[wizzwizz4]

The police should have information on people who have broken the law (assuming the laws are reasonable and proportionate – for the moment, let's make that assumption). The police should not have information on non-criminals, except as far as it is genuinely necessary for an investigation. (To the extent that the police do things other than investigating crimes and making arrests, the relevant information should be compartmentalised and handled separately.) I am willing to tolerate large amounts of inefficiency, and even some bad guys getting away, if it ensures that the police do not begin to get results by looking only under the street light (which, if nothing else, will lead to sophisticated offenders getting away more easily). Pre-emptively requesting records just in case they're needed is a very, very bad practice, and we must oppose it if we want to live in a free society.

This is also why I tolerate the widespread use of CCTV cameras, but strongly oppose CCTV networks. Closed-circuit television needs to be closed-circuit, with friction of access requests proportionate to the amount of footage requested, or it goes from an accountability tool to a mass surveillance tool.

[jen20]

While I largely agree, this isn't a question of having broken the law or not.

The registration is _literally something issued by the DVLA_, so of course government agencies have access to it. The problem in this specific case is where the registration information is not enough to indicate the likely driver.

[wizzwizz4]

Behind the scenes, there's a lot of procedure in place to ensure that arbitrary government agencies don't have arbitrary access to arbitrary things that "the government" knows. The DVLA has a legitimate basis for collecting information about vehicle registration, and there are often legitimate reasons to pass this information on to law enforcement; but that doesn't generalise to arbitrary information about the occupants of a vehicle. Collecting arbitrary information just in case the police need it is one, seemingly-benign route to a police state.