Next Gen News

The decision last December to close the FSS gave police forces and private forensics companies less than a year to draw up contracts and arrange for the transfer of thousands of cases from the service.

"To think you can refashion so much of the market and not have repercussions is simply daft," said a senior forensics specialist who worked at the Home Office but asked not to be named.

"Being on the scene and in the postmortem provides key information about the bullet trajectory and the range the shot was fired from amongst other things," said a source.

The FSS also holds an armoury of firearms, which numbers in the many thousands, and which are used to test bullets from murder scenes to establish the make of the firearm in the crime.