the report itself is available in PDF or HTML.

The DNA of more than one million innocent people will not be wiped from police records, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Instead the police will retain DNA profiles in anonymised form, leaving open the possibility of connecting them up with people’s names, ministers have admitted.

The admission appears to break a Coalition commitment to delete all innocent profiles, apart from those accused of violent or sex crimes, from police databases.

Civil liberties groups accused the Government of a “disgraceful U-turn” and a “breach of promise” to destroy innocent people’s DNA.

In an editorial comment, the paper says:

This was supposed to be a coalition that could at least agree on the sinister implications of mass supervision; hence the ditching of ID cards. But the effect of that liberating decision is rather cancelled out by this setback for liberty.

We urge MPs to insist that the DNA of innocent people is permanently deleted.

Two countries. Two pet projects of the respective Prime Ministers. Unmistakable parallels in the discourse. “The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty, but about the modern world,” wrote Tony Blair in November 2006, as he was mobilising support for his Identity Cards Bill, 2004. “Aadhaar…is symbolic of the new and modern India,” said Manmohan Singh in September 2010, as he distributed the first Aadhaar number in Nandurbar. “What we are trying to do with identity cards is make use of the modern technology,” said Mr. Blair. “Aadhaar project would use today’s latest and modern technology,” said Dr. Singh. The similarities are endless.

Mr. Blair’s celebrated push for identity cards ended in a political disaster for Labour. The British people resisted the project for over five years. Finally, the Cameron government scrapped the Identity Cards Act in 2010, thus abolishing identity cards and plans for a National Identity Register. On the other hand, India is enthusiastically pushing the Aadhaar, or unique identity (UID), project. The UID project has been integrated with the Home Ministry’s National Population Register (NPR). The “National Identification Authority of India Bill” has been tabled in Parliament. Globally, observers of identity policies are watching if India learns anything from the “modern” world.