Mr. Alan Todd:

The numbers are impressive, but there are bloggers in the United States of America, for instance, who have 3.5 million followers. It is really a case of what someone does with the medium and adds value. It is a cultural challenge and has been for us. Pretty much every local neighbourhood team has more followers on social media than the numbers who buy the local newspaper. That is a fact. People are more likely, therefore, to get their news and information from a policing perspective through social media than through their local newspaper. Local newspapers have been trending off, while we have been trending upwards. That is generally the case in any town across Northern Ireland; there are more people who read our social media feeds than the local newspaper. To make it work, social media are very much in the moment, relevant and sometimes can be a little edgy. That is the cultural challenge, something on which we are still working. The local garda or police officer in the town has to be able to access a social media device and post about stuff that is happening in the area, without centralised control. That does bring risks. I do not need to tell politicians about what happens when one gets it wrong on social media. It is no different for those involved in policing. You have to trust your people and allow them to do it, accept that they are going to make mistakes from time to time and that you are going to have to apologise when they do. That is the only way to make it fast, interesting and engaging. Otherwise there will be all of the people who follow the organisation but do not really engage with it. While we conduct national campaigns from the centre through our feeds, most of the interaction locally is about day-to-day stuff such as a lost dog, a missing person, a stolen car or a broken window, with the local team and local people engaging in real time. This is decentralising. Sir Hugh Orde would have said his model and ethos to enable community policing was maximum devolvement of authority within a corporate framework. We keep revisiting the corporate framework, but we have never, ever, moved away from empowering local people to do things locally. Social media make this even more important.

Reference was made to station closures. When I was asked about how we took the partnership forward, I spoke about the statutory framework. In the past 12 to 18 months we have been working with significant success on a concern hub. It started in Derry-Londonderry. It is a local multi-agency hub to where the police and partners can take individuals of concern, high demand or high need users, whichever way they come to attention, and people sit around the table and ask: "How do we fix this?" One then realises that while the police has eight pieces of information on the individual, the education people have three pieces, the housing people have four and the health people another five. When all of the information is put in the one place, solutions start to appear. We now have five hubs running. We have not gone right across the province because currently we are reviewing policing, but I believe we should be actively considering what the structure should look like at a local level. If we are to have local policing, local service delivery and local problem solving, we need a local partnership structure through which they can be delivered. It needs to be empowered by the partner agencies. Experience shows that this is effective and usually cost efficient. We have anecdotal examples from the centres that show that people who used to contact the agencies around 50 or 60 times a year about a range of issues are now finding that their problems have been solved and that they do not have to contact us anymore. There is a return on investment in that type of approach.

I see the relevance of this approach to the conversation. As Assistant Commissioner Leahy said, we need to find a way. If we can devolve authority to that level and our authority as a collective to partnerships and have a local partnership management structure, in which the police will provide a service for every element and do the policing piece in collaboration with partners around the table, it will be much more resource effective and an effective way to do business. That is the challenge, not only in our own structures but also in how we dovetail them to make them work collaboratively and in unison with other partners. The community could then feed its needs into that space. The accountability structures can be local. We have police and community safety partnerships that oversee and hold local commanders accountable for performance or other partners that are involved. It needs to expand into the service delivery space. We have partnership service delivery and decision-making at the centre of the organisation - as an enabler - to devolve decision-making to that level. In the first instance, in the Patten report, the ethos within our corporate framework was maximum devolvement.