Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimate she has made of the number of people in the Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Violence Matrix who have been convicted under joint enterprise laws.

The Gangs Violence Matrix (GVM) was an intelligence tool used by the Metropolitan Police to identify and risk-assess individuals involved with gangs across London.

The police are operationally independent of the government, and the GVM was devised and operated by the Metropolitan Police, independently of the Home Office. The deletion of the data held on the GVM is a matter for the Metropolitan Police as the data controller, and it is their sole responsibility to exercise their retention policies in line with the Data Protection Act 2018 and authorised professional practice from the College of Policing.

Following an enforcement notice from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the Metropolitan Police made the decision to discontinue use of the GVM after 13 February 2024. The Metropolitan Police had already previously decided that GVM data would be retained for a period of 12 months, from the date of decommission (13 February 2024), as there was no policing purpose to justify the continued retention of the data. This decision was taken in order to satisfy both Right of Access requests from persons seeking clarity on their inclusion on the GVM and to ensure that any claims under Article 8 Human Rights Act could be answered. Any individual that considers they may have been included on the GVM is therefore entitled to submit a Subject Access Request to the Metropolitan Police by 13 February 2025, and the Metropolitan Police advise the public of this on their website.

Any form of discrimination in policing is unacceptable. The Government is supportive of the NPCC and College of Policing’s Police Race Action Plan which aims to improve policing’s engagement with Black communities. A number of forces have developed their own local plans to address specific needs from their communities, including the MPS.