'Reporting the case is my biggest regret': How forensic science is failing victims of crime

A House of Lords report says the forensic science service in England and Wales is failing the police, the courts and the public, as ITV News' Science Correspondent Martin Stew reports.

Words by Rhiannon Hopley, Senior Science Producer

Sarah is a survivor of sexual assault. It happened when she was a child, and when she finally plucked up the courage to tell her family, they encouraged her to report it to the police.

She had years of messages from the perpetrator to support her story and police told her she had a good chance of a charge.

But two years later, they called to tell her they had lost the evidence.

"In that moment I felt like a child that I wanted to cry. In that moment I felt like all hope was gone," she told ITV News, using the fake name 'Sarah' for anonymity.

Hers is just one of many criminal cases which have collapsed, amid a forensic science sector in crisis.

A new report from the House of Lords shows that the forensic system in England and Wales is failing everyone from police, forensic scientists, lawyers and victims of crime.

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Now nearly seven years on from reporting her assault, Sarah says she is in limbo waiting to see if the CPS have enough to bring a charge now the evidence is gone.

"Reporting this case is my biggest regret. You shouldn't have to go through a lot to get justice when you've already been through a lot. "So it's like you have to fight to heal from the trauma, but then no one tells you the trauma that you get from reporting the case. I feel like I'm more traumatised from the case than the actual incident."

Sarah's situation is symptomatic of a wider problem.

The House of Lords report lays bare a number of failings. These include a backlog of 20,000 digital devices which need analysing - a number which has been near constant since 2019.

There are warnings of inconsistency in how evidence is stored too. There are 43 police forces and multiple forensic service providers who all look after evidence but not all of it is stored to the same standard risking evidence being corrupted or lost.

"Forensic science in so many cases is often the critical evidence that will be used for an acquittal or a conviction. If that's not done properly or it is done in a delayed fashion then what you are going to have is miscarriages of justice or very prolonged dates for court waits for justice" says Professor Brian Rooney, the forensic lab manager at Kingston University.

There is a growing risk that if evidence is not stored properly, cold cases may not be able to be solved and miscarriages of justice will not be able to be overturned because there will be no evidence to re-test.

Scientists believe the UK, which was once a world leader in forensic sciences, is also falling behind in terms of innovation and new forensic techniques.

"On a global scale, the UK is significantly behind other jurisdictions. I mean, I'm aware of scientists laboratories in the Netherlands for example, they have really good funding and have done some excellent work and their science is, is brilliant," Professor Denise Syndercombe Court, Professor of Forensic Genetics at Kings College London, told ITV News.

"A lot of Scandinavia as well have done some very forward looking work, certainly in DNA identification, which we're just not able to do here. We're not able to begin. We can't afford the instrumentation to begin with, let alone the research that you have to do to look into any new technique"

The House of Lords last wrote a report on the state of forensic science in 2019. Since then, they say barely any of the problems they highlighted have been addressed, meanwhile others have become much more acute.

They also draw attention to the risks of only having one major commercial provider for forensics and say specialist skills like footprint and fibre analysis are at risk of disappearing as they have become commercially unsustainable.

They warn of future problems too, such as the rise of AI and the threat of deepfaked evidence which current methods cannot identify.

The report calls for urgent action to fix the sector. Without it, the committee warns, justice may not continue to be served.

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