Oversight of the Serious Violence Duty
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 introduced a new Serious Violence Duty.
It requires organisations across the public sector to work together to tackle, prevent and reduce incidents of serious violence and make local communities safer.
At its core is the need for collaborative working, working as a local partnership across individual organisational boundaries to take a public health approach to tackling violence. That requires a focus on prevention and early intervention, informed by evidence.
The key elements to the Serious Violence Duty are as follows:
- Establish local partnership structures to enable multi-agency working. Here in the Thames Valley, the established Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) are the existing structures used to convene the local partners as required.
- To work together to effectively share information, intelligence and knowledge to prevent and reduce serious violence. This must be across organisational boundaries and includes work to develop comprehensive Strategic Needs Assessments, to better identify hotspots for violence, and to identify those of risk or at risk.
- To develop a multi-agency Strategic Needs Assessment to enable the partnership to identify the kinds of violence that occur, the causes, those of risk and at risk, and evidence based approaches to prevention. These SNAs are to be refreshed annually.
- To develop and publish a local partnership Response Strategy or Local Plan, informed by the SNA and with targeted activity that responds to the risks and vulnerabilities. These strategies must include existing and new actions that the partnership will take to prevent and reduce serious violence. These plans were first published by each local partnership on 31 January 2024 and will be held in review.
Oversight of compliance with the Serious Violence Duty is a function of the Police & Crime Commissioner. Here in the Thames Valley, that function is discharged through the Violence Prevention Partnership, using the VPP Strategy Board meeting as the main governance body to support partners with their delivery of the Duty.