POLICE hit back last night over revelations that hundreds of DNA records of innocent youngsters were being kept on file.

Tory MP Grant Shapps, who obtained figures from the Home Office, said a "postcode lottery" existed over whether such DNA was kept by individual forces.

He said many samples of ten- 18-year-olds were kept, even though they had never been convicted, charged or cautioned with a crime and accused police of creating a database of information by stealth.

The Northern Echo revealed yesterday how County Durham police leads the way in the region with the retention of such records, possessing details of 504 youngsters.

Northumbria police had 458, North Yorkshire police 323 and Cleveland 156.

But there were huge unexplained discrepancies in the data, with police in Durham said to be 16 times more likely to retain juvenile DNA than in the much larger Merseyside force.

Meanwhile, youngsters in Hertfordshire were eight times more likely to have their DNA material stored than in neighbouring Bedfordshire.

Mr Shapps said the figures showed guidelines were being interpreted in widely varying ways by different police forces.

Detective Chief Inspector Ted Edgar, who is head of scientific support at Durham Police, could not explain the differences in the figures, but stressed his force simply applied the law as it stood.

He said: "We are not going to arrest more people than necessary in order to increase the number of samples we hold, because we don't have the facility nor the time to be able to do that."

Cleveland and Northumbria forces directed reporters' inquiries to the Association of Chief Police Officers, which has said the DNA policy has proved an enormous success in helping to detect a large number of offences.