In 2019, the Home Office announced that 18 police force areas (PFAs) would receive funding to establish (or build upon existing) Violence Reduction Units (VRUs), as part of the Serious Violence Fund. VRUs take a preventative, whole-system approach to violence reduction, which comprises:

• multi-agency working
• data sharing and analysis
• engaging young people and communities
• commissioning (and developing) evidence-based interventions

The Home Office commissioned Ecorys, Ipsos MORI, the University of Hull and the University of Exeter to conduct a process and impact evaluation of VRUs in their second year of operation (April 2020 to March 2021).

The impact evaluation applied multiple quasi-experimental designs, which estimate what would have likely happened in the absence of funding, on a range of (serious) violence outcome measures to estimate as robustly as possible the initial impacts of the Serious Violence Fund.