Diana Johnson – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Diana Johnson on 2015-11-05.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many verified images are currently on the National Hash Set Database; and how many police forces have direct access to that database.

Karen Bradley

The Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) was launched in December 2014 and supersedes the interim National Hash Set Database. All of the hashes relating to Indecent Images of Children from the interim National Hash Set Database managed by Cheshire Constabulary were added to CAID along with hash sets held by other UK law enforcement agencies.

CAID contains over four million images. All these images appearing on CAID have an indicative categorisation based on police force grading or ‘votes’. Of these images, at present, fewer than 600,000 have been categorised as having a “trusted grade”. This “trusted grade” is achieved once the image has received three independent, undisputed votes by police forces encountering them. These are therefore the images which have been most reliably assessed as being Indecent Images of Children.

The focus this year has been to ensure that all police forces and the National Crime Agency are connected to CAID by the end of this year.