Labour

The Government is taking risks with forensic science and the evidence needed to solve cases - Cooper

Labour’s Shadow Home Office team have welcomed this morning’s damning report by the Commons Science and Technology Committee on the Tory-led government’s closure of the Forensic Science Service.

Yvette Cooper MP, Labour's Shadow Home Secretary, said: 

“This Select Committee Report shows that the Tory-led government is taking risks with forensic science and the evidence needed to solve cases. Closing the Forensic Science Service and hiving off its functions to a complex patchwork of private and police laboratories is rushed and even on financial grounds counter-productive. It also takes risks with our ability to convict criminals.

Diana Johnson MP, Labour's Shadow Home Office Minister, said: 

“This report finds that Tory-led government policy on the Forensic Science Service is rushed, dogmatic and not thought through in any practical way.

“The report says that government policy of fragmenting forensic work across a mixture of non-accredited police and private sector laboratories will ‘pose significant and unacceptable risks to criminal justice’.

“Along with the wider Tory-led government policy on DNA and savage police cuts, it would be a disastrous and wasteful backward move for our ability to bring criminals to justice and free the innocent.  The result will be lasting damage to the UK’s long-standing cutting edge role in forensic science.”