In its landmark report just released under the title, “Rebuilding forensic science for criminal justice: an urgent need” the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee has completed its thorough investigation into the most consequential aspect of the criminal justice system: forensic sciences. Australia’s politicians, lawyers and forensic scientists could take it as a red alert to our own systems, writes ANDREW L. URBAN.
After years of arguing for reform to Australia’s system of mistreating forensic sciences as part of policing, this blog welcomes the stringency of the report from the House of Lords. Its 75 pages begins with the most crucial reform that is needed in the UK – and Australia. Guided by common sense and the concept of fairness, the report is essential reading and powerful guide to follow with local adjustments. The following extracts are mere snapshots of the many reforms and refinements needed in how the justice system interacts with forensic science.
“… we recommend that the national provision of forensic science envisaged under the National Police Service is given sufficient separation from policing to ensure its independence, akin to the “sterile corridor” in place in Scotland. We refer to this as a “national forensic service”. We also advocate the immediate creation of a National Institute for Forensic Science to oversee areas such as research and development and training.
The abdication of responsibility for forensic science must end. A Minister in the Home Office and a Minister in the Ministry of Justice should have forensic science explicitly within their remit and they should work together to safeguard all aspects of the system, regardless of institutional arrangements.
Over recent years a substantial amount of forensic science has been taken in house by the police. We understand that in-house provision accounts for over 80% of police expenditure on forensic services. We have calculated this figure based on Chief Constable Gibson’s (and the Minister’s) estimate of in-house police expenditure of £500–550 million per year and estimates of the private sector market of £100–110 million. Firm figures are very hard to establish—as Chief Constable Gibson acknowledged, “it is difficult to obtain because it is … co-ordinated with the budgets of the forces”.
Chief Constable Gibson described “a blended market. The most complex, high-volume, more significant analyses take part in the commercial market. The element of the market that exists in-house is more simple types of analysis and also the collection of exhibits from crime scene investigators, et cetera” as well as most digital forensics.
Professor Gallop challenged the independence of the system
However, there are examples of police forces setting up their own laboratories. Some witnesses expressed concern about the extent to which this work is now carried out by the police themselves. For example, Professor Gallop challenged the independence of the system: “It is so easy to deflect an investigation. What you find depends very much on what you look for. If you are coming from a particular organisation—I would not want to say ‘with a particular mindset’— and you think someone has done something and you want to just see whether they have or not, spending as little money as possible, then your selection of which items you look for and what tests you are going to do on them can skew the results you get and can skew what you make of the results.”
Professor McCartney argued that: “Police are not scientists. There should be real independence and there has to be impartiality, and the science should be done by scientists. Everyone else around the world has recognised that you cannot turn police officers—nor should you—into forensic scientists. (Ed: not in Australia…) They are two different professions, and it is too risky in terms of impartiality and independence.”
Dr Mark Pearse, of Eurofins, echoed this, arguing that public confidence in forensic results relied on separation between the policing and the science: “Having a sterile corridor between the organisation doing the investigation and independent scientists is a good thing.”
He continued: “I worked for the Metropolitan Police and gave evidence as its employee. You are constantly juggling … integrity—that is, the deployment of the scientific method as an independent-thinking scientist versus the cognitive bias of working for an organisation that is prosecuting a case. There is no right answer to that. The overarching things should be cognitive bias and public confidence.”
The idea of a “sterile corridor” is a crucial factor in the Scottish system. In Scotland, forensic services are provided not by the police themselves, but by the Scottish Police Authority Forensic Sciences service. This was established by the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012, which also created the Police Service of Scotland (merging eight previous forces) and the Scottish Police Authority (SPA). The police service and the forensic service report independently to the SPA. As Fiona Douglas, Director, SPA Forensic Sciences, noted, this created the so-called “sterile corridor” between the organisations.
Professor Niamh Nic Daeid, Director of the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Dundee elaborated on the importance of this separation in the Scottish model: “we have one forensic science laboratory, as you know, which is part of or works within an organisation called the Scottish Police Authority. That looks after Police Scotland and the forensic science laboratory, but there is what is called a “sterile corridor” between the two. That means that one is not driven by the other: the laboratory does not do work just for the prosecution; it does work for the criminal justice system and it looks at both sides of the argument, as I said earlier, with regards to the items recovered from scenes and the work done on them.”
The process for defence solicitors to obtain forensic expertise is difficult and labour intensive. Legal aid rates for defence expertise remain too low, and lower than the Crown Prosecution Service itself pays for equivalent expertise. The Minister assured us that current legal aid rates can support the demand for defence experts, but the size of the defence expert market will depend on the legal aid rate. The true metric for success is whether bad forensic science is challenged and miscarriages of justice avoided. The fragility of the defence expert ecosystem is a threat to justice that must be addressed. The Legal Aid Agency urgently needs to review its rates for forensic scientists to facilitate equality of arms. At a minimum, they should be equivalent to the rates the prosecution pays and be paid promptly.
An issue that has raised major concerns in recent years is around the storage and handling of evidence that should be subject to forensic analysis. BBC and University of Leicester analysis showed that 30,000 prosecutions collapsed between October 2020 and September 2024 due to lost, missing, damaged, or insufficient evidence.