Public health duty to tackle serious violence

Home Secretary Sajid Javid is set to announce a new legal duty on public bodies to prevent and tackle serious violence.

The new ‘public health duty’ will cover the police, local councils, local health bodies such as NHS trusts, education representatives and youth offending services, and will ensure that relevant services work together to share data, intelligence and knowledge to understand and address the root causes of serious violence including knife crime.

The new duty will hold organisations to account as opposed to individual teachers, nurses or other frontline professionals. New guidance will also be published in due course to support the legislation, which will provide examples of different partnership models and explain how different organisations and sectors can partner with each other.

The government will also amend the Crime and Disorder Act to ensure that serious violence is an explicit priority for Community Safety Partnerships, which include local police, fire and probation services, by making sure they have a strategy in place to tackle violent crime.

Javid said: “Violent crime is a disease that is plaguing our communities and taking too many young lives. It’s crucial that we all work together to understand what causes violent crime in the first place, so we can intervene early and prevent this senseless bloodshed. I’m confident that a public health approach and a new legal requirement that make public agencies work together will create real, lasting long-term change.”

Simon Blackburn, chair of the Local Government Association’s Safer and Stronger Communities Board, said: “We support a public health approach to tackling serious violent crime, which has become an increasing priority for councils. Early intervention and prevention needs to be central to this work, as opposed to relying solely on a criminal justice strategy. This requires the input of a range of partners, including those in the health and education sectors.

“We are concerned amending the Crime and Disorder Act will not create the required step-change to tackle serious violent crime, particularly if this is not supported with extra funding. The government needs to reverse funding cuts to local youth services, youth offending teams and councils’ public health budgets, which need to be addressed in the Spending Review, otherwise we will not be able to tackle serious violence in our communities.”