. . . what is your take on what historic data might be on PNC if the Met have responded to a subject access saying that they hold no data?
It would be highly worrying if they were able to mislead people
People may feel they have been misled without the information given to them being, in itself, misleading.
This page on the Metropolitan Police Service website explains that there are two available forms of requesting personal data for Londoners, one is information held on the PNC (a request which is forwarded to the Criminal Records Office); the other is local information held on the Met Police Service database (a request which the Met process themselves).
It follows that a person in London, unsure about their history, can make requests about the information available on these databases, but would need to make both of these requests before they could be confident that the information was exhaustive. It is unreasonable to claim that the Met is misleading people if the person only makes one of these requests about their own history.
If they wish to research any history they will have elsewhere in England and Wales, then they would make requests to the local Police forces responsible for those other areas.
One of the leading drivers of change in our Criminal Records procedures in England and Wales was the thorough review and subsequent reports by Sunita Mason: "
A Common Sense Approach". Her findings were published in two reports which can be accesed here: "
Criminal Records Review Regime", and have been broadly adopted in current practice.
To answer your specific question about historic information held by the Met Police Service, beyond what I've said above about local and national records, I can only say that one of Mrs Masons recurring themes was to promote greater consistency than has been seen in the past. I don't know how the Met's procedures were applied. Policy and practice in recording and deleting criminal data has not been consistent within forces nor across forces. To compound the challenge, it remains at variance across the UK's 4 nations (and the Republic of Ireland, mainland Europe and the Commonwealth).
Following the implementation of most of Sunita Mason's recommendations, we should expect to see greater consistency from now on.
Finally, I have to put this debate in its global context, where there is an ever-increasing demand for intelligence which concerns defence and national security, and where nations respond to that demand in different ways. The will, the technology, and the ability, to transfer personal information which concerns security will transcend any of the discussion above, and the intelligence managed by security forces will not be constrained by concerns for Data Protection, DBS searches or consistency across Police forces.
