Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of the 322 Community Safety Partnerships in England and Wales (a) access and (b) share Cardiff Model data for preventing serious violence.

Tackling violent crime is a top priority and this government is determined to crack down on the scourge of violence devastating our communities.

This is why we have invested £105.5m from 2019-2022 into the development of our Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) programme, which operates in the 18 police force areas worst affected by serious violence.

We know that information sharing is key to identifying and supporting young people at risk of violence. VRUs combine the collective expertise of local agency partners to identify the drivers of serious violence and agree a multi-agency response to them. This includes the proactive sharing of data between health and other partners, emulating the Cardiff Model. The Home Office closely monitors VRUs’ progress across key priorities, including effective sharing data sharing between partners. As per the published 2019/20 VRU Evaluation, all 18 areas have made good progress in generating and sharing data across numerous partners to inform their direction of travel.

The 2018 Serious Violence Strategy for England and Wales consolidates the expectation that, in line with the Cardiff Model for violence prevention, Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) work with local hospitals to implement the sharing of appropriate health data to tackle serious violence. Information standard ISB1594, which applies to all Accident and Emergency departments, sets out the details of the minimum dataset to be provided. At this time, data on the percentage of CSPs using this model is not held centrally.

More widely, we are introducing the Serious Violence Duty through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will require authorities to work collaboratively and share data and information to prevent and reduce serious violence within their local communities.