Safer Kingston Partnership Plan 2024-2029

The Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 introduced statutory requirements on specified authorities (police, fire and rescue authorities, justice organisations (youth offending teams and probation services), health bodies and local authorities) to work together to prevent and reduce serious violence in their local area. This includes a requirement to conduct a serious violence strategic needs assessment to identify the drivers of serious violence in the local area and the cohorts of people most affected or at risk and the implementation of a strategy with solutions to address these issues.

The Safer Kingston Partnership recognises that there are many different forms of violence and that these are often related but require different approaches. The scope within this plan encompasses exploitative and criminal activities where there is an inherent threat or reality of serious violence in the public realm or in the home. We have defined serious violence using the minimum standard developed by the London Violence Reduction Unit: 

Any violence and exploitation affecting young people under the age of 25, domestic abuse, and sexual violence. Within the context of these types of violence, it encompasses homicide, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm, rape, assault by penetration, sexual assault, personal robbery, threats to kill and violence against property caused during the commission of one of these offences.  

Our serious violence strategic needs assessment identified the following additional areas for the Safer Kingston Partnership to focus on: 

• Violence and exploitation affecting those over 25 years.
• Public space violence, including that related to the night time economy.
• Areas of criminality where serious violence or its threat is inherent, such as in county lines drug dealing and modern slavery.

Our aim is to ensure that partnership work to prevent and reduce violence and exploitation is at the heart of community safety and prioritised in this plan. 

Our approach will be informed by the World Health Organisation's social ecological model, which encourages a focus on reducing risk factors and increasing protective factors at the individual, relationship, community and societal levels, each of which influences and is influenced by the others. The following public health prevention levels will provide a framework for action to help us achieve our aims:

• Primary prevention: preventing violence before it occurs by addressing the underlying causes.
• Secondary prevention: preventing further escalation of violence by identifying opportunities to intervene and enable change.
• Tertiary prevention: focused on reducing the harm from violence by concentrating on care, rehabilitation and safety.

We will ensure that the activities in this plan and the annual delivery plans are rooted in evidence of effectiveness to tackle the problem and ensure we are commissioning interventions and services which are known to deliver the greatest impact for people at risk of, or already involved in, serious violence and exploitation. Several high quality reviews have been completed and provide valuable information into ‘what works’ to prevent and reduce serious violence. These reviews and other resources can be found in Appendix A.