The FCN has filled two existing vacancies in its team with the recruitment of two experienced digital forensic and quality practitioners.

Based in Wales, Lois Arthurs joins as Digital Forensic Science Officer from her previous role at Dyfed-Powys Police, where she worked for 15 years most recently as the DFU Manager. Lois also has a degree in forensic science from the University of South Wales. She has already begun working with FCN’s DF team Simon Cullen, Shelley Wilson and Paul Fenwick on existing activities including NPCC Digital Forensics Performance Framework KPI collection and development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to identify and analyse digital communications.

Based in Preston, Chloe Burns joins as Quality Officer from her previous role at Lancashire Constabulary. She started working in forensics and policing in 2018 and has experience in Fingerprint Enhancement Labs (FEL), as a VIPER officer in criminal justice, and as a Quality Officer and Manager working with FELs, Fingerprint Units and Forensic Collision Investigation Units.

As part of the FCN team, Chloe will help stakeholders with all areas of Quality Management Systems and quality standards including the ISO 17025 and 17020 standards and Forensic Science Regulator’s requirements.

Welcoming the new recruits, FCN’s Managing Director John Armstrong said:

“FCN is nearing its fifth year of operation and it’s great to see new people joining the team and bringing fresh ideas. Chloe and Lois are both very capable at what they do, and have filled our existing vacancies after a few promotions and leavers earlier this year – they’ll be a real asset to the team.”

The new recruits follow a range of people changes in the FCN in April. Since 2020, FCN has streamlined its team considerably from 45 to 34 staff, and its annual budget has halved to £2.8m, now funded directly by the NPCC.

In other people news, the FCN team is onboarding a temporary staff member in a performance-based role to help with data analysis and reporting in various NPCC-led activities.