Forensic Science Regulator Statutory Code of Practice, Version 2 (May 2025) Digital Forensics Practitioner Briefing
Critical review and practical implications for Digital Forensics and Digital Investigations in England and Wales
Prepared for: Digital Forensics Magazine (DFM)
Date: 14 December 2025
Executive summary
Version 2 of the Forensic Science Regulator’s (FSR) statutory Code of Practice (the Code) is the central mechanism by which quality standards are imposed on defined forensic science activities (FSAs) used for criminal proceedings in England and Wales. It replaces version 1 (March 2023) on 2 October 2025, after approval by the Secretary of State and both Houses of Parliament, and establishes a refreshed baseline for accreditation, governance, validation, competence, impartiality, disclosure and operational control across forensic units. For digital forensics practitioners, the most consequential elements are not confined to the dedicated ‘Digital forensics’ FSA-specific requirements (section 97). The Code embeds digital-relevant requirements throughout Parts A to D: leadership accountability (Senior Accountable Individual), incident management and quality failure escalation, competence and authorisation, validation/verification and change control of tools and methods, information security, continuity of exhibits/data, interpretation safeguards (including cognitive bias controls), and reporting/disclosure obligations. From a practitioner lens, version 2 is best read as a ‘system control’ instrument: it expects forensic units to demonstrate end-to-end control over digital evidence workflows (capture, processing, analysis, interpretation, storage and disclosure) with explicit attention to the fragility of digital artefacts, tool-chain dependencies, rapid software/hardware change, and the risk of plausible-but-wrong outputs. It also clarifies boundaries between evidential digital forensic activities and certain investigative or frontline activities (for example, limited investigator review of extracted content under defined conditions), while signalling future regulatory expansion into adjacent digital domains (e.g., speech and audio analysis). This briefing explains why a statutory code exists, provides the version history and transition timeline, summarises key changes between versions 1 and 2 (with emphasis on digital), and then critically analyses the Code section-by-section to identify and interpret requirements that materially affect digital forensics and digital investigations.
1. Why a statutory Code of Practice exists
The statutory Code exists to reduce the risk that flawed forensic science leads to miscarriages of justice. The Code is issued under the Forensic Science Regulator Act 2021, which requires the Regulator to prepare, publish and keep under review a Code of Practice for the carrying on of forensic science activities in England and Wales. The regulatory model assumes that each ‘forensic unit’ (a legal entity, or defined part of one) implements and operates a quality management system (QMS) that meets Code requirements, thereby controlling processes and reducing the likelihood of systemic quality failures. The Code is not limited to laboratories. It covers defined FSAs that can occur at scenes, in fixed facilities, and in mobile or operational settings, and it explicitly includes handling, continuity, integrity/security, retention/destruction and reporting activities as part of FSAs unless stated otherwise. In practice, this means digital evidence workflows,from seizure and imaging through tool-assisted extraction and reporting,are expected to be governed and auditable within the same statutory framework as other forensic disciplines. An important practitioner implication is that the Code’s compliance posture is intended to be demonstrable, not aspirational. For most regulated FSAs, compliance is demonstrated through accreditation (primarily ISO/IEC 17025:2017) with the relevant FSAs and sub-activities reflected on the schedule of accreditation, alongside the Code’s additional, discipline-specific requirements. [7][1] [7][1]
2. Version history and commencement timeline
Version 1 was the first statutory Code made under the 2021 Act. It was approved in January 2023, published in March 2023 and came into force at 00:01 on 2 October 2023. Version 2 is a replacement statutory Code. It was approved by the Secretary of State on 3 March 2025, laid before Parliament on 20 March 2025, approved by the House of Commons on 29 April 2025 and by the House of Lords on 14 May 2025. It comes into force at 00:01 on 2 October 2025, when it replaces version 1. The Regulator consulted on a draft version 2 in February to March 2024 and subsequently published a consultation response report in March 2025. These consultation artefacts are important for digital practitioners because they explain how and why scope boundaries were refined for multiple digital FSAs, and they indicate where future frameworks or later regulation are being contemplated (for example, in relation to telecoms data analysis and speech/audio). [2][4]
3. What changed from version 1 to version 2 (high-level)
Version 2 is not presented as a wholesale redesign of the regulatory model. The consultation materials describe the change-set as a combination of clarifications, editorial changes, updated references and corrections of ambiguities, alongside targeted policy adjustments. The most significant thematic changes relevant to digital practitioners can be grouped as follows: • Clarification of notification and disclosure thresholds for non-conforming work and the Regulator’s enforcement posture (distinguishing information-gathering investigations from compliance actions). • More explicit articulation of the Regulator’s role in determining and interpreting applicable international standards (and the relationship between Code requirements and accreditation). • Refinements to compliance declarations and the need to describe mitigation where a report relates to non-compliance. • Targeted refinement of incident scene examination requirements (outside digital, but operationally relevant where digital evidence is recovered at scenes). • Digital FSA scope and workflow clarifications, including boundaries around investigator review tools, call data record processing that is not geolocation, and alignment of audio processing workflows with the NPCC video-based evidence framework. Version 2 also provides accessibility-driven tracking of significant changes (highlighted in grey in the main document, with a corresponding clause list in section 104). That list is extensive and signals that practitioners should not rely on a ‘delta reading’ of only obvious chapters; operationally relevant amendments are distributed across general governance, technical controls and multiple FSA definitions. [6][5]
4. Digital forensics and investigations: how to read the Code
Digital practitioners should treat the Code as having three interlocking layers: (1) Cross-cutting governance and technical controls (Parts A to C), which define how a forensic unit must run its QMS, control competence, validate methods, manage records and information security, handle quality failures, and produce defensible reports. (2) FSA definitions and compliance mechanisms (Part D1 to D2), which define when work is an FSA and when the Code applies (including accreditation requirements and scopes). (3) FSA-specific requirements (Part D3), which add discipline-specific constraints and expectations. For digital forensics, this is concentrated in section 97, but digital-relevant requirements also appear in the individual DIG FSAs and in other disciplines where digital tools are used (e.g., image processing). Operationally, this means a practitioner cannot ‘compartmentalise’ compliance to only the digital chapter. For example, a tool-validation deficiency is simultaneously a Part B problem (validation/change control), a Part D1 issue (scope of an accredited activity), and a Part D3 problem (digital-specific requirements addressing tool-chain risk and dependency management).
5. Critical analysis of the Code through a Digital Forensics Practitioner lens
5.1 Part A, General requirements: governance, accountability and quality failure
Part A frames the governance environment in which digital forensic work is conducted. Three provisions are operationally central for digital units: Senior Accountable Individual (SAI). Digital laboratories frequently operate within larger policing or corporate structures where operational ownership, IT ownership and evidential ownership are dispersed. The SAI concept is intended to force clear accountability for compliance, resources and risk acceptance. Practitioners should expect SAI-level sign-off to be required for core policies such as method authorisation, competence frameworks, tool procurement and acceptance, and the escalation of quality failures. Quality issues and escalation. Digital failures often manifest as silent error modes: partial extractions, time-zone misinterpretation, parsing errors, corrupted exports, or tool updates that change decoding behaviour. The Code’s emphasis on identifying, controlling and notifying material quality issues should be interpreted as requiring digital units to maintain robust incident triage, impact analysis (including potential case reviews), and defensible decision-making on what constitutes reportable non-conformance. Specialists from outside the forensic science profession. Digital investigations regularly involve external specialists (e.g., platform engineers, malware reverse engineers, data scientists) who may contribute to evidential outputs. The Code places explicit obligations on such specialists, including the use of validated methods, demonstration of competence, management of cognitive bias, and inclusion of formal compliance declarations in reports. For digital teams, this translates into a practical need for onboarding controls, method governance and disclosure-ready documentation when external expertise is used.
5.2 Part B, Technical requirements: the digital ‘control environment’
Part B contains many of the requirements that, in practice, drive day-to-day digital forensic operating models. Independence, impartiality and cognitive bias. Digital examinations often involve discretionary judgement (e.g., selecting extraction techniques, deciding what is ‘relevant’, interpreting artefacts and timelines). The Code’s treatment of opinion evidence and the need to guard against non task-relevant information should be operationalised in digital labs via case-context minimisation, role separation where feasible (e.g., triage vs interpretation), and structured peer review for evaluative outputs. Document and record control. Digital work is heavily tool-mediated, producing large volumes of derived data (images, extractions, logs, reports) and frequently relying on vendor software with opaque internals. The Code’s record control expectations imply that digital units must be able to reproduce outputs, explain tool configurations, retain validation artefacts, and maintain audit trails for every material step,particularly where automated processing produces “black box” results. Review of requests and examination strategy. Digital evidence is routinely ‘over-collected’ relative to what is required to answer investigative questions, and digital artefacts can be misleading if interpreted without context. Requirements to review the request, define end-user requirements, and develop an examination strategy should be treated as a safeguard against scope creep and confirmation bias. In practice, it supports disciplined scoping of artefacts to be searched, explicit definition of hypotheses/propositions (where evaluative opinion is in play), and documentation of why a chosen approach is proportionate. Externally provided products and services. Digital laboratories depend on third-party tools, libraries, cloud services, and managed platforms. The Code’s controls in this area should be read as requiring vendor due diligence, clear acceptance criteria, validation/verification evidence, and a structured approach to tool updates (including patch management) so that ‘upstream’ change does not silently invalidate ‘downstream’ conclusions. Checking and review. Peer review in digital forensics is frequently challenged by time pressure and limited expert capacity. Nonetheless, the Code’s emphasis on checking and critical findings review should be implemented with explicit triggers (e.g., device time reconstruction, geolocation inferences, attribution claims, key artefact decoding) and minimum evidential audit artefacts (tool logs, hash sets, chain-of-custody records and validation references). [1]
5.3 Validation, verification and change control: why digital is treated differently
Although validation requirements apply across disciplines, the Code explicitly recognises that, for digital forensics, the ‘measurement-based’ validation model applies to most methods,even where there is no traditional measurement,because extraction processes and tool-driven transformations are the mechanism by which data is produced for interpretation. This is a subtle but important point: digital outputs are treated as ‘generated data’ that must be shown to be reliable. The Code expects validation to be risk-driven. For imaging or data capture, example risks include altering data on the exhibit, returning incomplete/inaccurate data, or incorrectly declaring media unreadable. This aligns with common digital failure patterns (write operations, partial reads, unsupported filesystems, volatile data loss). A particularly consequential requirement is that methods are validated to a specific configuration, and any change in constituent parts (hardware, firmware, scripts, operating system) may invalidate validation. The Code therefore expects risk assessment for even minor changes (including vendor patches), and it highlights the risk that a patch could produce plausible but incorrect outputs such as inaccurate timestamps. For digital units, this translates into a need for configuration management and dependency mapping as compliance artefacts, not merely IT hygiene. Finally, the Code requires demonstration that the method works in the hands of intended personnel,meaning validation evidence must be complemented by competence, training and authorisation controls, and by periodic review to confirm methods remain fit for purpose.
5.4 Disclosure, transparency and ‘commercial-in-confidence’ limitations
Digital forensics often depends on proprietary tooling. The Code is explicit that material supporting method authorisation (including validation libraries) may be disclosable in criminal proceedings and that ‘commercial-in-confidence’ does not override disclosure requirements, including those under the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996. This is a direct operational signal: procurement and vendor management decisions must anticipate possible disclosure of validation materials, known limitations and tool behaviour. For practitioners, the risk is practical: if a vendor cannot or will not support sufficient transparency to satisfy disclosure and challenge, the tool may become unusable for evidential purposes, or its outputs may need to be restricted to intelligence-only workflows. Version 2 strengthens the overall direction of travel toward disclosure-ready validation libraries and explicit statements of validity. [9][1] [1][9]
5.5 Part D, Digital forensic science activities (FSAs) and what is regulated
Part D defines which digital activities are FSAs and how compliance is demonstrated. Core regulated digital FSAs include: • DIG 100, Data capture, processing and analysis from digital storage devices. • DIG 101, Analysis of communications network data. • DIG 102, Digital network capture and analysis. • DIG 300, Recovery and processing of CCTV/video surveillance systems. • DIG 301, Specialist video multimedia recovery, processing and analysis. • DIG 400, Audio acquisition, conversion and processing. • DIG 401, Speech and audio analysis (not yet subject to the Code in this version). Version 2’s consultation response provides several clarifications that matter for digital investigations: (a) Investigator review tools and evidential boundaries. The consultation response clarifies that an investigative review of data supplied by a forensic unit,using tools such as a reader application, eDiscovery tool or digital evidence management system,does not currently fall within DIG 100, provided it is restricted to content review and does not involve interpretation of associated metadata or file-structure context, and is for purposes other than those captured by the analysis section of the DIG 100 definition. This is a material boundary for many policing workflows and has implications for training, authorisation, and the lab’s responsibility to control the review method. (b) Communications data that is not geolocation. For DIG 101, the Regulator added a note to distinguish non-geolocation processing/normalisation of call data records (e.g., finding top numbers, connectivity graphs) from the regulated activity where a non-evidential mechanism was contemplated. For DIG 200 (cell site analysis for geolocation), the response clarifies that the regulated activity is historical analysis for geolocation and not real-time/near-real-time threat-to-life or missing persons location requests. (c) Audio processing alignment with NPCC video-based evidence framework. Version 2 updates DIG 400’s title and rationalises sub-activities, allowing certain processing to demonstrate compliance via adoption of the NPCC CCTV framework (or accreditation), to reflect risk-proportionate frontline use. These clarifications should be understood as governance tools: they define where the statutory compliance boundary sits today, but they also signal areas likely to evolve (e.g., future frameworks for telecoms data analysis or future regulation of DIG 401). Digital leaders should therefore adopt ‘future-proof’ controls so that activities can be brought within scope with minimal rework. [1][5]
5.6 Section 97, Digital forensics: key practitioner obligations
Section 97 provides FSA-specific requirements for digital forensics and is the centre of gravity for accredited digital units. Backup, redundancy and resilience. The Code explicitly requires forensic units to consider backup and redundancy (within legal constraints) so that a single technical failure (power loss, disk corruption) does not cause irrecoverable data loss. For digital labs, this supports the case for resilient storage architectures, validated backup/restore, and controlled working copies, particularly where datasets are large and re-acquisition is impractical. Tool and method validation within the method. The Code requires that software, hardware and tools that impact results are validated as deployed, or that existing validation is verified. It also directs that validation must take account of the competence required, the task difficulty, and broader acceptability in the forensic and criminal justice community. Risk-driven validation and dependency management. The Code provides digital-specific examples of method-level risk assessment for imaging and requires controls to be assessed during validation. It states that changes to constituent parts (hardware, firmware, scripts, OS) may invalidate validation, and that even minor patches must be risk assessed because they can generate plausible but incorrect outputs. This is effectively a mandate for configuration management and dependency control as part of the QMS. Implementation planning for digital change. The Code expects implementation plans in the digital context to include configuration management, dependencies, bug handling, and patch management. Practitioners should view this as an explicit requirement to integrate DFIR engineering (toolchain, build management, test pipelines) with the formal QMS and accreditation artefacts. Overall, section 97 operationalises the idea that digital forensic validity is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing control of a complex socio-technical system whose components change continuously.
5.7 Practical compliance implications for digital practitioners
From a practitioner viewpoint, the Code drives several concrete operating model expectations: • Evidence workflow traceability: end-to-end audit trails (including tool versions, settings, hashes, logs and derived artefact provenance) must be available and retention-aware. • Controlled toolchain change: updates must be risk assessed and, where needed, verified against original validation; emergency patching requires a defensible decision record. • Competence and authorisation: individuals must be demonstrably competent for the specific tasks they perform (e.g., mobile extraction vs cloud acquisition vs timeline reconstruction), and competence must be maintained. • Structured review: critical findings should trigger independent checking/peer review; digital units should maintain clear criteria and evidence of review outcomes. • Disclosure readiness: validation libraries and supporting material must be prepared with disclosure in mind; vendor tooling must be selected and governed accordingly. • Boundary management: where work is intentionally outside the Code’s current scope (e.g., certain investigator review activities), organisations should still implement proportionate controls to manage risk, because scope boundaries may tighten over time. Where these controls are absent, digital evidence risk tends to accumulate silently until exposed in court or during quality incidents,exactly the failure mode the statutory regime is designed to prevent.
6. Conclusions
Version 2 of the FSR statutory Code of Practice consolidates the statutory quality regime introduced by version 1 while refining how obligations are interpreted and applied in practice. For digital forensics practitioners, the Code is best understood as a requirements framework for controlling a fast-changing toolchain and evidence workflow, rather than as a narrow ‘laboratory accreditation’ document. The digital-specific requirements in section 97 reinforce the core message that digital validity is configuration-dependent and risk-driven. The Code’s explicit focus on method-level risk assessment, minor-change verification, and dependency-aware implementation planning aligns closely with the realities of modern DFIR engineering, where updates and interactions between tools can create plausible but incorrect outcomes. Finally, the version 2 clarifications around scope boundaries (investigator review, communications data processing, and audio/video workflows) should be treated as strategic signals. Digital forensic units should implement governance that is robust enough to satisfy current statutory expectations while remaining adaptable to future expansions of scope and to increasing scrutiny around transparency and disclosure.
References
- Forensic Science Regulator. Forensic science activities: statutory Code of Practice (Version 2), May 2025 (final). GOV.UK PDF: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68401f4be550203c8209cce9/2025_05_20_Code_of_Practice_final.pdf
- Forensic Science Regulator. Statutory Code of Practice for forensic science activities (Version 1), March 2023 (final). GOV.UK PDF: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64da431cc8dee4000d7f1c1e/FINAL_2023.1.18_Code_of_Practice.pdf
- GOV.UK. Forensic science activities: statutory code of practice (Version 2 page and commencement date). Published 5 June 2025: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/forensic-science-activities-statutory-code-of-practice-version-2
- GOV.UK. Statutory code of practice for forensic science activities (Version 1 page and commencement date). Updated 13 March 2023: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/statutory-code-of-practice-for-forensic-science-activities
- Forensic Science Regulator. Statutory consultation on Code of Practice version 2, consultation response report (final), March 2025. GOV.UK PDF: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67e12324c6194abe97358c80/Code_of_practice_consultation_response_report_FINAL__1_.pdf
- GOV.UK. Summary of changes proposed for the Code of Practice (Version 2 consultation), February 2024: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/forensic-science-code-of-practice-version-2/summary-of-changes-proposed-for-the-code-of-practice-accessible
- Forensic Science Regulator Act 2021. UK legislation: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/11/contents
- Crown Prosecution Service. Forensic Science Regulator Act 2021 and the Forensic Science Regulator’s Code (guidance), 2 October 2023: https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/forensic-science-regulator-act-2021-and-forensic-science-regulators-code
- Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996. UK legislation: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/25/contents
- Judiciary of England and Wales. Criminal Practice Directions 2023 (Chapter 7: Expert Evidence). PDF: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Criminal-Practice-Directions-2023-1.pdf
- Forensic Capability Network (FCN) on behalf of NPCC Forensic Portfolio. Retention, Storage and Destruction of Materials and Records relating to Forensic Examinations (NPCC Retention Guidance), PDF: https://www.fcn.police.uk/sites/default/files/2022-03/NPCC%20Forensic%20Retention%20Guidance%20v1.0.pdf
