Issue - meetings

This report outlines the progress made in establishing a Violence Reduction Unit to help address serious violence in Bath and North East Somerset and the plans for taking this work forward in support of a new ‘serious violence duty.’

The Head of Young People's Prevention Services introduced this report to the Panel, a summary is set out below.

There is no universally adopted definition of serious violence. The national

serious violence strategy (2018) focused on knife and gun crime and homicide

and included drug dealing and robbery. A broader Avon and Somerset definition, developed in response to stakeholder feedback, added serious domestic abuse, serious sexual assault and rape. Locally, the focus to date has been on domestic abuse, youth violence, including knife crime and violence associated with the street community.

Bath and North East Somerset initially bid for funding to establish a Violence

Reduction Unit in 2019 as part of the wider Avon and Somerset Police and Crime Commissioner’s bid to the Home Office. The ‘hub and spoke’ model adopted, with a central strategic group and the five Local Authorities each developing their own approaches and receiving a proportion of the grant funding is particular to Avon and Somerset.

The Violence Reduction Unit is a virtual team made up of Local Authority and

Police staff with directly relevant roles. It benefits from a proportion of a dedicated Home Office grant of £1.6m for Avon and Somerset, with Bath and North East Somerset receiving £114,884 representing 10% of the overall allocation, based on population and level of reported serious violence.

Local governance arrangements support a joined-up approach, with a multi-agency steering group overseeing delivery of the work plan and reporting principally to the Exploitation Sub Group of the Community Safety and Safeguarding Partnership but also to the Youth Offending Service Management Board, the Domestic Abuse Partnership and the Early Help and Intervention Sub Group. This is fitting as its ambition that children and adults lead lives free of serious violence at home and in their communities is a crosscutting agenda.

The core requirements in the first year of operation were to complete an all-age

serious violence problem profile with a focus on under 25s and a response plan

that in turn contributed to the wider Avon and Somerset submission to the Home

Office. The problem profile was undertaken by Crest, drawing on publicly

available and local data from a range of partners, together with qualitative

information from young people and professionals, facilitated by Youth Connect

South West and Lemon Gazelle respectively.

It concluded that although Bath and North East Somerset has a low overall rate of recorded violence relative to its population size, certain serious violence offences had increased significantly in the last five years.

The profile also highlighted that the demand for drugs is comparatively high in Bath and North East Somerset and that county lines are in operation, with their known links to exploitation and serious violence.

The response plan for 2020-21 identified key strategic and operational actions to address the risk of serious violence.

Work is underway to produce a logic model and/or pathway framework to identify the services available to address the risk of serious violence against known risk factors and to identify gaps. This will  ...  view the full minutes text for item 65