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Forensic Science

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) and the former Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), on an excellent report. I was less pleased with the Government's response, in that it was fairly short and did not answer some of the issues that were raised. I shall be relatively brief. As a former chairman of the London Assembly Transport Committee, the words ““public-private partnership”” strike fear in my heart because of the amount of money that may be paid to lawyers, how things may be negotiated and how things may go wrong in such circumstances. I understand that our Forensic Science Service is exemplary, one of the best in the world. My fear of a move to privatisation is that the service will be dilapidated in some way. My experience of the private sector is that, when an in-house department that serves a primary function—the Forensic Science Service first and foremost serves our criminal investigation units and our police—makes itself available on a commercial basis outside, it moves across functions and other demands are made on it. It then has the dilemma as to whether to meet the commercial demand and receive revenue from outside, or whether to facilitate its original purpose, which in this case is to serve the police force. It is not simply price competition that is the issue. It is also a matter of the capacity of the company, GovCo or PPP to provide the service. What does it prioritise—the huge commercial contract from abroad, which will bring in lots of money, or the needs of the police force? Which will be given priority by the privatised company? There are inherent dangers in moving towards PPP, so I urge caution in respect of the time scale by which the Government wish to proceed. The criteria, which I do not have time to deal with today, must be robust. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would wish the Forensic Science Service to move to a PPP. It is important to know at this point what sort of inquiries have been made about companies that might have a commercial use for the databases that will be created. For example, divorce lawyers could have an interest in DNA databases, as they could use them for their purposes. A great deal of interest will be expressed in the DNA databases, and we should be more concerned about that. As we have heard from many hon. Members, the DNA database and DNA collection are of great concern. The expansion of what I regard as a national database by stealth is a huge issue, and if that is the Government's purpose, they should have a proper debate on the Floor of the House. We have had no reassurance on any measure as far as security of access is concerned, or on the security of the databases and protection against misuse, whether that is hacking or more commercial activity. I recently attended a European Standing Committee where a European Union proposal based on the principle of availability was discussed. Our databases will be made available to competent law enforcement agencies in all 25 EU member states for the purpose of catching criminals. What is on our database will be available in 25 countries, and the Secretary of State had no answers about that on the day.