I share the hon. Gentleman’s delight at serving together on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. The evidence speaks for itself, to stretch a metaphor when we are talking about evidence. The Science and Technology Committees in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, as well as the Government’s own reviews and the Forensic Science Regulator’s annual reports, have all pretty much concluded the same thing: where standards cannot be enforced by providers and the validity of the forensic process is brought into question in prosecution, miscarriages of justice will have followed. The forensics regulator has been pretty bold in making that case in her annual report to Parliament. That is why, I am pleased to say, there has been broad consensus on the measures brought forward in the Bill to ensure that she can enforce the standards for more providers of forensic services.
That is why successive Governments have been notionally committed to putting the regulator on a statutory footing for nearly eight years. Many right hon. and hon. Members have called for this for a long time. That is what underpinned the conclusions of the reports from the Science and Technology Committees in this House and the other place that I mentioned to the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller).
Last year the Science and Technology Committee, of which I was a member, concluded in its inquiry on this issue that
“the Regulator—now more than ever—needs statutory powers.”
A couple of months earlier, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee had said:
“It is hard to understand why…the Forensic Science Regulator still lacks powers they need… The Forensic Science industry is in trouble; such action is now urgent.”
The regulator herself said in the report:
“Legislation is urgently required to give the…statutory enforcement powers”
needed to do the job properly.
I therefore appreciate the Government’s willingness to co-operate in seeking to carry the Bill, and the support of the Minister and his officials in producing the Bill and the explanatory notes, and in helping to secure the Bill’s passage through the House today. It is
especially important that the Bill does pass today, because the availability of these services on time and to reliable standards is often patchy.
When the then Government announced the wholesale closure of the loss-making Forensic Science Service in November 2010, the Science and Technology Committee warned that they had failed to give
“enough consideration to the impact on forensic science research and development (R&D), the capacity of private providers to absorb the FSS’s 60% market share and the wider implications for the criminal justice system.”
That warning has proved prescient. Today, many scientific processes are conducted in-house by police forces, but this is piecemeal in its extent.