Mayor’s Violence Reduction Unit must communicate better with Londoners

The London Assembly met with the Lib Peck, Director of the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) to discuss the performance and progress of the VRU.



The aim of the meeting was to examine and assess whether the Mayor is making sufficient progress on his objectives and commitments to tackle violent crime; how the shape and direction of the VRU has evolved and developed; whether the VRU has the necessary plans, strategies and processes in place to effectively combat violent crime in London; and the VRU’s programme of spend.

The London Assembly has today published a letter which makes a number of recommendations on how the Mayor can improve the VRU:

1. We request that the VRU informs this Committee of the mechanisms that the VRU has in place to evaluate the progress, performance and effectiveness of the Unit and that it provides further detail about the KPIs that have been developed. We also ask that the VRU provides clear, accessible and up-to-date information on its KPIs on its website.
2. The VRU provides further information to demonstrate how it is working with organisations to support children before they reach crisis point and face exclusion by May 2020.
3. The Mayor should work with the Minister for Education and borough leaders to jointly write a letter to all schools outlining their responsibilities to prevent violence, mandating them to make a change and cooperate with violence reduction initiatives.
4. The VRU develops a piece of work to identify schools that are underperforming in their efforts to prevent violence.

Chair of the London Assembly Police & Crime Committee, Unmesh Desai AM, said:

“Following our meeting with the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), we’re keen to understand more about how the VRU is engaging with Londoners to raise awareness of its remit and progress. This is important so that Londoners know what the VRU is set up to do.

“We heard that the VRU needs to look for some change around the pupils it has helped who are in Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) within a year, and that there is a need to “set up and evaluate some of the schemes that are already running.

“And while we welcome the work the VRU is doing with Ofsted, we are concerned by those schools that Ofsted recognises are underperforming and failing in efforts to prevent violence. That’s why we’re recommending that the VRU should convene an action group to work towards improving the performance of schools and PRUs in London in preventing and tackling violence.”