Mr. Alan Todd:

Absolutely. There are several formal groups but we all sit within the criminal justice family under the Department of Justice. Structurally and operationally we work closely in all the areas that one might expect, prison liaison, intelligence sharing, information sharing and cross-working on several aspects of the wider justice family. To that extent there is.

Apart from the prison service, to respond to Assistant Commissioner Leahy's point and the Deputy's last question, that joining up of services and agencies was probably best done at a senior strategic and central level. The challenge for the work on community policing is how to make those joined-up services available to local practitioners and cops. The waiting time for referral for heroin addiction in Belfast can be 18 to 20 weeks. Sometimes it goes beyond that, depending on the waiting lists in the health service. If there is a police officer in a town dealing with an individual who is breaking into houses or cars or stealing from shops to feed their addiction, society's solution should at least include some treatment to remove the causative factor in heroin addiction from that person. If the person has to wait 20 weeks for treatment and the system does not work, they end up in the custody suite, court and prison, which goes back to the Deputy's earlier point. When the local police officer dealing with the problem, using all the skills we have given him or her, identifies the problem, the culprit and a potential solution which requires partnership, how does that police officer use that local knowledge to get a response as opposed to a document signed off between departments headquartered some distance from the officer working on the ground? When I talk about local partnership delivery systems, that is where it has to be joined up. The prison service has a role to play in that, perhaps not a major one but that is a challenge. Communities are telling the cops what the problems are. We know what the underlying problems are and the long-term solutions, but then what? If we cannot get the long-term solution, we end up arresting the culprits, processing them, putting them before the courts and locking them up. That does not feel like sense to me.