Patrick Tomkins QPM

Paddy Tomkins is a director of three limited companies, a community interest company (CIC), and is a charity trustee. He was formerly a police officer for over 30 years, most of them in command ranks. Educated at King's College London, where he took First Class Honours in History, he subsequently graduated from the UK National School of Government’s Top Management Programme in 2000, and was awarded the Queen's Police Medal for Distinguished Police Service in 2006. He has an MA in Classical Studies (2012) from the Open University.

Appointed to Sussex Police in 1979, he later transferred to the Metropolitan Police Service. In 1997 he attended the Royal College of Defence Studies (RCDS) where he took the top prize for that year and his research paper was published in the journal of RUSI. From 1998 he was Commander (Crime) for Central London, commanding major incidents such as the Greek Embassy siege, before promotion to Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Ops) at the Home Office. In 2002 he was appointed Chief Constable of Lothian & Borders Police with his HQ in Edinburgh.

Appointed by Royal Warrant as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland (2007-2009), he was the senior professional adviser to government ministers and Parliament on policing, and led quality audits on the effectiveness and efficiency of police forces. He led the Independent Review of Policing in Scotland (2009), setting out the key challenges for governance and risk management in policing that initiated the most fundamental reform of policing in the UK for 200 years.

From 2012 to 2014 he was the UK resident twinning advisor for the European Commission, leading a successful €1.5m project on police reform, strategic planning and intelligence-led policing at the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Serbia.

He is chairman of Droman Crime Solutions Ltd, leading an innovation partnership, comprising Police Scotland and the University of Abertay, to produce an accredited suite of serious computer game training products for first responders to incidents of cybercrime. An associate of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR), and a member of the board of the Scottish Business Resilience Centre, he works internationally in the fields of leadership in organisational change, risk management and public engagement.

In 2013 he founded a registered charity, The Droman Scholarship Trust, to fund postgraduate students from post-conflict states to study international relations or a comparable course at a UK Russell Group university. The first beneficiary was from Serbia; she graduated from the London School of Economics with distinction at the end of 2015.