Recommendation FP36: Recommendation 36
From The Fingerprint Inquiry Report, published 14 December 2011.
Recommendation
The SPSA should amend its procedures to include a review panel to consider any disagreement between examiners: (i) Where there is a disagreement between examiners the further investigation should be conducted by a panel the members of which should have had no prior involvement with the mark in question but need not come from outside SPSA. (ii) The members of the panel should each examine the mark independently without any background information about the case or knowledge of the conclusions of the other panel members. (iii) Once the panel members have reached their own conclusions, they should, as a panel, look at the reasoning of the earlier examiners. (iv) A result of the review should be that examiners understand why they came to different views. (v) If the panel members are unanimous, then the result can be reported.
Government response
No government response to this recommendation is on the record yet.
Blanket government agreement does not establish acceptance or delivery by each addressee. Some response passages cover groups of recommendations.
Scope of the government response
The Scottish Government's news release of 14 December 2011, the day the report was published, is its only published statement on the recommendations. Its one sentence about them is given for all of them together and states no position. The Scottish Police Services Authority's release of the same day accepts "all of the recommendations made of it by the Inquiry" without listing them; the site records that on the recommendations addressed to its forensic service. The Authority no longer exists, and the site files its words under the Scottish Police Authority, which took over its forensic services in 2013.
Delivery
No statement on delivery from the addressee has been found in the sources searched (last checked 18 June 2026). This is separate from the response above.