The Home Office (HO) enacted the new Serious Violence Duty (SVD) on the 31st of January 2023. The new duty is brought onto a range of authorities, including Police, Justice, Fire & Rescue, Health and Local Authorities (LAs). The duty is for these services working together to share information, allowing for targeted interventions, where possible through existing partnership structures, to collaborate and plan to prevent and reduce serious violence within their local communities. The duty requires a public health (PH) approach to serious violence at local level as well as the development of a Strategic Needs Assessment (SNA), which needs to provide an understanding how violence is affecting local communities and to help local areas in developing a local Serious Violence Duty Strategy. The Suffolk Serious Violence Partnership Strategic Needs Assessment therefore:
- provides an overview of Suffolk and its population as context.
- provides an overview of the risk and protective factors around serious violence.
- establishes the current picture of serious violence in Suffolk, where possible setting it into a national context.
- looks at the local epidemiology, i.e., profiling who is at risk of serious violence.
- provides case studies on what works.
SODA has been commissioned to produce the SNA, with each section being published when completed (please click on the section headings below):
Demographic, social and economic characteristics of Suffolk’s population