LABOUR MP, Jess Phillips has hit out at North West Hampshire MP Kit Malthouse.

The MP for Birmingham Yardley took to Twitter this afternoon to express her anger at the accidental deletion of hundreds of thousands of police records.

It was revealed in January that around 400,000 police records were accidentally wiped from police databases because of “human error” and “defective code”.

An estimated 213,000 offence records, 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 records on people were potentially incorrectly deleted as a result.

Home Office minister Kit Malthouse, said the blunder happened during routine maintenance of the Police National Computer (PNC), causing huge swathes of information on suspects released without further action to be lost.

Today Twitter user @PARLYapp wrote: “Kit Malthouse is in a very chipper mood this afternoon” after he appeared in the House of Commons.

Jess Phillips replied to this tweet saying: “Maybe he has found all the data of child abusers and people who threaten to kill people that was lost.”

Labour previously demanded answers from Home Secretary Priti Patel after it was revealed the records had been accidentally wiped.

Priti Patel has since launched an internal investigation into the matter.

Last week it was announced that the records are “recoverable” but retrieving them will take “some weeks”.

Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft told MPs this was 400,000 was the “maximum” amount of records which may have been lost and insisted any risk to public safety was “minimal”.

Speaking to the Public Accounts Committee last Monday (February 1), he said: “I can assure the committee the risk to public safety is minimal.

“All of those deletions refer to what’s called ‘no further action’ cases.

“We are confident that the data is all recoverable and we are in the process of recovering that data.

“Over 99% of the potentially deleted records are over 10 years old.”

Mr Rycroft said the error took place after coding was “erroneously” entered into the system, but added: “The team are working flat out.

“They are seeking to recover all of the data as rapidly as possible, but as you would expect they are taking great care over that process in order not to compromise the data itself or the rest of the systems on the computer.

“So they are taking their time. It will take some weeks.”

He also stressed that police forces can turn to other data sources while the problem is being fixed, adding: “We can be confident that we are going into the right direction on this one.”

Last month the Prime Minister said it was “outrageous” that police records had been deleted and called any loss of data “unacceptable”.