Sarah Jones, Amanda-Jane Balfour and Christophe Prince.

Q109 The Chair: Good afternoon. Welcome to this meeting of the Science and Technology Select Committee. We are undertaking an inquiry into forensic science and the criminal justice system. We are very pleased to have as our witnesses this afternoon Sarah Jones MP, who is the Minister for Policing and Crime at the Home Office, and her two colleagues Amanda-Jane Balfour, who is the director of forensic services at the Home Office, and Christophe Prince, who is data and identity director at the Home Office. All three of you are very welcome. As you know, this inquiry is following up on a previous inquiry that we originally undertook back in 2018-19.

As we all know, a properly functioning forensic science system is critical for the wider criminal justice system in the UK, yet the responsibility for ensuring that we have one seems to fall between the 43 police forces, the regulator, the market, the Home Office, the courts and the Ministry of Justice. We would like you to help us by setting out for us who takes overall responsibility for forensic science in the UK and how your department—the Home Office—works with the MoJ to achieve this. Are there any active meetings? Are there any active co-ordination mechanisms? Perhaps the Minister would like to start; we will then ask you, Ms Balfour, a more specific question. Mr Prince, if you want to chip in at any point, please do so.

Sarah Jones: Thank you so much for inviting us to give evidence and for doing this report at a really helpful time, particularly as we are on the verge of publishing our White Paper on police reform. This is a very helpful process for us to think about forensics and to make sure that we are moving in the right direction.

May I pass on apologies from my colleague Sarah Sackman? She absolutely would be here if she could, but she really cannot; you will, I hope, do a session with her separately.

The Home Office has the ultimate responsibility for forensics, including the priorities and the provision of them to ensure that the policing and the prosecution systems function as they should. Obviously the MoJ has a very important role as well, but the Home Office is the ultimate lead and I am the Home Office Minister with responsibility—so the buck stops with us and with me.

We are, as you know—you may want to ask questions about this—looking at a significant reform agenda in policing more broadly. Forensics is at the core of that. A lot of the problems that we have seen in forensics over the years are a symptom of wider problems that we have had in policing, not least with the proliferation of police forces and the lack of efficiency and co-ordination that goes along with that; you may want to ask us more about that later. To answer your question, it is us who is responsible.

Q110 The Chair: Thank you. Ms Balfour, we have heard regularly in our inquiry about the appointment of a director of forensic services at the Home Office, so we are very pleased that you are here today. Can you set out for us what you are hoping to achieve in this post, what resources you have, why the post was established and how things are going?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: First, thank you very much for inviting me here today. It is a real pleasure to be here.

On my role, let me start by setting out my experience. I am a qualified forensic scientist, and I was the lead of a crime scene examination unit in a police force for 10 years. I also led on national reform and strategy programmes in the Forensic Science Service alongside the Home Office, in particular the national DNA expansion programme. Lately, I have worked in the private sector on leading global transformation programmes. I just thought that it might be useful to set out my experience and skills for leading this exciting new opportunity.

On both the role itself and how I shall look to approach it, my principles for reform and programme transformation are very much ones of collaboration, facilitation and co-design. Since taking up the post in September, I have spent the majority of my time being visible at the coalface—in police forces, forensic providers and other national forensic capabilities—to understand from them personally the issues that they face.

In addition to that, I have been working collaboratively with the NPCC lead for the forensic portfolio, Chief Constable Paul Gibson. One approach that we are taking is a risk-based, evidence-based approach, where we are identifying the national risks that are out there. We are looking to turn that into a proactive risk management approach, enabling the prioritisation of forensic reform. There is a lot to do so prioritisation, along with the added value of that, will be essential as we undertake this approach.

The Chair: What resources do you need to fulfil your strategy? Do you feel that you have enough resources?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: Part of what I have been looking at since joining is a workforce resourcing plan, including identification of the key roles. I am very much looking to secure a blended team, with subject matter experts in the team from forensic science but also programme and project delivery experts, because this reform programme needs to be managed with discipline and rigour. In order to do that, that expert set of skills will be very important.

I have resources at the moment, such as a temporary team. We are looking to recruit permanent people through the Home Office recruitment processes but, again, we are working with the forensic portfolio lead to look at subject matter experts from policing and forensics.

The Chair: Before we move on to questions from the committee members, I have one remaining question; it is for you, Minister. The Westminster Commission on Forensic Science produced a report highlighting many of the issues here; that was in June last year. We have heard that it has not yet had a response from the Government. Have you studied its recommendations?

Sarah Jones: Yes, I have. It was a helpful report that was interesting to read and obviously very thorough. We completely agree with a lot of the problems and recommendations that it identified. There are different ways to skin a cat, as it were, in terms of some of the solutions, and we would differ from it in some of our opinions—one of them being whether the police should have responsibility for forensics, and whether you need that separation that there is in Scotland. We are looking at reform, and we will talk about that more later perhaps, but currently we do not think that is something we need to do; we think we have a better approach. But I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read that report and to think through a lot of its useful findings.

Q111 Lord Lucas: The national centre of policing was announced in November 2024 and, as of now, we are still waiting for the police reform White Paper, although I note that you say we are on the verge of it. Looking at all the thinking you have put into that process, where do you find yourself in terms of a plan for forensics within police reform, and will the national centre of policing have a role in providing support for forensic science? Will we see an end to the fragmentation at the moment? Do you have a view on how funding will work within forensic science, given that that was one of the rocks on which the old system foundered?

Sarah Jones: A huge amount of thought has gone into this, both when we were in opposition—I was the shadow Policing Minister with the shadow Home Secretary then, Yvette Cooper—and with Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary. A lot of work has been done talking to policing and to colleagues, and working with people such as Nick Hurd, who was the Minister when you did your report. He is very thoughtful and has helped through his work. There has been a huge amount of thinking, and there is a huge amount of agreement between the different policing leaders across the system on what is required.

The basic premise of the problem and the solution is that the pushing away from the Home Office of responsibility for policing that happened in 2010-12—both down to police and crime commissioners and, in the forensic space, by closing the Forensic Science Service—has not worked as a model. It meant that the Home Office just washed its hands, almost, of responsibility for a lot of policing decisions. We lost a lot of the levers that we used to have. It is probably fair to say there was one man and his dog in the Home Office looking at forensics for quite a period of time.

That has improved since you last met, and I think you have heard that from the thoughtful contributions you have had already in this inquiry: there is a stabilisation now and a system that is certainly much better than the one that went before, although there are still a lot of challenges. But the basic premise of pushing responsibility away has not worked.

So, in the broader policing sense, we want to set up some form of national centre for policing—name TBC—that does some of the functions of policing from the centre. Forensics will sit within that and Amanda, as director of forensic science services, will sit within that function.

There is a huge raft of problems that we want to try to solve through this, and we do not underestimate how big this challenge is. But this is genuinely a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get this right across policing more broadly and forensics. It is so important to do this, particularly with the changing nature of forensics and the speed with which the criminals get one step ahead of us on things like digital forensics in particular.

The thing I found most shocking, as a new Minister in this space, is 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. As Amanda said, she is going around trying to understand what the landscape is so that we know what the ground-zero point is. If we can have performance data where we have standardisation of what is expected, what is good practice and what all forces should be doing, we can shine a light on forensics in a way that we just cannot at the moment. We are second-guessing—in an informed way—but we do not have a lot of the data.

On things like workforce planning, we have had huge problems in forensics, with an ageing population in areas such as fingerprints. We have people moving to the private sector because they are paid more, and we have welfare issues where people are having to look at hugely challenging and upsetting information: are they being looked after properly? Having a workforce plan nationally where you can look at things like training, standardisation and those kinds of things can be transformational.

When it comes to the market—that is the right thing, as we absolutely need the private sector—there are innovations that it can bring that we cannot. Through working with the regulator and having this national system, we can help to create a market that works. We know that there are challenges: some of the smaller niche providers that are potentially non-viable and that we need to support, and obviously the challenges with having one big provider in the physical forensics space.

There is a whole raft of things we can do if we get it right, although I do not underestimate that it is a big challenge. But, as I said at the start, forensics is the epitome of the wider challenges in policing that we will try to fix.

The Chair: It is quite clear that you are painting a grim picture. I think you hope to fix it.

Sarah Jones: Absolutely, yes, and to do that we need to understand it first and then make sure we are putting in place the right interventions. We absolutely need the private sector. We need better regulation—we will talk about regulation later on maybe—and we need this national system with the legal responsibility at the national level, which will be transformational.

Q112 Lord Ranger of Northwood: Thank you for your initial response. You started off saying that the buck stops with you—the Home Office—and I want to probe that. Why do you not know expenditure? Why do you not know what is going on? What has been the problem?

Sarah Jones: This speaks to the issue I mentioned about there not being the capacity within the Home Office to gather and understand that data. It is not collected. Amanda or Christophe might want to come in and say more about what they are finding. The amount that each police force spends is about £550 million if you add it up together, but we do not have exact figures. We know that there are about 20,000 backlog cases for digital forensics. When problems bubble up, we know how much the Home Office is spending, but there are lots of things we do not know, and we want to fix that. That challenge sits across policing. I do not have levers at the moment to pull on policing to ask why the performance is not as it should be, because the way data is collected across the 43 forces differs. That is hugely frustrating as a Minister.

Christophe Prince: Partly answering some of the earlier questions, I chair the meeting for the forensic steering group, which is an evolution of some of the meetings that we have been putting in place for a period of time. That is a tripartite agreement between APCC and NPCC—MoJ and CPS come and the Forensic Science Regulator is there as well. Latterly, the director of forensic services has been there. We have tried to fill some of those gaps with ad-hoc investment: we have done some work with the NPCC to get financial data, which is the information that you refer to. There are some systemic issues in policing around the systems—43 different computer systems—and different ways of recording this. We can fill that with a partial approach, and we have managed to do that to give us the baseline to inform some of the challenges the Minister described. But obviously it is going to be one of the top priorities for Amanda to take in the first place.

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I will just pick up on the performance and assessment. In order to drive reform, it is essential that we baseline that and get an assessment of exactly where we are at the moment. That work has already started. In the space of digital forensics, for example, myself and the NPCC digital forensics lead have established and initiated two pieces of work to look at the digital forensic landscape in terms of tooling and storage. But there are other areas, and it is essential that we start to collect the performance data—for example, demand and capacity. We heard earlier about the market.

Can I pick up on the point about things being grim? As a forensic scientist and somebody who has worked with the workforce in the past, there are nuggets of really good best practice. When I am out there in forces, I am so heartened by what I see. There is work going on in the fingerprint capability world with the Police Digital Service, and I see my role as very much being able to brigade, co-ordinate and say, “Do you know that this best practice is going on in this part of the country and we should be doing it down here?” I want to bring out the excellent work, passion and enthusiasm of the workforce.

The Chair: We appreciate that.

Q113 Lord Stern of Brentford: Thank you all very much for coming. I want to pursue a bit more the budgets, how they are spent and how the effectiveness and efficiency of expenditure is assessed. Please bear with me. I speak as a former senior civil servant in the Treasury and an economist at the LSE. Essentially, the Permanent Secretary is the accounting officer, as you all know, and is personally accountable to Parliament for the proper, regular and value-for-money use of public funds. I was going to go on and ask you how the money is spent in relation to forensics, but you have already told us that you do not know. Given that the Permanent Secretary, supported by senior civil servants, two of whom are with us, is supposed to know, that surely is worrying. But let us take your answer that you do not know at the moment, unless I misunderstood.

When you come to know, you will have to, as part of your responsibilities—Minister and civil servants—assess the efficiency and effectiveness of that expenditure. To check that I understood the first part of the answer that you do not know, can you tell us how you plan to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the expenditure? Perhaps you could go on to say how that might be affected, including both the allocation of the money and the assessment of the effectiveness, by the reforms that are coming about? Can you, for example, compare the 43 police forces now, as you would expect to if you are managing them? It may not be 43 later. But that question of how you compare and contrast across police forces will be relevant.

Sarah Jones: Absolutely. The way in which the funding works is that the Home Office gives funding and decides what it is, and we are allocating that at the moment. We have to do it by the end of January for each force and each police and crime commissioner, and the police and crime commissioner and the force decide according to their local priorities and to whatever national direction we have some levers over, but not much. They decide how that money is spent. There are lots of checks and balances on how that money is spent. I would not want you to think that there are not. There is obviously the inspection system and the accountability that at the moment comes from police and crime commissioners. That will change when we get rid of them, but there will still be local accountability. There is national accountability. There are lots of checks and balances on how money is spent. But within a budget that we allocate to a force, we do not say, “You have to spend this much money on forensics and you have to spend it in this way”. We do not at the moment, as the Home Office, collect in a standardised way the data on that. That is what Amanda is trying to get to the bottom of. The regulator also has a role in this space and is trying to get to the bottom of it.

I do not want you to think it is some kind of Wild West system, because it is not. But the way in which the system is set up is that we hand the money to the local forces and they prioritise. Obviously, the operational independence of policing is important. The chiefs locally know what is required in the workforce mix better than we do in the centre. But because there was an extreme step back from Home Office engagement in that process, the functions within the Home Office were shrunk in terms of our way of overseeing what is happening. Obviously, there have been reports from Parliament about how forensics operates. There have been reports from HMICFRS; there is the regulator’s work. There is oversight, but it is in terms of our levers, to know exactly in a standardised way how funding is spent. We do not have that at the moment.

So, the reform is an opportunity to fix that. At the policing level, we are designing about 17 measures that we will measure policing by, whereby we all agree that this is the bible of data that we need to get in a standardised way to understand that police forces are doing the things that we need them to be doing. Forensics will be the same. What is the standardised system and how do we manage it? We have not said “We need to save X amount of money through this process”, but I would find it slightly mind-boggling if we cannot save money through it because, at the moment, you have 43 forces who are responsible for procuring services. Of course, there is good work that happens through BlueLight Commercial. You heard about that in the evidence earlier. But having to corral at the moment forces to come together and do things in one standardised way is hard and inefficient. When it comes to the market, your power in the marketplace is less because you might be procuring things separately, whereas if there is one body that is able to do that, you have more heft and influence, and you can get better value for money. I would expect there to be a much more effective system that will be better value for money when we have the reforms in place.

The Chair: If I understood you correctly, on the point you just made, if, as rumoured, forces are to be merged, will that have an impact on the way in which forensic science is handled? Is that what you are saying? There will be larger bodies?

Sarah Jones: The point I was making is that by having a national centre that can procure, set the legal framework and standardise it, that will be a much more efficient and cost-effective system. How many police forces we end up with is TBC. But even if we stayed with 43, when you have a national framework with standardisation, that will improve the system in how we procure.

Lord Stern of Brentford: So, basically, the accounting officer is not in a position to fulfil their responsibility in regard to forensics—accounting to Parliament for the proper, regular and value-for-money use of public funds—because you do not know how much you are spending on forensics. Is that correct?

Sarah Jones: I would not want to overstate that, in that there are checks and balances, and we know what it is around from a piece of work that we have carried out. Around £550 million is spent by forces on forensic services, and we know about £90 million of that is private sector provision. Christophe might want to come in with more assurance because I do not want to give the impression that it is worse than it is.

Lord Stern of Brentford: Just earlier, you said that you did not know. So you know something, clearly. What do you know?

Christophe Prince: The accountability and responsibility is through the normal police settlement. As the Minister said, there is a disbursement to police forces through the police settlement. It is the breakdown below the Permanent Secretary that will fulfil their responsibilities in that process. It is the breakdown within police forces where we have less visibility of how police chiefs will choose to allocate their funding.

As I said, we have done some work with police forces to better understand how that is distributed in order to inform some of the reforms that we have been going through, but I say firmly that we fulfil the Permanent Secretary’s responsibilities through the police settlement process; it is just that the arrangement we have means that authority is then delegated to the police forces to make decisions on how they choose to spend their funding within their areas.

Lord Stern of Brentford: It is not a question of operational independence; it is a question of knowing what has happened and, to quote Evelyn Waugh, “up to a point”. However the allocation takes place, you will need to think about the effectiveness of the forensic side. What criteria will you bring to bear to understand that? How will you use that to assess the performance of police forces, however many there are, and compare across them?

Sarah Jones: It might be helpful for Amanda to come in and explain this—or do you want to, first?

Christophe Prince: I will start with that. Some of the work that we have been doing within the forensics reform steering group, which will inform some of the work that Amanda will be picking up, has started to pull out what relevant key performance indicators and metrics you might expect to see to understand both the performance of individual areas and, ultimately, the health of the system overall. We have done some initial work on understanding what that might be, and it includes an understanding of volumetrics—the volumes of particular forensics—and some of the data on workforce in beginning to pull that picture together. We have started some of that work in collaboration with policing and other organisations like the Forensic Science Regulator to build up a more detailed picture of the KPIs.

To your point, we will need to understand that at a higher level of granularity if we are to move certain elements to national standards or, potentially, even to nationalise some of those services. It is about the best way of putting those metrics in.

Lord Stern of Brentford: The examples you just gave are about how the money is spent, not about the effectiveness of what you get for that money.

Christophe Prince: We have done some work looking at individual forensic services. It is extremely difficult. It is a challenging proposition, but it is not impossible to understand how, say, a DNA sample might contribute to a particular prosecution or outcome, because multiple elements contribute to a successful prosecution or an individual finding of not guilty. That breakdown is very hard, but it is something that we have started to work on.

Certainly something that we would expect to see as part of police reform is a much better provision of data. My expectation is that we will have to start that with individual areas—for example, DNA, where we have a better understanding. For some of the other forensic services, it will be much harder to disaggregate what the value of a mark and trace was to a particular investigation or what the value of a mobile phone download or a particular piece of information was, but we have started doing that.

Lord Stern of Brentford: I understand that you would go about it that way—that makes sense—but is it not a bit worrying that you are starting? Should you not have started some time ago?

Sarah Jones: Obviously, through the regulator, for example in the accreditation process, there are already structures there. To build on what Christophe was saying, we need to make sure that we get this right and, as I said, the system is more stable than it was when you last looked at it.

There are huge challenges. One example that has been given to me is the backlog there is of about 20,000 in digital forensics. What does that mean? What does it actually tell you? If there is a crime scene and 10 mobiles and laptops are taken by the police, you do not necessarily need to do anything with them immediately, but there might be one that you need. Actually, the one that you need has gone and been processed in 24 hours and the others are forming a backlog, but that is because they are not crucial to that investigation—or it might be that they are.

It is about unpicking how we measure these things. We have to get it right, otherwise we will end up measuring the wrong thing. In digital forensics in particular, you have this explosion in the quantity of data that we have to look at. We have to get it right, as we will have some perverse outcomes if we do not.

Lord Berkeley: Very quickly going back to Lord Stern’s original question, who is the accounting officer for this work? Is it the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, to take one extreme, or is it each police force? I am unclear who actually has to report to Parliament on whether the money has been spent wisely or not spent at all.

Sarah Jones: I would say—and Christophe can correct me—that the allocation of funding is as Christophe explained: the Home Secretary has to oversee the process of providing the funding for each force; then it is for the force to decide how much they spend on forensics within that. They have the local responsibility and we have the responsibility to allocate funds in the first place. That will shift under our police reforms.

Lord Stern of Brentford: The accountability for the funds is with the Permanent Secretary, is it not?

Sarah Jones: For the overall funds, yes.

The Chair: Baroness Young, you wanted to come in too.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I had a slightly different point. If people want to pursue this one, there is another one I want to raise with Mr Prince.

The Chair: In that case, let us continue with Viscount Stansgate and then Baroness Young can come in after that.

Q114 Viscount Stansgate: Welcome to you all. One of the major concerns we have found in doing this inquiry, which you will appreciate and has briefly just been mentioned, is around the specialist disciplines such as marks and traces, fibre analysis, et cetera. We have heard that the forensic science market as it is simply will not support these disciplines—they are “non-commercial”—yet witnesses also agreed that it was vital that we preserve these capacities to avoid future miscarriages of justice. One of our witnesses said, “I think it is the last-chance saloon for many of these services”.

Part of the role of the director of forensic services is about addressing these risks. What is your concrete plan to ensure that we retain these capabilities in the future? We do not want to lose them and see miscarriages of justice happening in the future that we would like to have avoided.

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I completely agree. These niche services—traces, marks, paints, fibres—are absolutely vital services for investigation, especially of complex and more serious crime. I have heard through my visits, through speaking to the forensic providers and in the evidence presented to this committee that there is concern. Therefore, one of my priorities and objectives, as agreed by the Home Office, the NPCC and the police and crime commissioners is to tackle this issue of niche services now. I intend to work with partners such as BlueLight Commercial and the commercial providers to establish our strategic national approach and plan to do this.

I also encourage private industry to work with us. This is a great opportunity. We want to really find the solutions that we can from the private sector. We are very aware of what is out there at the moment, and this is an opportunity for a real collaborative approach and to develop a strategic solution and framework for these niche services.

Viscount Stansgate: Are more resources required to help protect and sustain them?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I do not know yet. Part of the fact-finding and plan will be to establish the what, the how and the where. I still have to do and lead that work. In fact, the forensic portfolio lead and I are meeting with the commercial forensic providers on this subject this month.

Q115 Baroness Young of Old Scone: Mr Prince talked about the improvements that would happen with national standards or a nationalised service. This is the $64,000 question, is it not? We are dying to know which way you are moving, because that will be fundamental to our report. I wonder whether you can give us a feel for whether you are talking about simply a system of national standards that continue to be delivered by both the private market and the police forces, or whether you are going to sweep the whole lot into a national service and get consistency in that fashion.

Sarah Jones: I cannot give you the exact answer that you are looking for. The White Paper will come out when it does. There are a few principles about how we are thinking about this. For example, we want to do this with policing and with our partners. Therefore, they would say—correct me if I am wrong—that we do not want a massive, catastrophic change in one go; we need to do this with partners as a phased approach. We are clear that the legal mandate needs to sit nationally and that there needs to be a co-ordinated and systemised approach across forces.

Where that takes us to—whether we TUPE people from local police forces into a national service—is TBC. That would be the major change. We want to do this in partnership with policing in stages and to make sure that we get it right. What Amanda-Jane is doing now—understanding exactly where we are and working with partners on what we think the next stages will be—is really important. For me, this is about standardising training, having a workforce plan and thinking about R&D centrally. All these things will make a big difference, regardless of whether we end up with everybody being TUPE-ed over to one system nationally.

Amanda-Jane Balfour: Forensic science is a system, from starting at crime scene examination right through to the courts. It is not a case of, “Let’s lift and shift and move all this into a national body”—that is not going to happen. Therefore, we need to look at the specific elements and activities—from the crime scene, through to the laboratory, the analysis, the providers et cetera—and establish that this is not me sitting in a room doing that; this will take time and this about speaking to the subject matter experts and policing.

There are already national capabilities—including the Forensic Capability Network—and national services, such as the Forensic Collision Investigation Network. We can learn and take best practice from those, so that we can say, “What can we do once for the benefit of all in a national centre?”. That scoping work will start in earnest in February. We will be speaking with forensic leaders, policing and our CJS partners to start scoping what that looks like.

Q116 Baroness Walmsley: Ms Balfour, can I take you back to your previous answer on the specialist disciplines? Given all the work that you are doing, what range of corrective measures are you considering in response to the problems that have been identified there? It has been suggested to us that there may be a need for retainers to ensure that these services survive. Would that be one of that range of corrective measures?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: As I said earlier, this work is starting, and my approach is to discuss the strategy for this with BlueLight Commercial and commercial providers. It is a clean slate at the moment in terms of what we might do. Following my initial conversations with some of the forensic providers, they are coming up with solutions and suggestions. I propose that we look at them from an evidence base, in order to ask: which ones should be prioritised, and which will give us the quick wins? Also, which of those niche services will run out tomorrow? We need to do it with a risk-based, prioritisation approach.

Q117 Lord Burnett of Maldon: I have questions that were largely going to be directed towards Sarah Sackman, but I would still like to cover them at a higher level with you. They concern how the current forensic science system is working for the defence in criminal cases. Minister, you candidly said that the Home Office—and thus you to an extent—is ultimately responsible for forensics. Ms Balfour, I noted that your online job description includes that one of your functions is to create and implement a longer-term market strategy. Mr Prince, you explained that the cross-government group that you chair includes someone from the MoJ.

We have heard evidence from a wide range of sources, which is unanimous in its view, that forensic science is not available as it should be to the defence community and that there is not equality of arms. That came from lawyers and from academic forensic scientists, who have a good deal of insight into the independent providers. Interestingly, that also came from the big commercial providers, all of whom are shocked—that does not overstate it—that this system is not working for the defence. Do you agree that there is not equality of arms? What do you intend to do about it?

Sarah Jones: I will bring in Christophe in a second. Clearly, this is an issue that has been raised, not only by your committee but in the APPG report and elsewhere. The data is unclear in this space. I am sure that you will want to talk to Sarah more about that.

From our perspective, we want to make sure that there is equality of arms and that we avoid the miscarriages of justice that we have seen in the past. That is one of the reasons why we work through the joint structures that we have. One of the particular issues in this space is that a lot of the companies that work on the defence side are smaller and therefore more vulnerable in terms of their market space. Christophe might want to talk a bit more about that and how we might help with that in terms of the market.

Lord Burnett of Maldon: Before we turn to Christophe, there is an antecedent question: why are the bigger providers not working for the defence? Is that a result of the systemic failings that we have heard much about?

Christophe Prince: To reassure you, it is part of the cross-Whitehall group and one of the issues that has been raised with us and that we have discussed. We are acutely conscious of the risk. As you have heard from other witnesses, the defence plays a significant role in ensuring quality through the system, in providing early warnings to the forensic science regulator and others. I am sure that you will ask the Ministry of Justice Ministers the key questions that have been put around legal aid and the funding available to the defence.

On some of the reforms that we are looking to deliver in collaboration with policing—I repeat: with oversight from and engagement with MoJ, the CPS and others—we hope that those benefits that will accrue to the prosecution can also accrue to the defence. Picking up your point on some of the larger providers, if we are developing a more stable and confident market provision that can drive efficient provision, there is no reason why the defence cannot also avail themselves of those services. While we are not taking direct responsibility for the defence services specifically—that falls to the MoJ—we are working collaboratively with them to ensure that the benefits that will come from the police reform will also accrue to the defence.

Lord Burnett of Maldon: You say that the responsibility for the defence services rests with the MoJ. I appreciate that the MoJ is responsible for legal aid and thus what gets paid, but I had not understood that the MoJ had, within its scope, a forensic science responsibility to make sure that there is a market there. I had understood that to be the responsibility of the Home Office.

Christophe Prince: Yes, you are correct. Our responsibility is to ensure that there is an effective market and the effective existence of people who can provide those services. It will then be for the MoJ to ensure that those are funded and that the defence can avail themselves of them.

Lord Burnett of Maldon: Chair, I think the more detailed questions are better left for the Minister from the MoJ.

Q118 Baroness Walmsley: Minister, a few minutes ago, you suggested that the situation now is a lot more stable than it was when this committee looked at the issue six years ago. However, from what we have heard, it sounds as if the external market is far from stable, so I want to ask you about market resilience. When we looked at this six years ago, we talked to the CEOs of three major companies, and since then Cellmark has gone into Eurofins, and Key has been facing administration. We have a virtual monopoly, with Eurofins dealing with about 86% of the external market. This hardly mitigates towards efficiency, value for money and so on.

Given that the external market clearly is not working as it did when it was first introduced, what is the plan to fix it? Who takes overall responsibility for ensuring that the market becomes healthier than it is at the moment and allows a full range of services to be provided at rates that are fair to both the people working for the prosecution and people working for the defence? We have heard that, if you are working for the defence, you get half as much for the same work as you do if you are working for the prosecution. This issue is crazy. Could you address that?

Sarah Jones: Yes, I will make a few points. I was trying to be non-political and generous in terms of what happened before my time. I am also aware that my colleague has been working in this space since you last did the report. There has been progress; that was my point. On the crudest level, we have not seen the catastrophic interventions needed from the Home Office, where companies were about to go under. Four years ago, there were huge crises around rape digital forensics. We have not seen those levels of crisis in the past few years—that was my point. I could be ruder than that, but I do not think that that would be fair.

From the evidence you have already heard, we accept that the system is absolutely not working as it should, but I think that there is a bit more stability than there was a few years ago. That is my point; I was trying to get right the balance around what we think.

In terms of the market, we need the private sector—and we need it to work. We know that markets work when you have a good national framework and good regulation. We need to make sure that that is functioning, but I do not think that it is in the way we want it to do that at the moment. We need the private sector to get us to the next stage of forensics. For example, with roadside toxicology, we could transform a lot of what we do if we had the right kit to do so, which we do not have at the moment. Looking at the emergence of deepfakes, we need the private sector to give us the solutions to help us identify what is and is not a deepfake. We need the private sector.

As Amanda-Jane said, there is a huge network of processes that sit within forensics. Some of those things will always be done by the public sector, but, in some places, we need the private sector. Is it comfortable that Eurofins now has an 80% share of the physical market? Absolutely not. There are also challenges in the digital space, in terms of the providers there. We know that, in the physical space, we have had challenges around the demand for drug testing, which is where the providers do not meet the capacity that we need. The same is true for some other processes where we need more private sector provision.

There is also the question of how we contract with the private sector to make sure that it is doing the things that we need it to do. Something that has been raised in your committee so far is about how to make sure we have innovation when we have these big players. Talking to the head of forensics in the Met recently, he said that, in their contract with Eurofins, there is a built-in part of that contract that demands innovation, to try to make sure we are always striving for the next technology. Having 43 forces using different systems is not the way to do this, so centralisation and standardisation will help.

The regulator—we might talk more about this later—is in a different place to where it was when you last met. There is improvement there. However, this is not an easy thing to get right, and I do not want to underplay the challenge—but we are we are certainly trying, and will continue to try, to get this right.

On your point about defence versus the prosecution, I say absolutely. To what Christophe was saying earlier, if we can get this market right, that should speak to everybody, not just one side or the other.

Baroness Walmsley: Before we move to Ms Balfour, you have suggested that there are niche areas, such as roadside toxicology and deepfakes, and that you are looking to Eurofins to provide solutions to some of them. But are there small, niche companies out there—innovative companies with solutions to some of the issues that you have identified—that could provide those services if they are given a bit of help?

Looking at a previous report from this committee, I see that there are a lot of innovative, small companies that are not being helped by the Government to grow, develop and get the public procurement that will help them to provide those solutions to public services. Is the Home Office doing anything to find those companies with solutions to some of these issues, to see what can be done to help them to develop in order to provide those solutions?

Sarah Jones: I will give a slightly wider answer. There is a problem in that space, as many different small companies are innovative but cannot get the route to market because they do not have the funding that we have been looking at. In my previous role as Industry Minister, I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Through the industrial strategy, a huge amount of more funding is available to support organisations to get from the initial research level up to being able to commercialise, so that we do not lose these companies to funding from abroad, such as when the Saudis or the Americans come in and fund them instead. There is a huge piece of work there—it is a bigger piece.

I will let Amanda-Jane come in on the specific work that we are already thinking about with the smaller companies, but I will just add one thing. For the Met, which has a much bigger bargaining power because it is much bigger, one of the stipulations within the contract that it has with Eurofins is that it has to outsource to smaller companies for a proportion of the services that it is contracted to do. That is a good way of ensuring that you are supporting the smaller organisations. Amanda-Jane might want to come in with a bit more on that.

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I completely agree on the opportunities that smaller companies can provide for innovation. Being in forces and speaking to forensic providers, I have heard about the potential barriers to entry. I need to understand the evidence and data behind that to establish what the root causes of those barriers are, so that we can come up with solutions to take that forward.

This is very much about developing a co-aligned, co-designed market strategy—not just for the big players but for the smaller companies as well. It is very easy to think about a strategy that involves the bigger players in the market, but how can we open up the route to market for the smaller ones as well?

Q119 Lord Drayson: Minister, given, as you have already said, that the Home Office has responsibility for maintaining a healthy market—you have identified the serious problem of one company, Eurofins, having 80% market share—how much does the Home Office spend annually with Eurofins?

Christophe Prince: It will not be the Home Office but the police forces that will be procuring with Eurofins. I am sure that we can obtain that information and breakdown for you. Going back to an earlier question, it is one of the areas where we have better data, because there is commercial contracting information, so I am sure we could obtain that for you by working with police colleagues.

Baroness Neville-Jones: It would be a fundamental piece of information.

Lord Drayson: Given the instability in this market, do you accept that it is pretty strange that the Home Office does not know how much it spends with the single company that has 80% of the market? That needs to be addressed urgently.

Sarah Jones: We made the point earlier that the funding is directed through the forces, so it will be the forces that have the contracts with Eurofins. We can get you that amount, because we have access to that data, but we do not have it immediately.

Christophe Prince: I can give a high-level view. Broadly, around £78 million is spent with the commercial market. We estimate around £35 million is spent on casework biology and around £9.1 million on DNA as well. Then there will be drugs, road, toxicology as well. It is not that we are absent information at all, but what I do not want to do, Lord Drayson, is give you specific answers now.

Lord Drayson: It would be helpful if you could write to the committee. You already mentioned that the Metropolitan Police, as by far the largest force, has the largest spend. Could you tell us what proportion of the Eurofins budget comes from the Met?

Sarah Jones: I could not tell you exactly. Again, we can probably get that information relatively easily. It is obviously the big player and will therefore have the lion’s share.

Lord Drayson: That would be really helpful. The reason for asking these questions is to bring into focus that the department really needs to have a contingency plan in place for the situation where Eurofins changes its business model or changes its pricing, or another provider exits the market. Are those contingency plans in place and what are they, please?

Sarah Jones: As I think we have explained, we are on a journey in terms of police reform. We will get to a point, if we get this right, where we have a better-designed market that we can make work. When I talk to the Met, it says that, because of its heft, Eurofins needs it as much as it needs Eurofins, if you see what I mean. It is in a better position to be able to have those conversations.

Lord Drayson: Absolutely.

Sarah Jones: If we had that capability at the national level, that would be increased; I do not know whether my colleagues have a better answer than I do.

Lord Drayson: As you are the Minister responsible for this, am I right in saying that your view is that the current situation with a single provider with 80% market share is unacceptable?

Sarah Jones: I think it is very challenging.

Lord Drayson: But is it acceptable, Minister?

Sarah Jones: The system is functioning but I do not think it is ideal. In part, the problem with the market is driving our desire to introduce reform.

Lord Drayson: That is helpful. I think you are saying that the current situation is not acceptable and needs to be changed. You and your colleagues have helped me explain to the committee the process you are going through to address these issues, but you have not really given us much information on the outcomes you are seeking to achieve. In other words, what does success look like and when do you expect to deliver that improvement? Could you give us some sense on that, particularly focusing on this one area—this crisis facing forensic science in the provision of physical market services?

Sarah Jones: The White Paper that sets the framework within which this will all unfold will be coming out shortly. Significant legislation will then be required across the whole of police reform. We will be able to do some aspects of the reform agenda sooner than others. A priority for Amanda—and she might want to speak to this—is the market.

Slightly going back to the last question as well, there are markets where there are big players that work and markets where there are big players that do not work. It is about the framework and the regulation and the way the system is set up. We need to make sure that system is right. There will not be an immediate solution and, all of a sudden, Eurofins is not the largest market. We have to work with the situation as we have it at the moment.

On how we take things forward and the timings, forensics is one of the earlier priorities, I would say, in terms of the national police force—name TBC—we are setting up. It is an early priority; I do not know if you want to speak more about timings on the market, Amanda.

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I will just pick up on a couple of points. You mentioned about ensuring that we have a contingency plan in place. I mentioned earlier, and you picked up, that my role description is about ensuring that we develop a market strategy with BlueLight Commercial and CJS partners. As we develop this market strategy together, one of the key successes or one of the key deliverables will be ensuring that we think about our blueprint. Where do we want to be? What does success look like in the market? We can sit here today, but I cannot lead on the delivery of the plan to get there until we are all in a room with the experts and actually discuss the blueprint for the market we want to aim for and develop the strategy.

In terms of timescales, this is not going to happen overnight, and we need to be realistic about that. We can do a phased approach with prioritisation—we spoke about niche services earlier; that could be one example. We also need to ensure we are aligned with wider police reform, making sure the timing of that is linked in.

Lord Drayson: Do you have a personal target or ambition for when you will have implemented this strategy and have the market in a condition which you regard as fit for purpose?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I do not have a date in mind, because I have not sat down in a room with the experts and the chief constables on the forensic portfolio and the marketplace. That will be later this month. From that, we will start to establish the plan to delivery with the ultimate date to get there and how that fits in. As I mentioned, we will take a very proactive, risk-based and prioritised approach to that, potentially phasing it in.

Q120 Baroness Northover: This is focused particularly on the independence or lack of independence within the system and the fact that the spend on in-house forensic science by police now far outstrips external spend. You as a Minister have responsibility for the criminal justice system within the Home Office, I note, as far as the list of your responsibilities is concerned. Clearly, it is very important to try to have successful prosecutions where appropriate. I noted that, Ms Balfour, in your explanation of what you were doing, I do not think you mentioned defence. That was one thing that Lord Burnett mentioned in terms of equality of arms. I can see an approach of trying to get successful prosecutions, but how do you balance all of this? Minister, you said, early on, that you were very interested in the Westminster commission’s report but you did not agree that there should be the kind of separation that you might see in, for example, the Scottish system. We are very concerned about the way in which this is working and how you ensure that you avoid conscious or unconscious bias in forensic testing, setting it in the context I have just placed it in.

Sarah Jones: How you ensure that there is not any conscious or unconscious bias is a big question. I would say a number of things in response.

First, we have brilliant forensic scientists who are doing brilliant things. We have the potential to be real leaders in this space. I do not think that, in order to deliver an unbiased and independent system, you have to divorce it completely from policing in the way that has been done in Scotland. In Finland, forensics come under the auspices of policing. Different countries do this in different ways.

Consistency around training and professional management—not line management; that is the wrong term—is really important. Under the previous system, when we had the Forensic Science Service, there was a national training centre. Now, training is the responsibility of each police authority. Each police force might train people in different ways. Making sure that we train people to know exactly what they need to be doing is a really important part of the picture.

Being able to have a line of sight to the forensics team in the national centre will help people raise professional issues that they any have in a local area; there will be a route to a team of people at the top with whom people can raise some of those issues. The regulator now has a statutory footing—part of the code that everybody has to adhere to is about independence—and has more teeth. It is early days, though. We do not know whether the regulator will give us everything we need—you can talk to it about that—but that need for independence is built into the regulatory system.

If you have a trained workforce with an accredited system where compliance involves the need for independence, as well as a route for professionals to talk about any concerns they may have if they need to do so, you can have an independent system in that structure—as you can with an independent system such as that in Scotland. I am not saying that I am against the Scotland model—it is a perfectly decent model; you are going to visit Scotland soon to talk about the learnings from that—but there are different ways to deliver that independence.

Is this incredibly important? Yes. If there is no trust in the forensic system, the whole thing collapses. We absolutely need our forensic system to work because that is how we bring people to justice in loads of different ways. There is a structure that you can make work where you do have that independence.

Baroness Northover: The forensic scientists may be brilliant, but they are being commissioned by the police to do certain things. Obviously, there is a lot of pressure on the Home Office and the police to have successful prosecutions and bring people to justice, as it were. Do you not think that that whole system has risks within it?

Sarah Jones: There are always risks in any system. You need to make sure that you navigate your way through those via regulation and the set-up that you design. Christophe, I can feel you itching to come in on that.

Christophe Prince: As the Minister mentioned, there is the professional responsibility. One of the big things that has changed recently is the Forensic Science Regulator’s code in terms of independence, impartiality and integrity. There is an expectation on individuals, if they are to comply with the code, that those things are a key part of their activity.

From my experience of talking to forensic scientists and investigators—Amanda-Jane may want to add something to this—you get quite a rigorous dialogue between the forensic scientists developing the strategy around what evidence they think is necessary and what the investigator will believe is needed. You see a strong professional relationship there; in some circumstances, that includes the industry as well. There will always be a conversation between the investigating officer and the person carrying out the forensic activity, but that does not preclude those individuals acting with independence and impartiality in fulfilling their responsibilities. There are different ways of achieving this.

Baroness Northover: What do you feel are the risks in the Scottish system?

Sarah Jones: I do not necessarily think that there are more risks in the Scottish system.

Baroness Northover: Why are you averse to it, then?

Sarah Jones: In time, that may be where we end up. I am not saying that we would not; what I am saying is that, in the system we are looking at now, where we have this central function and oversight as well as a strong regulator, you can deliver independence there. When the police are looking at forensic evidence, they are looking to prove that someone is either guilty or innocent. The evidence tells you what it tells you. Amanda-Jane, do you want to come in on this as well?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I do not think so.

The Chair: We have a lot more questions for you but, before we move on, we have had reports of this whole process being something of a postcode lottery, in that there are different standards of forensic science provision across the 43 police forces. Can you comment on that?

Sarah Jones: It is a postcode lottery, in lots of different ways, across policing. As Amanda-Jane said, there are pockets of absolute brilliance, and then there are pockets that do not operate in the way we would expect. That is a huge problem that we are trying to fix across policing as a whole through this reform programme.

Q121 Viscount Stansgate: I want to talk about evidence storage because it is an area of concern that has been raised with us. We are given to believe that thousands of cases collapse due to missing or damaged evidence. Although the NPCC sets guidelines on how evidence should be handled, we are given to understand that they are not consistently followed.

Is it not time to take the whole matter of evidence storage out of the hands of the 43 police forces altogether—full stop? They were not properly equipped or funded to do it in the first place. Should we not just fund a national forensic archive and have the whole thing dealt with centrally in that way? If you do not agree, we would be very interested to know why not and what the alternative plan might be, because the current system is not working.

Sarah Jones: My answer is yes, quite possibly. Obviously, under the previous system with the Forensic Science Service, there was a central database. There are two elements to this: the physical and the digital. Both are challenging, as you know and as you have heard.

When the Forensic Science Service closed, forensic science became the responsibility of local police forces. Local police forces will need evidence while they undertake their investigations—there will always be a need for local police forces to have evidence—but there is a question around where it should be stored in the long term. We have heard, as you have, about the challenges around space, capacity, funding and other such issues.

The storage for which we in the Home Office are responsible and which we oversee is the old national storage system. I cannot remember what it is called—Forensic Archive Ltd, I think. Do we need to give that the responsibility? I cannot say yes or no; I would say, “Quite possibly”.

Viscount Stansgate: As you will appreciate, there may be justice mechanisms in future that rely on being able to re-examine evidence that has been stored in a proper way; we can all think of cases where that has already happened. We want to make sure that that is preserved as a future capacity.

Sarah Jones: Yes, 100%. Do you want to come in on that, Amanda-Jane?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: Yes, please. I mentioned earlier that there are already some national capabilities and national services being provided out there at the moment. I am looking at these. I have visited the Forensic Archive Ltd facility. It is a fantastic, slick, professional capability that currently stores more than 4.5 million exhibits; these include physical ones, such as case files, and digital ones, such as DNA swabs. It is immense. It has the potential—I asked this question—to store material from other forensic providers should we leave the market, for example, or require archiving assistance.

I agree that, as part of the reform, there are opportunities to look at expanding the scope of FAL to include, potentially, exhibit material and records on a national basis. I see this as one of the advantages of us moving to a national police body—TBC. This would prevent the loss of exhibits, enable proper retention and ensure that that evidence is there for cold cases, reviews, appeals, et cetera in the future. We will explore this as part of the forensic reform.

Viscount Stansgate: I will leave my next question, so that other colleagues can finish up.

Q122 Lord Berkeley: Since the last inquiry, the Forensic Science Regulator has been put on a statutory footing, and we have heard a lot of complaints about the cost of compliance and accreditation. That may be necessary—you can convince us of that—but a question then comes: who is paying for it? If the complaints are coming from the police forensic people—the 43 different forces—I have to think that it is very easy for one force to say to the next force, “Which firm do you use? Oh, I’ll use the same one”, and we will end up with a monopoly of 86% of the market. Is this situation all right? Who decides whether the forensics are done in-house or externally by the police? Who checks their prices? Is there any competitive tendering for this?

Sarah Jones: At the moment, they decide within each police force what they do in-house and what they do externally. There is a network of collaboration that has built up over the past few years through BlueLight Commercial and, in some cases, regionally, where forces have said, “Let’s come together so we can use our combined heft to negotiate a better deal with companies”.

On the Forensic Science Regulator, the new code came out last year, and it has not long had statutory powers, so it is relatively early days. You are absolutely right about the grumbles about accreditation and the cost of that, so we need to understand that better and make sure that it is working in the right way. We need to understand whether the problem is with the assessment service provided by UKAS.

We have given the regulator more funding, and it has more people. I know the regulator will have told you its views on whether that has to change over time. Is it an issue that people talk about? Yes. Will it be better when we have a nationalised standardised system? Yes.

Christophe Prince: To add to the Minister’s answer, at the moment police forces decide. That fragmented approach across policing, with a lack of co-ordination and therefore individual leadership, is one of the contributory factors. Like us, you have heard from the private sector that a lack of transparency around some of the decisions on what might be in-sourced and what might go out to the market—and some reasonable period of time from policing to understand what the forecast might be—has impacted some of the ways in which it decides what it might want to invest in and therefore its provision. So, for us, that is one of the advantages of moving in that direction.

Lord Berkeley: Do any of you feel that it is part of your duty to encourage the market and competition?

Sarah Jones: Yes, 100%. Through the new provision that we have in Amanda, and through the reform programme, we will have the levers to do that. At the moment, we do not necessarily have the levers to do these things.

Q123 Baroness Young of Old Scone: I will take the costs of accreditation a little further. We took evidence from UKAS and got the feeling that it is marching to its own drumbeat: it has a set of things that it wants to require of services in order to be able to give them assurance—and whatever that costs, that is what it costs. There probably needs to be some examination of what similar services in other countries cost, because my impression from other fields is that UKAS is pretty expensive and does not have any real pressure on it to reduce its costs. It also means that the cost for new entrants and for smaller providers, particularly one-man providers, becomes prohibitively expensive. What will you do to look at the UKAS costs and the cost of accreditation in overall terms to avoid these problems?

Sarah Jones: Yes, it absolutely has been raised with us. Your point about the smaller companies is really valid. It is challenging, and the regulator is doing a lot of work in this space. Christophe might be able to speak more to this point, but my understanding is that the latest code that came out last year contained some changes that the system had asked for in terms of the over-accreditation demands—Christophe might want to talk to those. Yes, this is part of what we are looking at and need to look at. I do not have an answer for you as to what we will actually do, but it is something we are looking at as part of this process. There have been some small changes through the last code.

Christophe Prince: To pick up on the Minister’s points, it is in relatively new regulation: there is the code and, of course, accreditation is not required for all those forensic service activities. The first version of the code particularly came out from policing challenges around crime scene investigation and the application of a much more laboratory-style approach to the way in which you consider accreditation. Therefore, we were pleased to see that the regulator supported a change in the way we look at crime scene investigation. I believe policing colleagues have welcomed that in the second iteration of the code.

We in the department are trying to ensure that we have a strong dialogue between the police—who have to implement that and meet those costs—UKAS itself and the Forensic Science Regulator. We judge that, at the moment, there are still some teething problems, but they have those open dialogues on a regular basis. However, this is one to watch. We have also observed the feedback around the smaller providers having to meet those costs.

On the policing costs, we think that there is some duplication around the level of accreditation required. There is also duplication around some of the other elements, such as validation within the techniques and the tool solutions. So, although it is not an answer, notably for smaller providers, some of the reform should reduce the overall cost of regulation that is imposed on forensic science activities, either in policing or in the market.

The Government have indicated and given direction to the regulators to consider what steps they can take to reduce the burdens, so there is a broader proposition to encourage the regulator. As the department overseeing and sponsoring that regulator, we will continue to have that dialogue on behalf of policing with the regulator and ultimately with UKAS, should it be necessary to ask, “How do you drive down the costs and reduce the burdens?”

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I have one last point on that. Will you talk to other government departments that usually use UKAS? UKAS has got itself into a position of being a monopoly supplier all of its own, and I have the feeling that there may be evidence in other government departments’ use of UKAS as an accreditation system that shows that prices are not being pressured.

Christophe Prince: I would not want to comment on behalf of other government departments.

Sarah Jones: It is a good point—we should look across at other departments that use it and have those conversations.

Q124 Baroness Young of Old Scone: I will move to another issue. We were delighted that the regulator got additional powers and indeed some additional staff, although the numbers are still monumentally low. However, given the current state of the market, there is a real problem that, while they may have regulatory powers, when they find evidence of failure to meet regulatory standards they cannot really do much. If they poke Eurofins too hard, they are poking one of the key elements of the market, and there is no alternative—so they cannot really do anything very vicious to Eurofins. It is similar with police forces generally; there is no way that it would be able to say to a police force, “We refuse to allow you to carry out any more forensic services because you are simply not meeting those standards”. It can advise, prompt and persuade, but it does not really have any teeth, does it?

Sarah Jones: I think it has some teeth. I would not say that it has no teeth.

Christophe Prince: We have certainly seen evidence of some interventions around particular techniques recently. I believe Gary Pugh gave the example of speed estimation. You have seen a response from forces to the demand from the regulator for information, and it has the power to issue compliance notices and the power to investigate. We believe that there is sufficient evidence that both police forces and other providers are responding to that; we have no belief that the forces or others are disinterested in meeting that. Indeed, there is broad support for the regulation from across the forensic science service and from forensic professionals.

Of course, the regulator will have to be aware of any given action, but I do not have the impression that either the previous or current holder will give consideration to that; its priority is to give consideration to the quality of the evidence and whether or not there are substantial risks to the criminal justice system. I believe that it will act accordingly, using the powers that it has—notably compliance notices. Added to that are the admissibility declarations that are acquired by the court, which is an additional driver for both police forces and the prosecution to give consideration to the quality management systems around the evidence that is generated that ends up in court. So I think there are a number of drivers introduced by that statutory nature.

Sarah Jones: If you are not compliant and you are putting evidence forward in court, you have to say that you are not and there will be problems with that. That is an incentive as well.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I cannot remember whether we asked the regulator about how many compliance notices had been served since it got those powers. I wonder if we could ask for that information to be provided, if we do not already have it.

The Chair: I am not sure we asked. We are coming near the end of the session, but we still have some more questions for you, if you can bear with us for a little longer. We want to ask some questions about digital forensics from Baroness Neville-Jones.

Q125 Baroness Neville-Jones: I am going to ask some general questions about digital forensics, and a colleague is going to talk specifically about AI. In our previous report, we have identified huge backlogs in the evidence deriving from digital material. Despite the five-year plan that the National Police Chiefs’ Council has, we hear that the backlog remains just as big. Is there a plan to ensure that digital forensic evidence will be produced promptly and reliably? One of the difficulties is the length of time that it takes to produce the material on which a court case can rely. With digital forensics being more at the heart of a large number of cases that come to court now, this is becoming a very important issue. Justice delayed is justice denied, so we would like to know what your plans are to improve this situation.

Sarah Jones: The growing nature of digital forensics is a huge challenge, as is the pace with which the online world changes, with systems changes, software upgrades and the new technology out there. This is absolutely a challenge. As you have heard, the backlog—the delay—is pretty much as it was. This is not great but, because there is a much larger quantity of digital forensics, it is static, in a way.

We are facing this issue in lots of different ways, and Amanda can talk about the investment that we have made to try to understand the landscape. There are different ways to challenge this. One is that we need the private sector in this space—I have said that already—to come up with new innovations, whether AI or other forms of digital forensics, full stop. At the moment, about £36 million is spent by forces on digital forensic software, and that is just going to increase. Most crime investigations now have some kind of digital element, so this is just going to get bigger and bigger. It is a huge part of the landscape and a huge priority for Amanda, and I recognise that we have many huge priorities. Do you want to explain the work that we are doing now to try to understand the landscape?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: Yes, sure. I mentioned earlier a piece of work that was commissioned jointly by me and the NPCC digital forensic lead to look at baselining the digital forensic landscape. One of the reasons that we are doing that is very much to identify which areas are ripe for automation, new technology and efficiency improvements, and to establish how we can reduce these backlogs quicker, rather than have them sitting there. This work is being performed by the Police Digital Service; it is a short-term piece of work.

I also alluded to looking at the national operating model for digital forensics, working in collaboration with CJS partners and industry. This is a strategy that I will be leading on. If I may, I would also like to bring up research and innovation in the digital forensics space, because I believe that a cross-CJS approach that brings in academia, industry and the public sector is ripe for research and innovation in the digital forensics space. One thing I have also been doing is speaking with my counterparts in Scotland and Ireland, who have research and innovation strategies in place, to understand what they are doing and what we could be doing around the digital forensic space.

Baroness Neville-Jones: There are two separate issues, are there not? One is the backlog in existing cases and the second is the one that you have just brought up, which is the question of whether there is worthwhile research to be done. I think the committee certainly agrees. I would like to know whether you have a framework for research. Do you think that setting up a national institute would be a good idea, for instance?

To come back to the backlog for a moment, Minister, you and Amanda have described the nature of the problem, but do you have a plan to deal with it? Are we going to see this in the police report? We cannot go on just ignoring this and allowing the mountain to build.

Sarah Jones: I do not think it is fair to say that it is being ignored. The space around research and innovation is incredibly important here. If you talk to local police forces, for example, in their police stations they will have kiosks that you use to get into and download information from a phone. If you know what the password is, you can access it and do that really quickly. If you do not, it is more complicated and it can take a long time. As new technology emerges that helps us get that data quicker, it will make a huge difference. I was talking to somebody who was saying, “If we could get data from the phone straight away, we could get people to give a guilty plea straight away”. How much time would it save the criminal justice system if we got more guilty pleas at that point and we could access that? We need technology to access that and we need to be working on the private sector on that, which is why we need innovation.

Baroness Neville-Jones: Is that a resource problem? You mentioned money; is it a resource problem or not?

Sarah Jones: Everything is a resource problem up to a point, but it is about how we encourage an ecosystem of research and innovation, whether through UKRI or through private sector providers. We are funding a database for a new form of DNA that will help us catch rapists. Do not ask me how. There is a role everywhere. This is about how you get that ecosystem to work in the way that you need it to. We do not have all the answers to this now; we are landscaping the challenges that Amanda-Jane has talked about. Do we understand where some of the backlogs lie within the system? Yes, we have an emerging picture.

We need to go back to what I said at the start. Where we have a backlog of 20,000 devices, that will be a significant problem in a significant number of those areas, but it will not be a significant problem in all of them. For example, you might have taken 10 devices from a home in a raid but only one is crucial, so you do not need to look at the others. Making sure that we are measuring these things in a way that is about outcomes, and not just about a broad number, is also important.

Christophe Prince: I will say more on some of the technologies. Some of the work that we have been doing is around specific technologies within a broader digital forensics domain. For example, there are some very promising techniques around video analytics. At the other end of the forensic process, supporting the rollout of redactions has been a very significant issue for the policing give the volumes they have had to deal with. There are a number of specific interventions around more mature tooling solutions that enable us to take some of the burden off police forces. That is at a national level from the Home Office.

Individual police forces have also been innovating. There are some interesting improvements. Going back to some of the earlier comments, it is difficult to do good comparative analysis across different police forces, but we know that some of them appear to perform much better. You have a greater variability of operating model in digital than in traditional. Going back to Amanda-Jane’s earlier point, there are likely to be significant benefits from taking the less performant forces—or those with operating models that are less effective—and bringing them up to the standards of those that are most effective. We suspect that there will be some real benefit in that domain as well.

Baroness Neville-Jones: Those sound like the elements of a strategy. Do you know what fraction of data in digital forensics is stored in the cloud outside England and Wales? There is potentially a problem of access. It is very important to know what proportion you have stored and where it is stored.

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I mentioned the two pieces of work that we have already commissioned—one of which is being led by the Police Digital Service—to provide a comprehensive picture of the cloud storage usage among forces. That will be at the end of March.

Baroness Neville-Jones: I hope that you know about the geography.

The Chair: Lord Ranger, you have a question about AI.

Q126 Lord Ranger of Northwood: Yes. Thank you all for your time. There is a lot of grimness and many challenges, but, Minister, you said at one point that there is a huge opportunity, and I completely agree. I spent 30 years in industry. For full disclosure, over the past 10 years, I had a strategic supply to government, supplying a number of police forces around the country. I understand the journey that the police forces have been on, from policing to digital policing, and how their requirements have changed, including the operation of an almost mobile police office. A lot of the challenges have been emerging as you have been going along.

I have a question about the line between forensics and digital forensics. I do not think that there is a line—it will all be a technology-based conversation—but I would like to hear your view on that. You now have a huge opportunity as we see the maturity of the application of AI across all kinds of areas, particularly in the world of forensics. We can go quite specific. We have heard from witnesses the challenges; they get right to the heart of fake imagery and deepfakes. Do you have a view on the immediate concern around that and a plan for dealing with potentially fake evidence that will be coming up? Anything that is good is immediately used for bad, which is where AI seems to be going.

Lifting up from that, the strategy for transformation may be more your area, Ms Balfour. The Government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan does not specifically refer to forensics. There was an AI action plan for justice from the MoJ; I know that we do not have the MoJ Minister today, but is there any alignment with that? That was published in 2024.

As has been mentioned, you have an RDI strategy from the Home Office that refers to innovation and AI. However, looking at the whole picture of the transformative nature of this technology, do you have a view on what you will do or how it plays into your overall approach, as well as the immediate issues about fake evidence and deepfakes?

Sarah Jones: On the distinction between the physical and digital, you are right that the two will become one over time. The distinction tends to be about the companies that are doing the work or whether these things are largely in-house or done externally. There is a distinction in terms of who is doing what between those two, but over time everything becomes digital up to a point. I think that you are right.

On deepfakes, there is a piece of work going on in the Home Office about this, but it is a huge challenge. We need the tools that tell us whether something is deepfake, and we need to work with the private sector to develop those tools. AI offers a huge opportunity and a huge part of this. There is a big programme of work around AI that is to be done more broadly across policing. This will be part of the national service as well.

At the moment, I would definitely encourage police forces to use AI. There are low-risk places where we can use it. The best example that has been given to me is where AI can look at a huge quantity of data to look for risk of harm, in a way that would take months and months for an individual person to do. We need to be using these tools. Some of the new technologies are more experimental, and we need to make sure that we are getting it right, because if we get it wrong it is catastrophic. I would encourage forces to definitely use it—and they are. People are looking at AI across a range of different aspects, not just forensics. Christophe, do you want to speak to the work on deepfakes a little bit?

Christophe Prince: Yes, and I can mention the NPCC. We are working closely with and supporting Al Murray, the NPCC lead on AI, who is very firmly focused on trying to exploit and understand the opportunities. As a department, we are also supporting some of the more mature AI-related tools, as the Minister said, in lower risk, but also looking at trials and supporting those from a national level in some of the more challenging areas.

The last area where it is important that we are helping with the CJC AI working group, which includes operational partners, is around how we understand the policy. For example, will the CPS accept something that has had a contribution from AI, either in redaction or elsewhere? We are supporting that through a number of areas on the adoption side.

On the deepfake side—this plays a bit to some of the earlier conversations on market players—our department is working with a number of other departments, such as HMRC and DWP, on our second challenge to the market about the tooling solutions that enable us to identify deepfakes. The first round of that identified one quite promising tool, which was then procured by policing and is being implemented.

The other big component is that we are also developing the frameworks to understand what good looks like—talking to an earlier point. An innocent manipulation of an image might be said to be a deepfake, so we need to be able to differentiate between these types of tools. It gets quite complex quite fast. At a central level, not just at a departmental level, the Home Office is supporting a cross-Whitehall stimulation of the market to understand what can be done, and then to try to identify tooling that can be used to prevent exactly the kind of risk that you have identified.

Lord Ranger of Northwood: The building of agentic AI into those processes will be critical as you transform the service itself. It would be remiss of me not to mention one further point. Having worked for a big strategic supplier, there is a great opportunity for UK AI businesses as well—they are hoping for the processes and engagement that you are undertaking. I declare my interest as a co-founder of the Business AI Alliance, which is a UK-based community of AI SMEs.

As I am sure you know, there are many out there who come up with solutions that can seem generic, but actually it is about how we apply this technology to the challenges rather than thinking that they are niche challenges and that we have to get ad hoc technology built for them. There is a lot out there that can be applied, so I hope that UK SMEs will get a look in as well.

Sarah Jones: Absolutely. We need to support our British companies.

Q127 Baroness Walmsley: As the total volume of digital information grows, there is a big danger of either being swamped or the backlog growing, which means that intelligent triaging of what needs to be looked at first, or at all, becomes that much more important. Amanda-Jane, at the national level, is any research being commissioned to look at how this is done? AI will obviously have a role, but what about intelligent detectives? How are humans and AI being put together to do that triaging?

Amanda-Jane Balfour: I will defer to my colleague, Christophe, who is responsible for AI.

Christophe Prince: You pick up a good point. We can undertake a number of interventions to prevent a deluge and overloading. First, as you heard from other witnesses, some of that starts right up front when choosing which device we may or may not seize and being careful about that. Secondly, there is the need to be able to do quick analysis of that. That is where I think AI really comes in. We have already seen that, for example, with child sexual abuse: we are able, nearly automatically, to identify whether or not there is child sexual abuse material on a device. That is a result of investment from the Home Office and others. You can quickly say, “This is a device that is of use”.

You then picked up on the third point, which is about the skills of the investigators to be able to make use of this. We have some really high-quality training for investigators—you have heard about some of that—but it remains quite fragmented. There is an opportunity to improve the skills of both investigators and forensic experts to identify the right line of inquiry—both to exclude individuals from an investigation and to identify which ones are likely to be the most relevant suspects. Those skills will be really important.

Sarah Jones: When you talk to police across any part of the service, they will say that they spend a lot of their time doing bureaucracy and not being able to do the things that we want them to do: for example, being professionally curious, making the right choices, and thinking about things in the way that they often say they do not because of the pressure of bureaucracy. If we get AI right and we take away some of that bureaucracy, they will have more time to be professionally curious and interested and to do the things that we want them to be do when thinking about cases.

Q128 The Chair: We are nearly at the end of the session. Before Baroness Neuberger asks an important closing question, I want to clarify one further point. You have talked quite a lot about the White Paper on police reform. A few minutes ago, you said that it was due to be published shortly. Can you be a bit more specific? How long will we wait for the White Paper?

Sarah Jones: I cannot be more specific—I am sorry—but I promise that you will not have to wait very long. In September, we obviously had a new Secretary of State and a whole new team in the Home Office; I was newly appointed as the Policing Minister then. We have delayed it a bit from the original plan, but we are doing that because we are so ambitious and we want to get this right. It will not be long.

To be clear, the White Paper will set the parameters around which we will then have the legislation and set out the reform. It will not have the answer to everything on forensics, but it will set out that framework. There is a lot of work—as you know and as you have heard—to be done. We will do that as quickly but as best as we can, when implementing what that overall strategy looks like.

Q129 Baroness Neuberger: That follows neatly into my question. We have a somewhat depressed committee—you may have noticed that—because we are doing this follow-up inquiry. We have heard a lot of repetition of what we have heard before, so it would be very good to know what is in the White Paper, because it might give us a bit of hope.

Perhaps you can give us some reassurance, without telling us exactly what is in the White Paper. One of our witnesses described the forensic science sector in England and Wales as being in a vortex of reviews, where no one takes responsibility for actual reform but there is lots of reviewing. We want to know whether, if we did the same inquiry in another five years’ time, we would actually find something different? We hope that you might be able to say yes.

Sarah Jones: Yes—absolutely. I know that I have said this already, but this is such a good opportunity, because the leaders from all the different aspects of policing are largely agreed on the shape of what this reform agenda looks like—and that is hard to do. It is the same in the forensic world. There is a huge hunger for change. This is literally a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try to get this right.

Without speaking for them, I know that colleagues who have worked in this space and can see the challenges and what needs to be done view this as the opportunity to do that. We are going to be bold in what we do. So, yes, I hope that, when you come to look at this in five years’ time, you will see a system that is working for the benefit of all victims of crime. At the moment, we are not delivering for them in the way that we would like to be.

Baroness Neuberger: Do you think that there will be money available for it?

Sarah Jones: Yes.

The Chair: Minister, thank you very much for answering our many questions. I give thanks to your two colleagues as well, Ms Balfour and Mr Prince. We are extremely grateful. It has been very informative. That now concludes the public session.