Effectiveness of Violence Reduction Units in England and Wales, 2019-2023

• In Event: Breaking the Cycle: Youth Violence Prevention, Trauma-Informed Practice and Multi-Agency Strategies

Abstract

Prompted by the apparent success of the Glasgow Violence Reduction Unit (later, Scottish VRU) in reducing serious violence in Scotland and a ten-year peak in youth homicide, government in England and Wales established the Serious Violence Fund. Since September 2019, the fund has supported the creation and operation of Violence Reduction Units and the implementation of ‘Surge’ policing activity in the twenty most violent police force areas. This has resulted in a two-pronged approach to violence that combines a coordinated multi-agency ‘public health’ approach with proactive policing of violent areas and individuals.

This paper will describe these two programmes of activity and estimate the effect of the Serious Violence Fund on six violence outcomes: homicide, admissions to hospital for violent injury (sharp object or any mechanism), police recorded violence (with and without injury) and possession of weapons offences. To reflect the uneven distribution of violence and violence prevention activity toward population dense, higher violence areas and to reduce the effect of confounding between the baseline outcome and funding, local authorities were used as the treatment unit. To estimate the cumulative effect of funding, pre-post trends in violence between April 2013 and December 2022 in funded area were compared with a synthetic control group of unfunded areas. The analysis found no effect of funding on the primary outcomes of homicide or admission to hospital for violence with a sharp object or the police-recorded secondary outcomes. However, there was an observed reduction on admissions to hospital for any violence.

Modest evidence for an effect of the Serious Violence Fund is emerging, but not definitive and separating effects of VRUs and proactive policing remains a challenge. Understanding the contribution of VRUs is an important component of evaluating the Serious Violence Fund and crucial to the future of violence prevention policy.

Author

• Iain Brennan, University of Hull