The national forensic centre, which is expected to be built by September 2015, will allow lightning-fast forensic examinations of crucial evidence gleaned from crime scenes in the ACT, and in federal investigations.

The new centre will mean a DNA analysis, for example, could be completed in hours, dramatically faster than the AFP's current facility in Weston, where examinations can take several weeks. It will give local police a powerful weapon to quickly track down suspects and, in some cases, allow forensic reports to be sent back to authorities while they are still at a crime scene.

The new centre will be situated alongside existing AFP facilities in Majura, near the Canberra Airport.

AFP national manager of forensic and data centres Julian Slater said the current facility at Weston was so outdated that it was now hindering forensic work.

''Over the last 30 odd years the capability of the AFP in terms of forensic examination [has] grown enormously, and the skills and the capabilities of individuals have grown,'' Assistant Commissioner Slater said.

The new forensic centre will revolve largely around the concept of the ''rapid lab'', an integrated laboratory combining the skills of the various forensic disciplines to assess evidence as quickly as possible.

The rapid lab concept has been tested at the Weston facility over the past two months, and has already dramatically reduced the turnaround in producing forensic reports.

''What will happen now … is that the evidence is still harvested in the field, but brought back into a laboratory where there is a collaborative effort amongst the scientists to actually exploit that evidence very early,'' Assistant Commissioner Slater said.

''The sorts of lags that we've seen in the past - where it can be several weeks before results are actually able to be reported - increasingly those will be turned around in days.''

The early successes with the rapid lab have helped drive down property crime rates in Canberra, which has been a key focus of the ACT government and ACT Policing.

The facility is still being planned, with construction expected to take up to two years.

''This is a great opportunity for us, that we have been working within our current constraints for so long, that we have closed the way we think about how we do our business,'' Assistant Commissioner Slater said. ''The challenge for us is to really open that up, and … actually test some much more innovative approaches to doing our forensic case work.''

Federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said a new forensic centre had been at the top of the AFP's wish list for the last budget.

He said the new forensic centre would give the AFP and ACT Policing access to the most advanced forensic capabilities in the world.

''This is the way that you catch criminals now, you catch them on the street, but you also catch them in the work that's done here in the laboratory, and we catch criminals here every day,'' Mr Clare said.

''But now it's time for a major expansion, and we're building a new state-of-the-art forensic facility for the Australian Federal Police,'' he said.

''It will mean that we will be able to do more of this work, and we'll be able to do it three times as fast.''