Forensic Science Service Expenditure - 749/20

Date Responded 12 June 2020

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

Please can you provide the last 10 years of expenditure, by year, on forensic science services broken down between in-house and contracted out. Also can you give the split of contracted out expenditure that relates to digital forensics.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Finance Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

Northumbria police do not separately identify or report on in-house forensic science services. Information is held for outsourced forensic science cost information but is only available for the last 6 full financial years. In order to assist we have provided you with what is available as in the table below.

	2014-15	2015-16	2016-17	2017-18	2018-19	2019-20
Outsourced Digital Forensics	£5,024	£6,938	£3,233	£31,667	£5,180	£29,004
Outsourced Forensics	£1,296,411	£1,509,993	£1,327,457	£1,260,069	£1,338,853	£1,508,715
Total	£1,301,435	£1,516,932	£1,330,690	£1,291,736	£1,344,033	£1,537,719

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.