Police across the UK may soon be armed with mobile fingerprint readers in a bid to improve checks against suspected criminals, following the success of a pilot project.

The pilot scheme, dubbed Lantern, was launched by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) in November 2006 and was initially running for a year in 10 forces across the country with 100 devices. This was expanded over time and currently sees 200 devices in use across 20 forces.

The NPIA developed the project to prove that a fingerprint check could be taken out on the street, sent electronically to a database and a result returned to the officer, all within five minutes or less.

To date about 30,000 operational checks have been conducted and according to NPIA figures, more than 97 per cent of the checks have been carried out within the five minute time limit, with 87 per cent being less than two minutes.

Currently the process of taking a suspect into custody and processing them at the station takes an average of 67 minutes.

Following the success of the Lantern project, the NPIA is working on a national rollout, called Mobile Identification at Scene (Midas). Under this project, readers about the size of a BlackBerry will be available to forces nationwide towards the end of next year or early 2010.

According to the NPIA, those partaking in the trial had access to increased support and back-up and could spend more time on the frontline and less time returning to the station, while custody suites had to process fewer prisoners.

Civil rights campaigners have expressed concern over the readers, stressing that any fingerprints taken by the officers should be deleted as soon as the check is complete.

The NPIA has said that fingerprints taken on the devices are not stored and that from the public's point of view, the faster response and reduction in the number of wrongful arrests makes the project worthwhile.

The existing Lantern devices will remain in use until Midas is in place.