When a forensic laboratory is called "accredited", what has actually been checked?

AnalysisA court cannot inspect a laboratory, and neither can the party whose case depends on its result. Somebody has to do that work in advance, against a written standard, so that the question in the courtroom is what the result means rather than whether the laboratory was capable of producing it. Accreditation is that arrangement, and its value is entirely in being external.

The statutory code names a single assessing body and three standards: the Regulator recognises UKAS as the sole national accreditation body, and "Where the Code requires accreditation, UKAS will assess forensic units undertaking FSAs against ISO/IEC 17025:2017, ISO/IEC 17020:2012 or BS EN ISO 15189:2022."

What is accredited is a forensic unit, defined as "a legal entity or part of a legal entity that performs any part of an FSA" — and the code is explicit that a unit "can be a team, a unit or a single practitioner".

Compliance is demonstrated "by having accreditation to the standard, the Code and the sub-activities of the FSA that the organisation undertakes, on the schedule of accreditation". Accreditation is required for most of the activities the code lists, though not all, and some activities have other routes to demonstrating compliance.

The schedule is the document that says what is covered

Accreditation is recorded against the standard, the code and the sub-activities the organisation actually undertakes. Reading "accredited" without reading the schedule tells you very little.

Not every activity requires it

The code requires accreditation for most listed activities and allows other compliance routes for others. A claim that all forensic work must be accredited would overstate what the code says.

The assessor is external and singular

One body is recognised as the national accreditation body. Assessment by the organisation itself, or by a customer, is a different thing and does not produce accreditation.

The standards are international, the code is domestic

Accreditation runs against ISO standards; the code adds the domestic requirements on top and is itself placed on the schedule. Both have to be satisfied.

And accreditation is about capability, not about a result

It says an organisation was assessed as able to do specified work to a standard. It says nothing about whether a particular examination in a particular case was done correctly, which is a separate question a court has to reach on its own.

• Common belief: An accredited laboratory is accredited for everything it does.

  In practice: Accreditation is recorded on a schedule naming the standard, the code and the sub-activities the organisation undertakes. The scope is the point of the document, and work outside it is not covered by it.

• Common belief: All forensic work must be accredited.

  In practice: The statutory code researched here requires accreditation for most of the activities it lists but not all of them, and allows other routes to demonstrating compliance for some.

• Common belief: Accreditation means a result in a particular case is correct.

  In practice: It is an assessment of capability against a standard, made in advance. Whether a specific examination was carried out properly is a separate question, and it is not answered by the schedule.

• Common belief: Only large laboratories can be accredited.

  In practice: The code defines a forensic unit as a legal entity or part of one, and states that it can be a team, a unit or a single practitioner. Size is not what the definition turns on.

• Common belief: Accreditation is the same thing as regulation.

  In practice: One is an external assessment against a standard; the other is a statutory scheme with a code and consequences for breaching it. The corpus describes the second separately.

One statutory framework, as it states itself.

• One recognised national accreditation body — England and Wales.
• Three named international standards, chosen by the kind of activity.
• A forensic unit may be a team, a unit, or a single practitioner.
• Compliance recorded on a schedule naming standard, code and sub-activities.
• Required for most listed activities, not all.
• Not researched: every other country, and what the ISO standards themselves contain.

AnalysisThe scope written on a schedule is what allows a party to ask a precise question instead of a rhetorical one. Without it, "the laboratory is accredited" and "the laboratory is not accredited" are both usable as debating points and neither is checkable. With it, the question becomes whether the specific work relied on falls inside the specific scope assessed — which is a question with an answer.

• One system was researched — England and Wales, under its statutory code. How forensic accreditation works anywhere else was NOT RESEARCHED.
• The ISO standards named here were NOT read. They are cited as the standards the code names, not as documents this platform has examined, and nothing here describes what any of them contains.
• Accreditation is required for most but NOT all of the activities the code lists, and some have alternative routes to demonstrating compliance. Which activities fall where was NOT RESEARCHED, so no blanket claim that forensic work requires accreditation appears here.
• What an accreditation assessment involves in practice, how often it recurs, and what proportion of units hold it were NOT RESEARCHED. The national accreditation body’s own pages could not be retrieved — an access limitation, not evidence about the body.
• Whether accreditation improves the quality of forensic work is an empirical question this platform has not researched and does not answer.

Related: who regulates forensic science, how forensic competence is established, and evidence integrity and admissibility.