FSS closure plan criticised by MPs

Government plans to close down the Forensic Science Service (FSS) have been heavily criticised in a Parliamentary report last week which concluded that it is unlikely to ensure an orderly transition and urged the coalition to extend the deadline by at least six months.

The Home Office announced last December that the FSS would be abolished by March next year as it is currently operating at a loss of £2 million a month.

However, it has now been revealed that the chief scientific adviser to the Home Office was excluded from the decision-making process to close the FSS, raising questions over how it was made.

Andrew Miller, chair of the Science and Technology Committee, which produced the report, said: “In deciding to close an organisation with science in its title, the Home Office sidelined its own chief scientific adviser. That says volumes about its attitude to science. But more worryingly, the chief scientific adviser’s acceptance of his exclusion raises questions about his effectiveness within the Home Office.”

The Government hopes the closure will lead to more private enterprises getting involved and filling the void, approximately 60 per cent of the forensic market in England and Wales.

The report raised serious concerns around the proposal and said it is not confident that an orderly transition can be achieved by the “extremely challenging deadline” for closure of the FSS. Extending the deadline by at least six months would allow the Government to consult on and determine a wider strategy for forensic science.

It added that the shrinking forensics market – driven by police in-sourcing of forensic science – and a failure by the Government to consider enough evidence in its decision-making, is of concern.

“We were shocked when conducting this inquiry at how little consideration the Government had given to the wider impacts of the FSS closure before making its decision. The elephant in the room was police in-sourcing to largely unaccredited labs which had been eroding the market away from the FSS and private providers.

“We now call on the Government to stabilise the market, curbing police in-sourcing, and come up with a sensible strategy for forensic science research and provision in England and Wales,” said Mr Miller.

The report added that in making its decision to close the FSS, the Government failed to give enough consideration to the impact on forensic science research and development, the capacity of private providers to absorb the FSS’s 60 per cent market share and the wider implications for the criminal justice system. These considerations appear to have been hastily overlooked in favour of the financial bottom line.

It also claimed that in the transition to closure, transferring work from the FSS to a non-accredited police or private laboratory would be highly undesirable, posing significant and unacceptable risks to criminal justice. The committee called on proposals to be brought forward immediately to provide the Forensic Science Regulator with statutory powers to enforce compliance with quality standards.

The report draws attention to what it described as historical inadequacies in government decision-making that brought the FSS to its current financial situation, and says that much of the responsibility for the problems now facing the FSS lies with previous administrations.

It said: “The FSS’s dire financial position appears to have arisen from a complex combination of factors, principally the shrinking forensics market, driven by increasing police in-sourcing of forensic science services, and a forensic procurement framework that has driven down prices and does not adequately recognise the value of complex forensic services.”

The committee has encouraged the Government to ensure that the market is not distorted by the police customer increasingly becoming the competitor. Its ambitions for fully privatised forensic science provision are jeopardised by its complacent attitude towards