Serious violence duty

The Serious Violence Duty was introduced under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. The duty requires relevant public services to work together to share data and knowledge to enable them to target interventions to prevent and reduce serious violence.

Defining serious violence

The Home Office latest serious violence strategy describes serious violence as specific types of crime such as homicide, knife and gun crime and areas of criminality where serious violence or its threat is inherent, such as in gangs and county lines drug dealing. The strategy can be found on the Government's website:

• website: Serious Violence Duty - GOV.UK
• website: Serious Violence Strategy - GOV.UK
• legislation: Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022

Preventing and reducing serious violence

Ashfield District Council work closely with a range of partners including the Violence Reduce Unit (VRU) to prevent and reduce serious violence, which includes taking a holistic placed-based approach to understand the causes and consequences of serious violence, focused on underlying causes, prevention and early intervention.

Violence reduction strategy

In collaboration with other agencies, the Violence Reduction Unit has developed a strategy which sets the contexts for how organisations within Nottinghamshire will respond to serious violence. The response strategy is reviewed regularly. This can be found on the information page of the Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner Violence reduction partnership website:

• website: Information - Nottsvrp.co.uk

Serious violence local plan

We have a key role in supporting these duties and has a legal duty to work to produce a localised response plan to support delivery.

Our plan includes:

• Focusing on our communities and neighbourhoods to reduce violent crime and working with vulnerable groups.
• Making sure as a community safety partnership we share information and work together.
• Preventing serious violence by working with young people and their families
• Maximising the use to intelligence and information to help decision making.

The Serious violence response plan details how the duty has been implemented, through the Ashfield and Mansfield Community Safety Partnership, was submitted to the Home Office in January 2024.

A copy of the plan is available in the downloads section of this page.