Report on violent crime in London

The Police and Crime Committee launched its investigation into violent crime in response to rises in violence in 2020 and 2021.

The Committee published its Part One report on 8 October 2021, focusing on the actions taken by the Met, and by various organisations working across London, to reduce violence, following the Committee’s meeting in June.

This Part Two report is focused on the meeting held in October 2021 with the Mayor’s VRU, which leads the Mayor’s response on tackling violence in London.

Recommendation 1

The Committee recommends that the VRU publishes comparisons with the other VRUs on its web pages so that Londoners can easily compare the performance of London’s VRU with all other VRUs. This should be done by 1 June 2022.

Recommendation 2

The Committee recommends that the VRU writes to us detailing its current and future approaches to the key issues it identified of:

• tackling long-term funding for programmes, which the Committee recommends includes putting in place and publishing a plan to mitigate the risk of a significant change in funding from year to year to enable it to sustain longer-term programmes;
• the need to evaluate all programmes;
• and the challenge around complexity of partnership-working on delivery of programmes;

by 30 June 2022.

Recommendation 3

The VRU should commission specific research to examine the underlying factors driving the over-representation of Black Londoners as victims of homicide in London.

Recommendation 4

The Committee recommends that the VRU targets programmes at the communities most impacted by violence.

Recommendation 5

The Committee recommends that the VRU should publish information relating to the timeline, nature, target audience, outcomes and impact of these initiatives. In addition, the VRU should publish the full suite of KPIs for each initiative. This information should be available on the VRU web pages and provided in performance reports by 1 September 2022.

Recommendation 6

The Committee recommends that the VRU develops and leads a Vision Zero-style campaign, by the end of September 2022, to reduce the number of homicides in London. This should be supported by an action plan and a commitment to report regularly on progress against the campaign.

Recommendation 7 - to the Metropolitan Police Service

The Committee notes the VRU’s evidence that young Londoners have raised concerns about the sharing of knife imagery online by the Met. The Committee recommends that the Met ceases sharing such images in line with the motion passed by the London Assembly at its plenary meeting on 2 December 2021.