Birmingham Violence Reduction Board

Serious Violence Duty

As part of their wider response to crime, in January 2023 the Government introduced the Serious Violence Duty. The Duty requires specified authorities to “work together to share information and target interventions, to collaborate and plan to prevent and reduce serious violence”. 

The specified authorities in Birmingham are Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police, Youth Offending Teams, Integrated Care Board, Probation, and West Midlands Fire Service.

Preventing serious violence before it occurs and putting in place arrangements to reduce the violence if it does occur, continue to be a top priority for the Community Safety Partnership.

Requirements of the Duty

The Duty requires specified authorities to work together to:

• Adopt a public health approach
• Prevent and reduce serious violence
• Understand the causes and consequences of serious violence
• Create strategic needs assessments and strategies
• Consult educational, prison and youth custody authorities to prepare strategy

Objectives and the intended effects

To improve the current multi-agency approach involving partners and agencies such as education, health, justice, social services, housing, youth, and victim services to work collaboratively to tackle serious violence.

• To encourage organisations to share information, data, and intelligence to generate evidence-based analysis of the problem and solutions.
• To increase the effectiveness of partnerships to work together to identify the causes of serious violence and make plans to prevent/tackling serious violence.
• Alongside continued law enforcement, this duty supports partnership to understand and address the factors that cause someone to commit violent crime in the first place. This is not just a policing issue – to be successful in dealing with this threat, the partnership will focus on, preventing and reducing serious violence targeting activity to the people and places most at risk.

The intended effect is two-fold:

to increase effective collaboration across agencies and ultimately to reduce the number of serious violence offences

Violence Strategic Needs Assessment 

The Birmingham Violence Reduction Board has led the city’s response to the Serious Violence Duty, including the development of a local Strategic Needs Assessment (SNA). This assessment provides a detailed understanding of the local challenges and drivers of serious violence and informs the city’s strategic response.

The Strategic Needs Assessment is available on the Birmingham City Council Observatory – Supporting delivery of the Serious Violence Duty in Birmingham — Birmingham City Observatory.

West Midlands Violence Reduction Strategy

The West Midlands Violence Reduction Strategy  is the regional response to serious violence.  It sets out how partners will work together across the West Midlands and in our local places, to prevent and reduce the likelihood of children and young people under the age of 25, becoming a victim or perpetrator of violence. The strategy’s objectives include:

1. Influence systems to deliver prevention across the life course
2. Development of a sustainable, community led, and youth led approach to violence reduction
3. Building regional and local partnerships that enhance collaboration and innovation
4. Development of a West Midlands wide movement that aims for a violence free region
5. Influence delivery of evidence-based programmes in educational settings

Birmingham Delivery Plan

The Birmingham Violence Reduction Board is committed delivering a realistic and achievable plan to ensure more effective and efficient use of the resources each agency has to serious violence collaboratively.

Birmingham Priorities

The Partnership has identified four key priorities. These priorities are based on the Birmingham Violence Problem Profile, Birmingham Violence Strategic Needs Assessment, what communities and children have told us, and what the wider partnership plans have set out:

• Priority 1 Partnerships (development and collaboration)
• Priority 2 Early intervention and protection from social harms across the life course
• Priority 3 Strengthening prevention with a placed-based approach in communities, schools, and settings
• Priority 4 Disruption

With delivery supported through three enablers:

• Strategic commissioning of support, intervention, and recovery
• Insight development, life course and population approach to data and lived experience
• Multi-agency practice, learning and development based in a trauma-informed approach

Our approach is underpinned by the adoption of the World Health Organisation’s definition of a public health approach to reducing violence: ‘Seeks to improve the health and safety of all individuals by addressing underlying risk factors that increase the likelihood that an individual will become a victim or a perpetrator of violence. By definition, public health aims to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people’

Useful Contacts:

Useful information:

Useful contacts – reporting concerns:

Public Health Approach

The public health approach is a comprehensive way to help people, organisations, and systems understand how to prevent violence.

WHO Four Step Approach

DEFINE THE PROBLEM collect data to find out the “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “how” of violence happening

IDENTIFY RISK AND PROTECTIVE FACTORS – Risk factors are the characteristics or settings that increase the risk for violence. Protective factors buffer against the risk factors and decrease the likelihood of violence

DEVELOP AND TEST PREVENTION STRATEGIES using the information gathered in steps 1 and 2. Once prevention strategies developed rigorously evaluated to see if they prevent violence

WIDESPREAD ADOPTION effective strategies disseminated and implemented widely for greater impact

Risk Factors

There are multiple and complex issues that can increase the likelihood of violence happening ‘risk factors.’ These risk factors can arise from a complex interplay between a wide range of causes operating within and across individual, relationship, community, and societal domains