Short-term “jails” are planned for supermarkets and town centres to deal with yobs and shoplifters under Home Office proposals to ease the burden on police. Discussions have already started about building a “retail jail” inside the Selfridges store in Oxford Street, London.

Suspects would be held for up to four hours in a small room with a clear plastic front so they were visible to custody officers at all times during their detention.

Ministers are also proposing a huge expansion of police powers to take fingerprints, DNA and other samples from offenders and store them on national databases. People caught speeding, failing to wear a seat belt, allowing their dog to foul the footpath and dropping litter could be forced to give fingerprints or DNA to police for checking against other databases.

The Home Office proposals for a network of “short-term holding facilities” in shopping malls and high streets aim to help police to process high-volume crimes such as shoplifting. The move to speed up the handling of suspects and save money was outlined in a consultation paper on rules to govern how suspects are treated by police.

The paper also suggests another radical change to existing rules by allowing police to question suspects after they have been charged.

The proposal for short-term holding facilities is intended to facilitate cases where suspects’ identity cannot readily be confirmed.

“A potential solution in dealing with high-volume offending is to enable the police to make use of short-term holding facilities located in shopping centres and town centres,” the paper said.

The facilities would be secure but would not be the same as standard cell design, it added.

“Persons detained would be subject to detention to a maximum period of four hours to enable fingerprinting, photographing and DNA sampling,” the paper, Modernising Police Powers, said.

“The aim would be to locate the short-term holding facility in busy areas to allow quick access and processing of suspects to enable the officer to resume operational duties as quickly as possible,” it added.

As well as its plan for Selfridges, the Metropolitan Police is understood to be interested in placing units in other stores and is planning custody units in every London borough.

The Home Office document also suggests allowing police to fingerprint people over 10 accused of nonrecordable offences – crimes for which an offender cannot be imprisoned.

At present fingerprints and DNA and other samples are only taken for recordable offences.

The consultation said that extending fingerprinting would send a strong message to offenders that, whatever their crimes, they would be subject to indenti-fication that could be checked against other databases and linked to other offences. Gareth Crossman, policy director of Liberty, the civil rights group, said: “The Government is fast replacing the best traditions of English law with a chilling presumption of guilt.

“Dropping litter and bad parking are proposed as lame excuses for an ever-growing national DNA database.”

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