First established in 2019 as the Thames Valley Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), we are one of a network of 20 VRUs funded by the Home Office to deliver upon the government’s Serious Violence Strategy.
In 2024, we rebranded as the Violence Prevention Partnership (VPP) to better reflect our function and responsibilities under the Serious Violence Duty, which passed into law in 2023.
Our aim is to reduce the number of people affected by Serious Violence across the Thames Valley, working with our communities.
We are a partnership body supported by a central programme team. We bring together representation from policing, local authority community safety, children’s services and social care, prisons and probation, education, youth offending and the voluntary and community sector.
Our partnership model uses a structure of meetings to provide both formal governance, strategic leadership, tactical coordination and sharing of best practice, working at multiple levels across the whole Thames Valley and down into individual local areas.
Our vision
As a partnership, under the umbrella of the Serious Violence Duty, our vision is to prevent serious violence by embedding a public health approach through which we will address the root causes of violence.
We take a whole-system partnership approach with an emphasis on supporting young people, on education, early intervention and diversion and on changing behaviours.
Our work is an important first step in preventing violence. The police and youth justice services will also take action against those who offend, with enforcement activity that protects the public and seeks to prevent reoffending.
We will work together as a partnership to share data and undertake evaluation of what works, with evidence used to embed systemic change.
Our core function
Through our partnership, and the core programme team, we will provide strategic leadership, coordination and training for our local response to Serious Violence under the umbrella of the Serious Violence Duty.
The Serious Violence Duty will be discharged via the PCC or their representative at the Thames Valley Prevention Partnership Strategy Board. As active system leaders, we will work with Community Safety Partnerships as they manage their local response to serious violence and deliver upon the requirements of the Serious Violence Duty.
Where central government grants are available, the programme team will work collaboratively across the partnership to support local capacity, while continuing to deliver and evaluate interventions, sharing the evidence of what works across partners.
Where interventions and new approaches are shown to have impact, the partnership will work towards achieving longer-term sustainability and adoption.
Our underpinning principles
Together with our partners, we have agreed the following underpinning principles. We seek to embed these in the way that we work across our own projects and those of our partners.
- A public health approach to tackling serious violence and its root causes
- Data-led and evidence-based practice and interventions
- Trauma-informed approaches
- We will involve our communities in our work, in particular young people and those vulnerable to violence and its impact, giving them a voice in our approaches
Download a presentation with our vision, function and principles.