SPSA plans to speed up forensic support for police

The Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) has launched a six-week consultation period on ways to speed up forensic support for Scottish police.

Options put forward by the SPSA involve maintaining the current caseload but finding efficiencies in the way it provides forensic services, potentially reducing the number of laboratories from four to two.

The forensics services modernisation proposals aim to improve the speed, consistency and cost-effectiveness of forensic analysis in Scotland.

In an options paper published this week, the SPSA sets out how, over the next five years, it could maintain the 250,000 cases completed each year for police forces and fiscals, speed up key turnaround times for DNA, fingerprint and drug tests in volume crimes, while reducing annual costs by up to £3.5 million.

SPSA intends to maintain local scene examination services co-located with all eight forces as at present, up-skilling those officers over time to provide forces with a wider range of skills to draw on at a local level – including blood pattern analysis and fire examinations.

The options under consideration for scientific laboratory support include:

•Driving forward a programme of change and efficiency within the existing four laboratories in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, with the potential to realise annual savings of £1.75 million by 2015;

•Invest in a new case management IT solution to step up the efficiencies within the existing four laboratory structure, with the potential to realise annual savings of £2 million by 2015;

•Moving to a new structure where four smaller ‘satellite laboratories’ staffed by scientists would be maintained in the cities, supported by two high-volume processing units in Glasgow (later Gartcosh) and Dundee, with the potential to realise annual savings of around £2.8 million by 2015;

•Moving to a new structure where all scientific support in Scotland is delivered from two laboratories in Glasgow (later Gartcosh) and Dundee, with the potential to realise annual savings of around £3.5 million by 2015.

The options for discussion and debate with customers, staff and stakeholders, follow a year-long analysis of how Scotland’s forensics services could better meet the national needs of Scotland’s police forces and fiscals.

That analysis found that forces are broadly satisfied with the support they receive in serious and complex crimes such as murders. However, there is concern among customers that the focus given to serious crimes can lead to inconsistency and delay in providing support to day-to-day investigations in volume crimes, such as housebreaking. The analysis has also identified wide variations in practice, procedure and cost of delivering services from SPSA’s four laboratories.
SPSA’s director of forensic services, Tom Nelson, said the SPSA has made important progress – not least reducing the backlog of cases inherited from over 8,000 to 3,400 today – and engaged with customers to define what they want from a forensic service.

“Rightly, they want and expect a lot from us – because forensic science is the key to unlocking many investigations which in turn can save thousands of hours of expensive police time.

“At the heart of what they want is consistency. They want us to not just have the expertise for the serious cases, like murder, but to have the resilience and consistency to provide them with fast results in day-to-day crimes, like robbery and housebreaking. In short, they want a forensic service that supports the many crimes, not just the few.

“The task now is how best to organise ourselves within forensic services to be able to deliver what they want from us.”

The consultation will seek to achieve a consensus around which of these options strike the right balance between what the customers are looking for, and what generates the best efficiency for the public purse.

Of the four laboratory facilities inherited by SPSA in 2007, tw