Thousands of records that were deleted from the Police National Computer have now been recovered, Andover’s MP has confirmed.

In a written statement to the House of Commons, Kit Malthouse, in his role as crime and policing minister, said that the information wrongly deleted from the database, which linked to cases where no further action was taken along with DNA and fingerprint records, has been reinstated.

While police chiefs continue to investigate the impact of the loss, Mr Malthouse said: “To date, we are not aware of any law enforcement operations that were significantly adversely affected by this incident.”

The incident was revealed in January this year, which was described at the time by the MP as “a standard housekeeping error”.

However, former Cumbria police chief Stuart Hyde said contemporaneously that the loss represented a “very large proportion” of the around 650,000 people arrested each year and is a “risk to public safety and a risk to the safeguarding of vulnerable people across the country”.

Following an independent review, it has been confirmed that 209,550 offence records were wrongly deleted, which were associated with 112,697 individuals’ records, along with 195 full fingerprint records. It was put down to “human error” caused by an engineer’s defective code while updating the system.

The report from the review identified “a failure from the first alert to act quickly, resulting in an uncoordinated, ineffective effort exacerbated by the department incorrectly giving the all-clear on the first alert”.

This included it taking almost a month to inform police forces which data had been removed, which the report said “should have been avoided”.

However, the review panel found that the impact of the loss was “minimal”, Mr Malthouse said, and that its recommendations for the Home Office and police would be followed up.