Mr. Cyril Dunne:

One of the things the Commissioner said in her opening statement was about moving from a situation where we are making do to a situation where we are looking at the long-term and planning for the long-term, and that is very much the case with the ICT side. It is worthwhile to say in this forum that many police services across the world would give their right arm to have PULSE because the information that we have is probably second to none. One of the issues is the technical architecture on which it is built, because it is probably about 15 years old at this stage and the kind of technology that was available then is different to what is available now. The key difference is that the ability to respond and develop new applications - or apps that one would see on an iPad or mobile telephone - is simply not available on technology that was state of the art ten or 15 years ago. The challenge is to take the applications that we have and move them forward onto a new technology base.

In the last number of months we have looked very precisely and in a great level of detail at exactly what needs to be done to not just refresh and reinvigorate PULSE but also to look at, for example, case management systems, which were also identified by the inspectorate as being something that we could benefit from. Computer-aided despatch is another area that we could benefit a lot from. We have looked in great detail at exactly what we want to have to be able to provide the policing service that the Commissioner talks about, up to 2020 and beyond, and what it takes to do that, what the best sequence for implementation of that would be, the type of resources we would need, and everything associated with implementation and scheduling of that plan. That is now in place. To use the words that the Commissioner used earlier, it will be a journey. There will not be one fine day where we suddenly switch off what he have and switch on something new. We will refresh and reinvigorate the systems over a period of years but it is now well planned. We are not just making do.