Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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84. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality if an update will be provided on the Local Community Safety Partnership pilot in County Longford; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [16095/22]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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The government is committed to ensuring that every community has a right to be safe and to feel safe. As part of our plan to deliver on this commitment, I have announced the establishment of three pilot community safety partnerships in November 2020. These pilots schemes have been set up in Longford, North Inner City Dublin and Waterford. The pilots will run for a period of two years, and learnings from the pilot LCSPs will inform the eventual nationwide rollout.

The Longford Community Safety Partnership, along with the other two pilot areas, will devise and oversee a Local Community Safety Plan, which will be informed by the community itself. The Plans will detail how best the community wants to prevent crime and will reflect community priorities and local safety issues. The goal is to make communities safer for families, residents and businesses.

I can inform the Deputy that the Longford Community Safety Partnership has a complete membership with an Independent Chair and Coordinator in place.

The partnership is in the process of developing their Community Safety Plan and I am advised that they are on track to complete development and adoption of the plan by the end of Q2 2022.

A Steering Group was formed to assist the Chair and Coordinator in developing public consultations and to provide oversight of the development of the Community Safety Plan. The Steering Group has met on four occasions to date, in November and December last and twice in February. This group makes recommendations to the full Partnership on the consultation approach, assisting with arranging consultation events and analysis of consultation data to feed into the development of the Plan.

Two Thematic Working Groups have been formed and met for the first time in January of this year. Each group is chaired by a Vice Chair of the partnership and will meet monthly. Membership includes partnership members and some external members nominated based on expertise and experience.

Each of the Local Community Safety Partnership pilots is subject to monitoring and evaluation by an independent evaluation team and learnings are communicated to the three partnerships through an active learning approach. The initial phase of fieldwork, between Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, is focused on reviewing processes and establishing a baseline for any outcomes of the LCSPs' work over the next two years.

Establishing a baseline is an important aspect of the evaluation as it ensures a solid understanding of the starting point against which to compare the data at the latter stages of the evaluation. It is expected that a baseline report will be completed and submitted to my Department in Q2 of this year. The first report on findings and lessons will be due in Q4 2022.