The government is to wipe clean its DNA database. That was the headline, although careful reading suggests that not all will be lost.

What is lost, or missing from this debate, is the view of those who believe that this craven act, in response to a European court ruling, weighs the criminal justice system even more towards the thug and against the decent citizen.

So this blog carries a health warning. I am in favour of the police keeping records of people like me who are not criminals and who have everything to gain from being part of a national DNA database which would catch many murderous suspects and bring their trail to a safe conclusion.

Look what the figures tell us. I asked the Home Office back in March 2006 for the number of major crimes solved due the use of the police DNA database. Thanks to an amendment to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in 1984, which came into force in 2001 – so we are talking about a fairly short period of time – 8,493 profiles of individuals have been linked to crime scenes involving 13,964 offences. These offences included 214 murders, 55 attempted murders, 116 rapes, 68 sexual offences, 119 aggravated burglaries and 127 supplying controlled drugs.

More recent figures are even more impressive: there are 3,100 DNA matches per month and over the period from April 1998 to March 2008 there have been more than 272,000 detections which probably would not have been made otherwise.

It is worth rereading those figures again. The likelihood is that none of those criminals would have been found, brought to trial and sentenced had it not been for the police DNA database. Criminals have everything to fear from this database and we innocent citizens have no such fear.

In my constituency a young mother was murdered but no one charged. Years later the murderer set alight to the little shop which was used as the local mosque when an individual was inside. DNA samples from this site linked back to the murder scene. He was convicted of murder.

Would it not have been better to put the resources which are being wasted on ID cards into building up this most effective way of weighting justice in favour of effectiveness? Should this not have been an area where government sought a derivation from the human rights legislation so that balance of our criminal justice was kept in favour of the innocent and not the guilty?

What about a movement by those of use who would quite happily offer our DNA sample to be included on the database? We have nothing to lose other than those criminals who wish us harm.

This article also appears on Frank Field's blog