SENIOR police officers will call this week for the DNA of everyone in Britain to be put on a national database from the moment they are born.

They believe that this would be a vital weapon in the drive to curb crime and help to solve hundreds of murders.

But the proposal will meet fierce opposition from politicans and civil liberties groups alarmed at the “big brother” implications. Plans for identity cards have already provoked controversy, with Cabinet ministers raising concerns about a scheme being pushed by David Blunkett.

Ministers have questioned its costs and its political acceptability and raised some technical issues. The Treasury denies, however, that Gordon Brown and John Prescott had joined forces to oppose the Home Secretary, who hopes to announce this month that the scheme is going ahead.

The controversy over the ID cards would pale into significance when compared with the DNA plan. But Kevin Morris, chairman of the Police Superintendents’ Association, insisted that people were not as fearful as politicians believed.

Mr Morris, whose association’s conference this week will call for the database and for a national debate on the subject, said: “If we have a compulsory database to which every citizen is expected to donate their DNA as a responsibility within our society, I fervently believe we will not only detect crimes quicker but we will help prevent them in the first place.

With estimates suggesting that there are as many as 600 people in the UK who have committed murder but who escaped initial detection, the question has got to be asked why we can’t do more. Experience has shown that the general public come forward in their thousands when they believe their sample will help police to detect a serious crime.”

He believed that most people were more worried about how DNA might be used by insurance companies or by employers looking at the genetic risks of illness than about its use by the police.

Barry Hugill, of the civil rights organisation Liberty, said: “We think this is unnecessary and that it would make everyone a suspect.”

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