Forensic Science Service

Debate between Rehman Chishti and Andrew Miller

Monday 27th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Miller]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point, and I will demonstrate later that when we saw the next set of FSS accounts, the supposed £2 million a month loss had shrunk by a remarkable degree.

The FSS provided forensic services to police forces across England and Wales and to other agencies, such as the Crown Prosecution Service. It held about a 60% share of the market when the closure decision was made. We were told that the decision was based on commercial and legal grounds. The FSS had been struggling for many years, and it had gone through a series of status changes over the previous two decades, eventually becoming Government-owned.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that in 2003 the then Minister said:

“The investment required could never be funded year by year out of surplus”—[Official Report, 5 November 2003; Vol. 412, c. 282WH].

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Miller]

The hon. Gentleman is right, and I shall cover that issue in a moment, because the whole point of the Committee’s investigation is that the FSS is not simply a trading arm; it incorporates a range of other resources, and the Government now agree that it is necessary to protect some of them, such as the archive.

In 2008 the FSS transformation programme, funded by a Government grant, was designed to turn the service into a profitable and sustainable business. The FSS told us that prior to the 2010 closure decision it had been on track—this supports the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) made—to reduce the headcount and to close three of its sites as part of that programme.

One suspects that had successive Governments—to respond to the point raised by the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti)—placed in a separate account the cost of primary research and the cost of maintaining the archive, the figures would be quite different today. However, the internal financial struggles of the FSS must be seen in the wider context of the changes to the forensic market.

Anyone who has ever run a business will know that, however much they restructure, the profitability and sustainability of their business ultimately depends on the size of the market. The market for forensic services is largely driven by the police customer, and it is worth clarifying that police forensic expenditure splits into “internal”, what they do in-house, and “external”, what they spend on external providers. External spend constitutes the bulk of the forensics market.

The peculiar factor in the Forensic Science Service is that its initial customer is the investigating police officer, but as time goes on the relationship transforms and ultimately the customer is the jury. This rather unusual transformation means that the customer is initially in one Department but finally in another, the Ministry of Justice.

Our inquiry found that between 2005 and 2011, police external forensic expenditure steadily decreased, and unpublished analysis of the forensics market in September 2010 expected the market to decline from £170 million in 2009 to £110 million in 2015. Ignoring the impact of the 2010 spending review, which had yet to bite on police resources, that analysis represented a 35% decrease in the market.

[Rehman Chishti]

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the Science and Technology Committee’s seventh report of Session 2010-12 makes it quite clear, on page 67, that on this matter the previous Parliament called Labour’s approach misleading and confusing?

[Andrew Miller]

The hon. Gentleman is clearly reading from a Government-prepared brief, but he is right. Let me be clear—

[Rehman Chishti]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Miller]

No, I will not.

The Committee’s report is not a partisan attack on the Government; it represents a Committee unanimously criticising the actions of a particular Department under both its current stewardship and its previous ownership. I hope that the hon. Gentleman does not think that I am taking a partisan view.