Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
Dr David Werrett, Mr Trevor Howitt, Mr Mike Loveland,
Mr Rod Anthony, Finance Director and Dr Bob Bramley, examined.
Q80 Chairman: When I asked my original
questions, I was doing so on the basis of advice and all your
answers to me were that matters had improved. It would have helped
the Committee enormously if we had known this before the start
of the Committee. It makes it rather difficult to do our job of
interrogating you if you are now saying the goalposts have effectively
moved and that whatever was in the NAO Report which looks critical,
things are much better now. I think that Sir John, in his usual
extremely courteous style, has made an implied criticism of you.
Dr Werrett: My apologies, if these
figures do confuse. They were a true reflection at the time. We
have had more time to analyse and look at things. What I would
point to is the progress we have made which we have not yet highlighted,
which is that we have moved from a 90% turnround time of 126 days
to 74 days in this last year. We have made various other improvements.
We now deliver, for example, CJ samples in three and a half days
compared with 140 days mentioned in the Report.
Q81 Mr Jenkins: All we can judge
by is the Report in front of us. We cannot judge by figures we
do not have or improvements you allege you have made unless they
are in black and white figures, can we? Do you accept that criticism?
Dr Werrett: I accept the criticism.
I was just trying to help the Committee understand the performance
of the agency. My apologies if in trying to do that there is some
confusion. I felt I was obliged, having reviewed and revisited
these figures only recently to understand the way the old systems
and the new systems, in terms of accounting, performed.
Q82 Mr Jenkins: I am thinking about
unit cost in effect, cost per case. You must have a cost basis
for each site and know which one gives you the best cost per case
value. Which is the best site?
Mr Anthony: We look at our sites
on the basis of contribution, the revenue they generate and those
costs. Each site does deliver a different level of contribution
based on the mix of work that goes through that site. The sites
which perform best financially are those which do DNA analysis
and the one which comes out financially best is our Huntingdon
site.
Q83 Mr Jenkins: Is it possible under
the new arrangements—this is just a thought—if you
have work like DNA analysis, which is a fairly simple procedure,
to send that out to private laboratories and create more capacity
in your labs if the workload went up?
Dr Werrett: The people who carry
out the DNA analysis are a different set of people from those
who carry out the regular case-work. We do take people from the
DNA analysis stream into the case-working stream, but they require
a training programme to take them through that. Also, as you were
aware when you visited the laboratories, the DNA analysis is becoming
increasingly automated, so the number of staff involved in that
will become smaller and smaller as time goes by.
Q84 Mr Jenkins: Will the same principles
apply to any other part of your work where, although you appear
to have a monopoly position with regard to the police force for
this work, it would be possible under the new arrangements for
you to sub-contract that work out to other private laboratories?
Dr Werrett: It would be possible
to sub-contract some work out to other laboratories. My understanding
though from the current position is that they do not have the
capacity at the moment and they may be struggling to supply the
level of service or the capacity to the police forces currently.
The one area where that may become an exception fairly rapidly
is in the field of DNA, where we have excess capacity anyway to
carry out DNA testing.
Q85 Mr Jenkins: You are aware of
the police's dissatisfaction with your turnround time for DNA.
What are you doing about it?
Dr Werrett: We are very busily
automating the analysis of stains and I believe the success we
have had with the analysis of samples from suspects for the database,
which has moved us down to a turnround time of three and a half
days, will be repeated with the automation of the crime scene
stains and similarly for stains within case-work.
Q86 Mr Jenkins: Why do you not inform
your customers when you are going to miss the agreed delivery
date?
Dr Werrett: We have reinforced
the procedure and it is to inform customers when we are going
to miss the delivery date. Sometimes it is just the sheer mechanism
of doing it has not been there and one of the processes we put
in place is for us to be on a similar e-mail system to police
forces so that we can contact them quickly and efficiently.
Q87 Mr Jenkins: So now you are in
a position for all customers to be informed when you are going
to miss the agreed date.
Dr Werrett: Yes, that is the position
we are striving to achieve from a managerial point of view.
Q88 Mr Jenkins: When will you be
there? When will you achieve it?
Dr Werrett: I cannot actually
say. It is an aspiration to get there.
Q89 Mr Jenkins: This year, next year,
the year after? When are you trying to achieve it?
Dr Werrett: We are trying to achieve
it now; our goal is to achieve it. All the managerial effort is
going into achieving it, to understanding why it does not happen
when it does not happen and we are much better at doing it now
compared with where we were before.
Mr Loveland: To try to reinforce
this we have come up with what we call a set of business rules,
to make it clear to the workforce who are responsible for communications
with the customer that it is a requirement of the service we provide
to get in touch with the customer and make sure the customer is
aware of any difficulties we have. Furthermore, on many occasions
on the customer's side, problems have occurred with a case: they
possibly have to look at other suspects, they possibly have to
submit further materials. So it is a two-way dialogue.
Q90 Mr Jenkins: How many court cases
have been delayed because your evidence has failed to turn up
on time?
Dr Werrett: I do not know the
precise number because that is not always fed back to us. I know
of isolated cases where situations like that have occurred, but
sometimes when those situations are investigated there is a mixture
of getting a material into us and us delivering that material
and understanding the communication with the force.
Q91 Mr Jenkins: Do you realise the
implication of the costs to the court system if these situations
are delayed and the costs might far outweigh what you would spend
in getting enough staff in there to be able to deliver on the
promised time.
Dr Werrett: I agree and over recent
years it has been a struggle to increase the capacity, robbing
Peter to pay Paul, because we have to use experienced forensic
scientists to train more forensic scientists and those experienced
forensic scientists are not there delivering the work.
Q92 Mr Jenkins: Mr Bacon asked you
the question I was going to ask about the satisfaction with your
training, but all police forces now have within them people called
scene of crime officers. Do you work closely with these and have
all forces' scene of crime officers gone through your system?
Dr Werrett: All scene of crime
officers have not gone through our system. What we have done,
particularly with regard to DNA, is to train all police officers
and we achieved quite a high percentage of all police officers,
under sponsorship from the Home Office, and we provided police
officers with the CD for DNA training.
Q93 Mr Jenkins: Scene of crime officers
are not necessarily police officers. They are specialists in their
role employed by police forces to conduct that investigation on
the scene. They are the most critical people and they have not
all been through your training system.
Dr Werrett: We do take part in
training with 23 police forces and we do take part in the training
of scene of crime officers with the Durham training school. In
that way we do get involved with scene of crime officer training.
Q94 Mr Jenkins: Do you not think
they should all go through the system?
Dr Werrett: That is a decision
for the chief constable. I would agree that we would be happy
to train them, but it is a decision for the chief constable whether
or not he uses us to train his scene of crime officers.
Q95 Chairman: Sir John, just in light
of your intervention during that last session of questioning,
do you think it would be worth your while to impress on organisations
which we are going to interrogate that if there is any change
in the figures between the publication of your report and our
meeting, we should be told about it?
Sir John Bourn: I certainly will
do that. Instructions to do that already exist, but I will have
attention drawn to them again, working with the Treasury to do
that.
Q96 Mr Gibb: May I ask you about
turnaround times? You were talking about a target turnaround time
of 24 days, which is not being met and it is taking 35 days. There
is a table on page 25 which shows the turnaround times for various
types of case. Why does it take 25 days to examine the evidence
in a burglary? Is it 25 days' worth of procedures that are happening,
you have to let the chemicals dry or send away or something? Or
are we talking about 25 days like the NHS waiting lists, time
waiting because of excess demand?
Dr Werrett: Yes, there are queuing
times within the 25 days.
Q97 Mr Gibb: What proportion of the
25 days is queue and how much is actual procedure in dealing with
the work, would you say?
Dr Werrett: It is very difficult
to give precise figures on that because cases will vary and what
is required to be examined within them. I could give you an example.
If it takes between 24 and 36 hours to do a DNA test, which may
be involved in a burglary, the queuing time may be 14 days before
that test goes through.
Q98 Mr Gibb: That does sound to me
to be a terribly lax service. I would not tolerate that kind of
service from any of the services which are provided to me by any
of the private sector companies which supply me. What are you
doing about reducing that time to the time it actually takes to
do the test, getting rid of this 14-day queuing period?
Dr Werrett: The thrust of what
we are doing to get rid of the queuing period is to automate the
service. We are tackling it from start to finish in that we are
providing the means to get the samples to us through a collection
and delivery service and we are speeding the process through in
terms of receipt of the samples and then we are devising systems
to place it onto an automated system to do the analysis. At the
end of the process it is examined by an expert system.
Q99 Mr Gibb: That is DNA. What about
all the other stuff, examining the fibres on an old duvet or bloodstained
T-shirt?
Dr Werrett: Some of those things
take a long and painstaking time, for example the comparison of
fibres.
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