Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans she has to tackle knife crime and serious violence in Bournemouth East constituency.

Tackling knife crime and serious violence is a priority for this Government and we are supporting the police by recruiting an additional 20,000 police officers by March 2023.

As of 31 March 2022, Dorset Police has recruited 121 additional uplift officers against a combined year 1 and 2 allocation of 99 officers. The force has been allocated 67 additional uplift officers in the final year of Uplift.

Police funding is also increasing and on 2 February 2022, the Government published a total police funding settlement of up to £16.9 billion in 2022/23. Dorset Police’s funding will be up to £159.1m in 2022/23, an increase of up to £8m when compared to 2021/22.

The Government has also made £130m available this financial year (22/23) to tackle serious violence, including murder and knife crime. This includes:

£64m for Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) which bring together local partners in the 20 areas most affected by serious violence, to tackle the drivers of violence in their area. VRUs are delivering a range of early intervention and prevention programmes to divert people away from a life of crime. They have reached over 260,000 vulnerable young people in their second year alone.

Our £30m ‘Grip’ programme operates in these same 20 areas as VRUs and is helping to drive down violence by using a highly data-driven process to identify violence hotspots – often to individual street level – and target operational activity in those areas. In 2020, a 90-day trial of this approach in Southend resulted in an overall fall in violence in the hotspots of around 30% over the period of the trial.

The combination of these two programmes has prevented an estimated 49,000 violent offences in their first two years of activity.

We are also providing £200m over 10 years for the Youth Endowment Fund, to test and evaluate what works to ensure those young people most at risk are given the opportunity to turn away from violence and lead positive lives.