Your public-spirited attempt to highlight the concerns expressed about the prevalence of fingerprinting in Sussex schools (The Argus, March 13) proves to have been percipient.

Not only, as Rachel Wareing points out, is such data available to the police, but Scotland Yard and the Association of Chief Police Officers are now suggesting that primary school children should be eligible for the British DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life.

With a breathtaking disregard for the liberties of the subject that would surely have stunned Huxley or Orwell, Gary Pugh, director of forensic services at Scotland Yard, asserts that such measures for the early identification of criminals will save the economy huge sums.

Accepting that this proposed expansion of the DNA database - which at 4.5 million genetic samples is the largest in Europe - is "an emotional issue", Pugh goes on to observe: "Fingerprints, somehow, are far less contentious.

We have children giving their fingerprints when they are borrowing books from a library."

Long may The Argus in particular, and the Fourth Estate in general, sound its warnings as to the dystopian future we seem strangely content to allow to approach ever closer by default.

  • Stephen J Williams, York Road, Hove