Police: Independent Police Commission Report

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, for securing this debate. First, I need to declare my former policing interests, which appear in the register, and that I too was a member, unpaid, of the commission. I also need to tell your Lordships that, perhaps surprisingly, I shall speak on only one part of the report—that of forensic science. I am most grateful for the support and help given to me in this matter by Professor Angela Gallop, our leading forensic scientist, and Keith Fryer from the College of Policing, which is now responsible for training police personnel in this profession.

Forensic science in policing goes back many years. It was originally run by the Home Office from regional laboratories. It then merged into a sort of business arm of government in 2005 in order to make efficiencies and to cut costs. However, police forces were increasingly in-sourcing forensic services. So, by 2010, the Government decided to close the Forensic Science Service and transfer its responsibilities to the NPIA, the former National Policing Improvement Agency, which had been responsible for the forensic procurement to forces until that point. Then the NPIA was disbanded and its responsibilities were transferred to the College of Policing, which is where it now sits within the Home Office and where much of the work of training for in-force forensic specialists is undertaken.

In the mean time, excellent work was going on in the private sector. The national forensic framework agreement was introduced, which categorised services into 14 work packages open for tender to forces. This then became the National Forensic Framework Next Generation and is intended to run until 2016. Regional competitions are run to enable forces to select their preferred forensic science provider, from the 13 within the framework, following the tendering process. There are between two and six providers for each work package. However, the contracts that the commercial providers will bid for are quite short term, which I believe could cause instability, especially when forces are trying to plan long-term. It also may mean that staff could end up moving between suppliers and contractors. There are just so many trained forensic scientists to go around. Indeed, a significant number of forensic science staff have already left the service. What proposals do the Government have to replace this loss of experience and talent?

Therefore, we now have a service to police forces which comprises different forensic science models. Some work is undertaken by the forces themselves. Scientific support managers oversee the use of forensic science in their force. They help to produce strategies for individual cases and with the collection and securing of evidence by scenes of crime officers et cetera. They also help with submissions to the forensic science provider laboratories. Clearly, a huge amount of work needs to be undertaken by forensic scientists but most of that now is provided by the private sector, which has a responsibility to its shareholders rather than to its customers. That is a subtle but vital point to make when considering who the end-user of the service should be.

Materials can be widely dispersed, being kept by both forces and forensic science providers—commercial organisations. DNA databases are back in the Home Office. The Biometrics Commissioner has responsibility for the National DNA Database and the IDENT 1 fingerprint database. The forensic regulator has published his codes of practice and ethics, which provide the standards that will apply to all remaining commercial forensic science suppliers. There is a European initiative to harmonise forensic science across Europe, which is based on the ISO accreditation and will include the police internal forensic services.

The College of Policing is currently developing competence assessments for police service forensic personnel, so it is to be hoped that this initiative will be successful. However, it hardly replaces the full-scale forensic science laboratories that I remember: police were able to be assured of superb quality from scientists trained exclusively to provide a bespoke service to Home Office police forces. I ask my noble friend the Minister: who now will do the research previously undertaken by the Forensic Science Service? Does he think that commercial pressures will stop suppliers sharing findings? For how long does he expect commercial suppliers to remain viable if the police continue to in-source services?

The report states baldly that,

“without a research and development capability, this country will be relegated from its world class status in forensic science innovation and perhaps even more importantly, there will be serious lapses in the quality of forensic interpretation potentially leading to lengthier less successful police investigations and miscarriages of justice”.

So there is a stark choice: invest in research and development or accept that standards may slip.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee produced a report in 2011 on the FSS closure, followed up by another report in 2013, to which the Stevens report refers. It had serious concerns about a number of aspects of the service. There was lack of an obvious national forensic science strategy. It was concerned that the market was not robust enough to absorb the forensic science work being outsourced to it. There were threats to research and development, the maintenance of forensic archives, continuity of evidence, impartiality of forensic interpretation and the quality and independence of that evidence. In its most recent report, it stated that some police forensic science laboratories had failed to achieve accreditation to the agreed ISO standard, and that there was a lack of transparency of police expenditure on their in-house forensic science, making it very difficult to see whether any savings had been made. Its conclusion as interpreted by the Stevens report was that,

“in the absence of a strategy for forensic science, and given the present ‘pattern of short-sighted decision–making that led to the demise of the FSS and the creation of an unstable market for the remaining commercial providers’, the present state of affairs jeopardises public confidence in the criminal justice system”.

In short, there is instability in the market, contracts being too large and over a short term. Financial penalties for late delivery of services impact on the employment of forensic scientists, leading to a reluctance to give full-time contracts. There is also a tendency to take on younger, less experienced and therefore cheaper staff. No ISO accreditation is required by the CPS in the Code for Crown Prosecutors in assessing the quality of evidence put before it. There is no standard across all laboratories. Different suppliers are being asked to undertake tests on different aspects of the same case, and this fragmentation is a true recipe for failure. I could go on.

In conclusion I quote Professor Angela Gallop, one of the 40 distinguished independent members of the commission:

“far less work is being commissioned, partly anyway and partly because forces are doing increasing amounts of forensics in their own in-house units”,

which,

“don’t have to be accredited to the same (very expensive) quality standards as external suppliers of these services. In addition, a procurement system has been introduced which has led to huge volumes of work being shifted between one supplier and another”.

In the future, she suggests that the consequences of the current state of affairs will be more cases which cannot be solved and many more miscarriages of justice. This is a serious matter, which I hope the Minister will address urgently.