Fragmented forensics in England and Wales has led to ‘postcode lottery’ with no fix in sight

It’s 16 years since the then government announced its intention to close the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in England and Wales, leading to a litany of reports condemning the consequences of the decision and its impact on criminal justice.

No one seems to be calling for a return to public delivery of forensic science and while ministers admit reform is needed, it’s not clear what any new system will look like. A policing white paper published in January set out proposals to form a new nationwide force to tackle the most complex crimes. It said that the National Police Service will take over responsibility for forensics from the 43 forces operating today, set direction and tackle backlogs in digital forensics.

The FSS began life as a public body providing forensic services to the police and other government agencies, spearheading the use of DNA. Successive governments oversaw its transition into a commercial body competing with private forensics providers and in-house police laboratories. When the government announced in late 2010 that the service would be closed within 15 months, it had a 60% market share. Concerns were raised about the ability of other providers to absorb that work, loss of skills, continuing research and development, and impartiality.

The latest inquiry into the health of forensic science concluded that the system is now so broken that its rebuilding can’t wait for the long-term structural reforms envisaged by the Home Office. The House of Lords science and technology committee bemoaned an abrogation of responsibility for forensic science, structural underfunding and the erosion of the independence of forensic science, thanks to it being increasingly conducted by individual police forces.

This, they say, raises questions of oversight, quality and transparency. With individual cases being increasingly split between in-house and external capacity, ‘there are risks that forensic science becomes commoditised, preventing in-depth, end-to-end, scientifically consistent analysis’.

Indeed, the minister for policing and crime, Sarah Jones, acknowledged that ‘it is a postcode lottery’. She told the inquiry she was shocked at ‘the lack of real understanding of what is actually going on across the country on forensics. We do not know how much money is spent, how many delays there are or the balance between the private sector and in-house.’

The inquiry proposed a national forensic service independent of the police. One such framework could be the Scottish model, where forensic science is provided by a separate body with a so-called ‘sterile corridor’ between it and the police. It also called for a centralised forensic archive, and a national institute for research and training – ‘the very things we lost when the FSS was closed’, suggests Tiernan Coyle, a veteran of forensic science who specialises in textile fibres. He told Chemistry World that ‘the failure is not that the private sector was involved. The failure is that the national infrastructure was removed and a market was expected to fill the gap on its own’.

‘I think the government anticipated a multi-supplier market where competitive pressure was the driver perhaps for innovation, and certainly for pricing. That has not worked,’ notes Mark Pearse, a former FSS employee and now director of Eurofins Forensic Services, the largest private forensics supplier.

Collaboration for good forensic science

Pearse observes that ‘we started with several players, and a drive towards formal procurement that commoditised everything, and a government and police that wouldn’t sit at the table with us for fear of having commercial conflict by not speaking to [other suppliers]’. The result is ‘feast and famine’ owing to swings in demand such as seasonal drink/drug driving campaigns with no joint planning. ‘We will be inundated with work, and so our service levels will be poor… so we build our capacity, and then the demand goes away,’ Pearse explains.

In her evidence to the inquiry Carole McCartney, an expert on forensic science and criminal law at the University of Leicester, said ‘everything has come down to money. That means that we have shed a lot of the safeguards and the checks and balances.’ Collaboration between police and scientists that get quality results are seen as inefficient, she added.

Post-privatisation, Pearse says police tenders became more prescriptive, limiting the forensic tests that could be done. ‘You can take that too far, and you can miss the opportunity to deduce things from the evidence that you’ve got in front of you.’ He adds that ‘we need to be given the freedom to get as much out of the evidence as we possibly can, and then stop where it’s sensible to stop, and we’re not going to risk a miscarriage of justice’.

Driving down costs

As more forensics work has been taken in house by police, less financing is available in the private sector, which now accounts for around £110 million a year. In contrast, evidence provided to the inquiry suggests in-house police forensic expenditure is five times as much. Concerns have also been raised over the years as to whether in-house labs are accredited to the same standards as those in the private sector. The House of Lords has urged the Home Office to publish the accreditation status for all police forces.

As police have driven down the cost of forensic testing, specialist skills, such as in marks and traces, which include fibre and footprint analysis and microscopy, are being lost. And as more resources are invested into DNA, the volume of work on other specialities has fallen so far it’s not enough to maintain the competencies, says Pearse.

In 2024, when Eurofins took over Cellmark, it discovered its contracts were ‘unsustainable’, forcing a rethink on pricing, which police forces were unwilling to pay. A new model is needed, argues Pearse, that can retain forensic specialisms and invest in equipment.

In Coyle’s view, ‘funding forensic science from the day-to-day operational budgets of police forces is one of the root causes of the demise of key specialist areas of expertise. The police must not be the sole arbiters of what type of forensic evidence is pursued in criminal investigations. Whether such expertise sits in the private sector or within a public body is another debate.’

Forensic failures

The closure of the FSS led to the dispersal of evidence across 43 forces with differing standards. Ruth Morgan, who researches the role of science in the justice system, told the inquiry that this resulted ‘in something of a postcode lottery in whether or not your evidence will remain accessible and be preserved in ways that mean it is viable for reanalysis’.

In one reported case an over-stuffed freezer containing evidence from victims of sexual assault broke down. All the evidence had to be destroyed meaning that these cases of alleged rape were dropped.

An investigation by the BBC and the University of Leicester found that more than 30,000 prosecutions in England and Wales collapsed over the four years to September 2024 owing to lost, damaged or missing evidence, including forensic evidence.

Morgan and her colleagues did a systematic analysis of unsafe rulings by the Court of Appeal between 2010 and 2016 and found misleading interpretation of forensic evidence accounted for about a third of cases. Given the tiny fraction of cases that are put forward to the Court of Appeal, ‘how many that never get looked into maybe also had that problem?’ she asks.

The responsibility extends beyond the forensic scientist. ‘The evidence has to be collected in the first place,’ Morgan says. ‘It has to be preserved in a way that maintains its integrity and it has to be analysed in a way that is appropriate.’

There have been failures under both the FSS and in the privatised system. Despite its successes and international reputation, Pearse recalls the FSS was inefficient and labs were slow. ‘I believe there were at least as many quality incidents in the FSS, if not more.’

One case stands out: during the original investigation of the murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in 2000, forensic scientists missed blood and textile fibres that subsequently proved key to securing a conviction.

Defence teams, as opposed to regulators, turned up separate and different errors at two private labs over a number of years. At Randox Testing Services staff manipulated calibration data, leading to thousands of drug-driving test results having to be re-run, and at Synlab major weaknesses in the analytical test method for blood sample analysis were discovered in potential drug driving cases.

Increasing insourcing of forensic science has also raised questions about access to the science for the defence. While some police labs ‘are doing absolutely fantastic work’, says Morgan, ‘it’s deeply worrying that the vast proportion of the capability sits within the prosecution side of things’. There are ‘some difficult questions to answer [about] equality of arms and the degree to which it’s possible for the defence to get a second opinion, or to get an analysis or even access the samples’.