Forensic science labs are on the brink of collapse, warns report
A crisis in forensic science has brought some of the country’s largest private laboratories to the brink of collapse, risking miscarriages of justice, an inquiry has warned.
The House of Lords science and technology committee has called for urgent reforms to forensic science provision, warning that declining standards could lead to crimes going unsolved and an erosion of public trust in the criminal justice system.
“The situation we are in cannot continue,” said Narendra Patel, the committee’s chair. Cuts to funding, combined with increasing demand for new digital evidence, had brought forensic provision to “breaking point”, he said.
“Unless properly regulated, [the market] will soon suffer the shocks of major forensic science providers going out of business and putting justice in jeopardy,” Lord Patel added.
The inquiry heard that many private forensic service providers – including the three with the largest market share – were experiencing serious financial difficulties, with some on the brink of collapse. Concerns were also raised about the outsourcing of forensic services by police authorities to unregulated providers that had not met minimum quality standards set by the government’s regulator.
The overall quality and delivery of forensic science in England and Wales was described as “inadequate”.
Huge cuts to overall spending on commercial providers, from £120m to about £50m in the past decade, meant companies’ margins had been “cut to the bone”, Patel said. Some areas of private provision had seen 70%-90% erosions in pricing, the report said.
Mark Pearse, the commercial director in the forensics division of Eurofins, one of the three major providers in the UK, described an “unsustainable toxic set of conditions” when he appeared before the inquiry. Representatives from the two other largest providers – Key Forensics, which had to be bailed out by police last year after going into administration, and Cellmark – raised similar concerns.
Prof Ruth Morgan, director of the UCL Centre for Forensic Sciences and a special adviser to the report, said: “If one of those major providers withdrew from the market, we’d have a massive capacity issue. There would be significant challenges to the integrity of the evidence and upholding justice.”
The broad-ranging inquiry looked at the provision of forensic analysis, from DNA and fingerprint evidence to digital phone and computer records. Inhouse law enforcement teams account for about 80% of the provision, with the rest of the work carried out by private providers.
The report criticised the government over an “embarrassing” seven
year delay in giving the Forensic Science Regulator statutory powers that were promised in 2012. It called for the regulator to be given powers to take action when failings emerged such as issuing improvement notices and fines, launching investigations and rescinding accreditation. The committee also recommended the creation of an arms-length body to be responsible for the coordination, strategy and direction of forensic science.
Prof Claude Roux, the director of the Centre for Forensic Science, University of Technology, Sydney, and president of the International Association of Forensic Sciences, told the inquiry that the UK was once regarded as “Mecca” for forensic science. “Some 30 years later, my observation from the outside … is that it has been an ongoing national crisis and, at this stage, is more of an example not to follow,” he said.
The committee said that, throughout its inquiry, it heard about a decline in forensic science since the publicly-owned Forensic Science Service (FSS) was controversially closed in 2012. However, the committee noted that it did not hear convincing arguments in favour of resurrecting the FSS.
Last week, the Home Office published an action plan to improve police forensics after a review found the existing model needed to be strengthened by addressing regulatory, governance and capability issues.
The government’s approach includes supporting a private member’s bill to give the the regulator statutory enforcement powers.
A Home Office spokesman said: “Forensic science is an invaluable tool for bringing criminals to justice and it is vital it has the confidence of the public. That is why we commissioned a joint review of police forensics with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and developed a 13-point taking action plan to strengthen the market and address quality concerns. We will consider the findings of the report carefully and respond in due course.”