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Serious Violence

The Serious Violence Duty requires specified authorities to work together to formulate an evidence-based analysis of serious violence.

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The Serious Violence Duty

The Serious Violence Duty requires specified authorities: the Police, Local Authorities, Fire and Rescue Authority, Youth Offending Teams, the Integrated Care Board and the Probation Service to work together to formulate an evidence-based analysis of serious violence and then implement a strategy detailing how they will respond to those issues and how they plan ways to reduce serious violence.

This strategy outlines the ways in which the specified authorities listed above will prevent serious violence in County Durham and Darlington.

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The objectives of the Duty are to:

  • Improve the current multi-agency approach involving partners and agencies such as Education, Health, Justice, Social Services, Housing, Youth and Victim Services.
  • Increase the effectiveness of partnerships at preventing serious violence and reducing the number of victims.
  • Share data, intelligence and knowledge to generate evidence-based analysis of the problem and potential solutions. The intended effect is two-fold: to increase effective collaboration across agencies and ultimately to reduce the number of serious violence offences.

Why is this new Duty needed?

The Duty is intended to create the right conditions for authorities to collaborate and communicate regularly, using existing partnerships where possible and to share information and take effective coordinated action in their local areas to tackle serious violence.

The County Durham and Darlington Serious Violence Duty Strategic Partnership was established in 2022 to provide strategic leadership, drive action and ensure partners work together to prevent andreduce serious violence in County Durham and Darlington, by adopting a public health approach as described in the appendix. It has agreed to focus on the 4 priorities below:

  • Focus on support for those aged 18 and under at risk of being drawn into serious violence
  • Alcohol-related violence in the Night-Time Economy.
  • Support for those aged 18-35 already involved in Serious Violence, with a focus on males.
  • Domestic Abuse related violence with a knife or sharp instrument (repeat DA perpetrators and victims).

Specific interventions and activities will be commissioned as part of this Strategy to address the 4 priorities above. The Home Office will be assessing the Partnership’s success by measuring homicide rates, hospital admissions for knife/sharp object assault, and police-recorded knife crime.

Our Partnership will also include additional success measures tailored to help track progress in dealing with local serious violence issues.

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