Serious Violence Duty

The Serious Violence Duty

The Serious Violence Duty (SVD) came into force on the 31 January 2023 across England and Wales. The purpose of the SVD is to ensure that relevant agencies work together to share data, intelligence and knowledge to understand and address the root causes of serious violence, and target interventions to prevent and stop violence altogether.

The SVD aims to ensure that agencies focus activity on reducing serious violence, whilst also providing sufficient flexibility so that relevant organisations can work together in the most effective local partnership for any given area. It is also strongly encourages that local areas adopt a public health approach to reducing violence.

Page contents:

• Specified authorities with a statutory responsibility to comply to the duty
• Defining serious violence
• What are specified authorities expected to do?
• Funding
• Delivering the serious violence duty in Surrey

Specified authorities with a statutory responsibility to comply to the Duty

The Duty requires the following specified authorities within a local government area to collaborate and plan to prevent and reduce serious violence:

• Police
• Probation Services or Youth Offending Teams
• Fire and Rescue
• Integrated Care Boards
• District and Borough Councils
• County Councils
• Schools and the Education Authority must collaborate
• Prison Services must collaborate as requested

Community Safety Partnerships are also subject to the Duty and the Government have amended the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 to ensure that Community Safety Partnerships have an explicit role in evidence based strategic action on serious violence. As Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) are subject to both the new Crime and Disorder Act requirements and the Duty, this will enable them to escalate local serious violence issues to a higher strategic level where necessary.

In recognition of the vital role schools and colleges play in safeguarding children and young people, education authorities including local authority maintained schools, academies, independent schools and free schools; including primary schools, alternative education provision and further education providers, must be consulted by the specified authorities in the preparation of the strategy.

Prisons and the Children and Young People Secure Estate play an integral role in protecting the public, both in the rehabilitation of those people in prisons and young children who have committed violent offences and are in custody, and people on probation or children supervised by Youth Offending Teams in the community. As with education authorities, prison and youth custody authorities are required to be consulted by the specified authorities in the preparation of the strategy.

The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner is not a specified authority, but will be responsible for allocating grant funding to authorities under the Duty and are encouraged to have a convening role.

Defining Serious Violence

Each area should determine what amounts to, and is defined as, Serious Violence in their local area. The guidance makes clear that violence is not limited to physical violence against the person. It provides that, for the purposes of the Duty, violence also includes:

• Domestic abuse
• Sexual offences
• Violence against property
• Threats of violence, but does not include terrorism

This does not mean that specified authorities will be compelled to take action on these crime types specifically linked to the Duty alone, but instead that they should consider whether violence of these kinds amounts to serious violence in their area. Specified authorities should also include a focus on public space youth violence including; homicide, violence against the person (which may include both knife crime and gun crime), and areas of criminality where serious violence or its threat is inherent, such as in county lines drug dealing.

In determining what amounts to serious violence in their local area, the specified authorities must take into account the following factors;

1. The maximum penalty which could be imposed for any offence involved in the violence;
2. The impact of the violence on any victim;
3. The prevalence of the violence in the area, and
4. The impact of the violence on the community in the area

What are specified authorities expected to do?

Strategic needs assessment

In order to identify the kinds of serious violence that occur in their areas, and so far as it is possible to do so, the causes of that serious violence. The partnership should work together to establish the local 'strategic needs assessment', identifying the drivers of serious violence acting in the local area, and the cohorts of people most affected or at risk. This will require the sharing of relevant data and useful information held by the individual organisations subject to the Duty.

Preparation, publication and implementation of a strategy

The local partnership must collectively develop a strategy which should outline the multi-agency response that the partnership will take to address the drivers identified in the strategic needs assessment, and work to prevent and reduce serious violence in the specified local area. The strategy should set out how the proposed actions will enhance and complement existing local arrangements responding to serious violence. Part of this work may include consideration of joint funding or investment to support local early interventions and responses.

The Need Assessment and Strategy must be published as soon as possible when finalised, with the first strategy due by the 31st of January 2024. These documents must be kept under review on at least an annual basis.

Funding

To support the local partnership in meeting the requirements of the Duty and to develop interventions, the Home Office have allocated each local policing area funding. The funding is split between labour and non-labour costs.

Labour costs broadly include the costs associated with preparing and developing the strategic needs assessment and local strategies for the local government area or areas, including familiarisation costs, training, meeting costs, analysis, and strategy development.

Non-labour costs include the costs associated with implementing the specified authorities' local strategy to reduce serious violence (e.g., interventions). This can include the salary costs for delivering these interventions. Funding is not for capital expenditure except where it can be legitimately used to strengthen the response to Serious Violence i.e. CCTV

Local policing bodies (Police and Crime Commissioners) are the grant holders for Serious Violence Duty funding. Reason being they occupy unique positions due to their responsibility for the totality of policing in their area, services for victims of crime, and shared objectives on prevention and reduction of serious violence.

Together, the specified authorities should be jointly accountable for delivering the key milestones of this grant, following allocation of funding by the local policing body. Joint decision making needs to be at the centre of all Duty-related activity. It is for this reason that a requirement of funding is for each area to produce a partnership agreement to demonstrate how they intend to strengthen their local multi-agency structures.

Delivering the Serious Violence Duty in Surrey

Our approach

In Surrey we will follow a public health approach and the recommendations from the 2019 cross government publication, 'A whole-system multi-agency approach to serious violence prevention'. This approach considers that serious violence is not inevitable and is preventable, but cannot be tackled in isolation. It must be addressed through prevention strategies that consider the multiple risk factors that cause and perpetuate violence such as deprivation, early life trauma and emotional and physical health, and promote the protective factors that mitigate against the growth and victimisation of violence.

This approach means violence reduction interventions are not constrained by our organisational or professional boundaries and remain focused on generating long term reductions as well as short term solutions. At the core of the approach, data and intelligence is used to identify the burden on the population, including any inequalities, meaning actions responding to the problem are rooted in evidence of effectiveness.

In understanding the causes and contributing factors of violence, we can deliver across four different levels of prevention aimed at addressing the risk factors, reducing prevalence and threat of violence:

• Contextual prevention, meaning we support the creation of the conditions that prevent violence. These include economic growth, social-cultural change, environmental and legislative change
• Primary prevention, meaning preventing violence before it happens by understanding the root causes and working to strengthen the protective factors at the earliest stage
• Secondary prevention, being an immediate response to early instances of violence and ensuring the provision of timely, tailored and effective interventions
• Tertiary prevention, focusing on those engaged in violence by providing effective support to work towards rehabilitation

We will adopt the five key principles of the public health approach:

• Collaboration – we will engage with a diverse range of partners to successfully work together towards the shared goal of tackling and preventing violence
• Co-production – we will work towards a partnership that listens and reflects all local partners perspectives and importantly, meaningfully involves the community in solutions
• Cooperation in data and intelligence sharing – we will establish a data sharing process that enables an evidence-based response to tackle serious violence
• Counter-narrative development – we will work to develop a delivery plan that creates credible and trusted alternatives for all and celebrates the strength of our communities
• Community consensus – lies at the heart of place based public health approach and we will work with communities and groups most at risk to empower them to become involved in developing solutions

Governance

The Serious Violence Duty legislation and guidance does not give us a proposed governance structure and allows for local flexibility. Violence is a wide-reaching term and is not limited to physical violence against the person. Because of this there are several mature workstreams and partnerships in Surrey that fit under the umbrella of the Duty, namely the Domestic Abuse Partnership, the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Partnership and the Adolescent Safeguarding Partnership.

We are pleased to have commitment from across the specified authorities to establish and Surrey Serious Violence Reduction Partnership (SSVRP). The SSVRP will provide a forum for dynamic leadership and a collaborative approach that fosters greater consistency across the work programmes that make up serious violence. This approach will assist all relevant Executives and Boards in understanding the driving factors of violence and their role in preventing violence from escalating.

Members of the SSVRP will:

• Agree and oversee the Serious Violence Reduction Strategy and delivery plans for Surrey
• Provide strategic support and updates from their respective areas of expertise
• Provide leadership and remove strategic challenges and barriers
• Work as a partnership and make joint decisions to deliver the Serious Violence Duty
• Support Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner in meeting the requirement of the Serious Violence Home Office Grant and oversee the funding allocation for Surrey

The establishment of the SSVRP does not take away the ownership of the respective workstreams but provides the opportunity to work across the strands, sharing and linking into their respective networks and resources. The SSVRP will report to the Health and Wellbeing Board and support Priority 3 (supporting people to reach their potential by addressing the wider determinants of health), and that people are safe and feel safe. The SSVRP will also report into the Community Safety Partnerships, recognising their role in supporting the delivery of the Surrey Serious Violence Reduction Strategy.

To support the SSVRP a Serious Violence Operational Group has been established, with representatives from each specified authority, focusing on the following aims:

• Oversee the successful adoption of the Serious Violence Duty for the Health and Wellbeing Board, in line with the Home Office's milestones
• Support the wider partnership in its awareness and understanding of the Serious Violence Duty,
• Define serious violence
• Coordinate the sharing of relevant data, insights, and information to inform the problem profile/strategic needs assessment for the area
• Support the development and implementation of a strategy to identify and mitigate the risks identified and agree an approach to preventing serious violence (by January 2024)
• Review the strategy and delivery plan annually to ensure it remains current and is reducing violence across Surrey

Delivery against the duty in Surrey has been split into four key areas. These are reflected in implementation plans presented to the Health and Wellbeing Board in June 2023. Below are the key milestones;

• Milestone 1: Development of a Surrey Serious Violence Duty strategic needs assessment working under the governance of Surrey Office for Data Analytic (SODA)
• Milestone 2: Development of a Serious Violence Reduction Duty Strategy for Surrey
• Milestone 3: Implementation of the delivery plan, ensuring prevention activity is commissioned in line with the needs assessment and Serious Violence Reduction Duty Strategy for Surrey
• Milestone 4: Annual review of the Serious Violence Duty strategy