Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners

Article taken from Issue 3 of the Forensic Access Newsletter "Benchmark"

Until very recently, and despite the high-profile miscarriages of justice of the 1970s and 1980s that featured forensic science, there has traditionally been no system of accreditation or regulation of forensic scientists in the UK. This effectively meant that anyone with any sort of scientific background and sufficient brass neck, or who was sufficiently misguided, could set themselves up as a forensic science expert and produce evidence that tended to be unhelpful at best and positively misleading at worst; without anyone being the wiser.

Over the years, true forensic scientists became increasingly concerned about the risk of further miscarriages of justice and the additional damage these might do to the profession. Forensic Access in particular played a vigorous role in bringing the matter to the attention of the government and the general public.

And so in 1997, with support from the Home Office, a small group of bona fide members of the profession – including Angela Gallop of Forensic Access – got together to discuss what to do about the lack of regulation. The upshot was the establishment of the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners (CRFP) – an independent regulatory body to promote public confidence in forensic practice in the UK.

Critically, and uniquely, CRFP accreditation is based on peer review of forensic practitioners and not just on what their customers might say about them. It is tough – there is no ‘grandfathering’ clause – no matter how experienced they are, practitioners have to obtain separate accreditation for each field of expertise in which they wish to practise. They must specify precisely what they are accredited in, renew their accreditation every four years, and abide by a strict code of practice; they can be expelled from the register if they fail to meet the necessary standards.

The register now contains more than 1250 registrants in an ever expanding range of disciplines, and it will not be long before lawyers and courts will be entitled to ask their expert witnesses whether they are registered and be able to derive proper comfort if they are. A pilot scheme to test the system started running in parts of the northwest of England in late May 2004. Registration is not the whole answer – nothing ever is, but it is certainly a giant leap in the right direction.

Dr Angela Gallop is a founder member of the Governing Council of the CRFP and has recently been re-elected to serve a further three-year term.