A rallying cry has been made for councils to make use of the reams of available untapped data.

Speaking at The MJ's Future Forum North event today, Cat Park, a citizen intelligence solutions manager at consultancy EY, said data on everything from the weather, the timing of football matches and the occurrence of previous incidents could be used to predict future cases of domestic violence, with accuracy rates as high as 90%.

She said: ‘There's a huge amount of data that we're not doing anything with.

‘Essentially, at the moment, we're wasting data.

‘What we're trying to do is pull data together to ascertain when people are at risk.'