Buncefield fire destroyed crime data
Updated on 16 August 2007
The Buncefield oil depot fire caused millions of pounds worth of damage in 2005 but it also damaged a vital crime fighting system
Channel 4 News understands that a vital back-up system to the police national computer was damaged by the Buncefield fire, with knock-on effects still felt today.
This programme has learnt that as a direct result of the fire, the government has scrapped an attempt to join the Shengen Information System (SIS), an important crime-fighting tool, because vital software was damaged.
Paid for - but never used
The SIS provides vital information of whether wanted criminal suspects are entering the country from the EU or elsewhere.
The UK has held the right to access much of this information since late 2004 - and paid £39m for its share of developing SIS - yet there isn't a single computer connected to it in the UK.
The Home Office has even trained staff to work on it, but have told Channel 4 News that because of the fire, they had abandoned trying to connect to the database in its current form.
The Schengen Information System (SIS)
The SIS is a huge EU-wide system for the collection and exchange of information between different law enforcement agencies. The information covers various policing, immigration, criminal and terror-related areas.
The SIS hub is located in a bunker in a Strasbourg suburb called Jesuitenfeld. Its back-up is in Austria and it is linked to Europe-wide police forces, security agencies and border posts. They collect the intelligence and information and exchange it by sending back it to the hub, where their European colleagues can access it.
That information is available on the desk-top for authorised officials to use and the database has been found to be enormously effective with thousands of alerts triggered every day.
'Acts of God'
Home Office officials told a House of Lords committee this spring that they had abandoned trying to connect to the first version of SIS because of computer problems and 'acts of God'
Channel 4 have discovered that these 'acts of God' refer to a fire in a building consumed in the Buncefield oil depot fire. This building held computer infrastructure designed to connect to SIS.
Also destroyed in the fire was the Police National Computer's "Hot Stand-By" back-up system, designated "national critical infrastructure" by the government as it holds details on nearly seven million offenders, crimes and property.
Questions remain as to why such a vital piece of national infrastructure was placed 100 yards from a disaster hazard.
Consequences: why does it matter?
In January, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) revealed that the details of over 27,000 Britons convicted abroad have been left sitting around the Home Office rather than being entered onto the UK police national computer. It meant serious criminals could return without anyone knowing.
The police are now inputting those details onto the computer, but the authorities still won't know if Britons convicted abroad re-enter the country - because there are no criminal or policing databases to check with at the border.
".... as and when we join up with the Schengen Information System, more information will be available so that whilst they may be allowed into the UK, there will an update as to the fact that they are in the UK. At this point in time, we do not have effective border control in that context."Chief Con Paul Kernaghan, January 2007
Police frustration
British police are seriously handicapped when making extradition requests. They have to guess where a suspect has gone and file the paperwork, making the process slow and inefficient.
It is a situation described as a "totally unacceptable position" by a chief police officer, many of whom view SIS has a vital crime fighting tool.
The UK intends to connect to an enhanced version of the European database, SIS II, but will be the last EU country to do so - four years later in 2011. At present, there is no way in the UK to access material on SIS.
