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Serious Violence Duty

The Serious Violence Duty (SVD) was introduced by government through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, to commence on 31 January 2023.

The Duty places several requirements upon local areas, including agreeing a local partnership arrangement to lead on the Duty, agreeing a definition of serious violence, having consistent data sharing, analytical processes to produce a Strategic Needs Assessment, and production of a Strategy to set out how the Duty will be implemented locally.

The responsible authorities (also known as ‘duty holders’) in the Serious Violence Duty will be:

  • The police
  • Fire and rescue authorities
  • Justice organisations (youth offending teams and probation services)
  • Health bodies (Integrated Care Boards)
  • Local authorities

Educational institutions, prisons and youth custodial institutions will be under a separate duty to co-operate with duty holders, but they are not duty holders. 

The Duty does not specify a ‘lead’ organisation or person to coordinate activity or prescribe a structure within which specified authorities are expected to work, however, for London, it has been agreed that the lead partnership will be the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) which exists in each borough.

There are key requirements for the duty holder authorities to fulfil together:

Undertake an evidence-based analysis of the causes of serious violence in their area (and have effective data sharing to enable this) 

Develop a strategic needs assessment based on the analysis 

Develop and implement a strategy with solutions to prevent and reduce serious violence in their area, which will need to be reviewed every year

A Bexley Serious Violence Working Group was created to bring together key partners, primarily to gather and analyse data, and supportive narrative to complete the Strategic Needs Assessment (SNA). Following the SNA’s completion, the group will concentrate on the direction of the Serious Violence Strategy, the findings from the SNA and the actions within the Violence & Vulnerability Reduction Action Plan (VVRAP).

Bexley’s local definition of ‘serious violence’ expanded on the prescribed MOPAC version by including those people over the age of 25 years old affected by violence and exploitation, domestic abuse and sexual violence. This acknowledges that the BCSP engage with some older people in regard to violent crime, and not just those involved in serious youth violence.

Our local definition of ‘Serious Violence’ is:
 

Any violence and exploitation, domestic abuse, and sexual violence. Within the context of these types of violence, it encompasses homicide, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm, rape, assault by penetration, sexual assault, personal robbery, threats to kill and violence against property caused during the commission of one of these offences.”

A template document was provided by the VRU, and themed leads were identified throughout it to assist with the SNA process. Various data sources were used as per the template suggestions such as the Met Police data, MOPAC dashboard, ‘SafeStats’ as well as local data sources across many LB Bexley services and CSP Partners.

This covered a wide range of ‘serious violence’ crime types including Domestic Abuse and explanatory narrative was then added from theme leads including answers to further analysis questions.

The SNA will be reviewed each year, with updated annual data from key partners and annual reflections on changes to their services, trends and challenges. This will be considered by the Serious Violence Working Group in order to feed into a gaps and needs analysis. Findings from the annual SNAs will feed into the Group’s Action Plan, the associated VVRAP, and the refresh of this Strategy, annually.