Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of Police Scotland’s violence reduction unit in Glasgow, and whether she has plans to replicate the work of that unit in England.

We have not made an assessment of the effectiveness of the Violence Reduction Unit in Scotland. We will shortly be publishing our new Serious Violence Strategy which will respond to concerns about serious violence especially recent increases in knife crime, gun crime and homicide.

The approach we will set out in the Strategy will give much more of an emphasis to prevention and steering young people away from crime in the first place, and it will put in place measures to tackle the root causes of the problem.