Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to support the Violence Reduction Unit to help support community initiatives aimed at preventing violence crime.

This Government is committed to tackling violent crime and making our streets safer, which is why we are giving the police and their partners the resources they need to do so.

To support the prevention of violence in London, we have allocated the London Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) c.£33.7m since 2019, including a c.£12.6m allocation for this financial year (2022/23). The VRU also received an additional investment of £5.5m in 2021/22 to deliver specific, highly targeted interventions to vulnerable young people.

The London VRU delivers multiple initiatives that are projected to support over 5,300 young people in the capital next year. This includes locally delivered activity in all 32 boroughs, including Ilford’s borough of Redbridge, where the London VRU have used Home Office funding to make a £145,000 investment into the “Redbridge Inclusion and Alternative Activities Hub”, which targets support, mentoring, and diversion to those young people identified as being at risk of involvement in violent crime.

We are also providing additional funding to enable the Metropolitan Police to increase enforcement activity where most violence occurs, through our Grip programme (previously known as Surge). The Metropolitan Police have been allocated approximately £50.9m over the last three years, including £7.9m for this financial year (2022/23) for Grip. Through this programme, the Metropolitan Police are delivering data-driven, targeted visible patrols to suppress violence where it is most concentrated.

Grip and VRU funding are provided in addition to the commitment to increase the number of police officers in England and Wales by 20,000 by March 2023. As of 30 June 2022, the MPS has recruited an additional 2,952 uplift officers against a total three-year allocation of 4,557 officers.