Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps his Department is taking to reduce youth-related violence in (a) Mansfield constituency and (b) Nottinghamshire.

The Government’s Serious Violence Strategy sets out 61 actions and commitments to tackle serious violence. It places an emphasis on prevention and early intervention to tackle the root causes and steer young people away from crime in the first place alongside a robust law enforcement response.

Action delivered through the Strategy to date includes:

• Our Early Intervention Youth Fund of £22m which is already supporting 29 projects in England and Wales to deliver interventions to young people at risk of criminal involvement, gang exploitation and county lines;
• A new National County Lines Co-ordination Centre to tackle violent and exploitative criminal activity associated with county lines;
• The new Offensive Weapons Act which strengthens legislation on firearms, knives and corrosive substances;
• Delivering our national knife crime media campaign - #knifefree - to raise awareness of the consequences of knife crime among young people.

On 2 October 2018 the Home Secretary also announced further measures to address violent crime in the UK including:

• The £200 million Youth Endowment Fund, which will be delivered over the next 10 years to support interventions with children and young people at risk of involvement in crime and violence, focusing on those most at risk. The charity Impetus, working in partnership with the Early Intervention Foundation and Social Investment Business, is now operating the Fund

• An Independent Review of Drug Misuse, to be chaired by Dame Carol Black, which will look into ways in which drugs are fuelling serious violence.
• A consultation on a new legal duty to underpin a ‘public health’ approach to tackling serious violence. This consultation launched on 1 April 2019 and closes on 28 May.

The Home Office has funded five knife crime prevention projects in Nottinghamshire through the Anti-Knife Crime Community Fund since 2017 to support those most at risk of involvement in knife crime. The Home Office has also provided funding to the charity Redthread to support the expansion of their youth violence intervention scheme in hospital emergency departments and we have supported the development of this service at the Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham.

On 13 March, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced an additional £100 million to tackle serious violence, which includes £80m of new funding from the Treasury. The majority of the investment will go towards supporting the police forces most affected by the violence we are seeing, but the funding will also support Violence Reduction Units, bringing together a range of agencies, including health, education, social services and others, to develop a multi-agency approach to preventing serious violence. £63.4 million of this funding has been allocated to 18 police forces most affected by serious violence to pay for surge operational activity, including increased patrols, and £1.6 million to help improve the quality of data on serious violence, particularly knife crime, to support planning and operations. Nottinghamshire Police has been allocated £1,540,000 from the serious violence fund.