Violence Harm Assessment

The Violence Harm Assessment (VHA) is a tool used to identify and risk assess individuals involved in violence in London.

It's an internal Met tool used to tackle the most harmful and violent offenders. Where individuals come to notice, it can also provide an opportunity to work with partners to support those who are vulnerable or criminally exploited and to divert them from a criminal lifestyle.

The overall approach of the VHA is through a lens of the most violent offenders in London. The scoring for the VHA uses academically tested methodologies developed by the Cambridge Harm Index and Office of National Statistics Scoring.

This page contains:

• VHA Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)
• VHA Equality Impact Assessment (EIA)
• VHA Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

As part of their oversight function, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) will undertake an annual review of the VHA.

A quarterly breakdown of the special category information for the VHA will also be published on this page.

How the VHA works

The following questions have come up most frequently in a wide range of community and stakeholder engagement sessions. The answers are intended to provide an understanding of how the VHA works and how it will be used by the Met.

What is the VHA?

The VHA is a tool used to identify and risk assess individuals, who are involved, or likely to be involved, in violence in London. It is an internal Met intelligence tool used to tackle the most harmful and violent offenders.

It is not a replacement for previous tools which were focussed on violent crime associated with gangs.

What is the aim of the VHA?

The overarching aim of the VHA is to be a proactive and reactive tool in order to prevent and reduce violent crime, generally experienced in public places (not in domestic settings), by focussing on the most harmful, violent offenders. The VHA enables us to prioritise and focus its resources on the most harmful individuals and prevent lives being lost through violence. Where individuals come to the Met's notice, inclusion in the VHA can provide an opportunity to work with partners, such as local authorities, to support those who are vulnerable and/or criminally exploited, and to divert them from a criminal lifestyle.

The VHA is not policing action itself, but it may be the reason that the Met decide to undertake policing action.

What data sources are included in the VHA?

The VHA brings together a number of separate data sources to create a comprehensive list of the most violent individuals. The crime areas include knife crime, gun crime, aggravated burglary and homicide, using data primarily from the police crime reporting information system (CRIS). Intelligence can also be included alongside the CRIS reports. 

How are individuals selected for inclusion on the VHA?

To appear on the VHA an individual must fulfil the following criteria:

• feature in at least four separate reports, two of which must be a crime report, or
• feature in three crime reports where the harm score of those reports is 2500 or greater

and

• one of the violent crimes, where the individual is a named suspect in the reports must have taken place in the last twelve months unless the individual has been in custody.

Crime report scores reduce by a third after every 12 month period. Intelligence scores are based on the reliability of the intelligence.

What are the removal criteria?

Individuals are removed from the VHA for the following reasons:

• they do not meet the offending criteria when the VHA is updated
• they're in custody and have an earliest release date three or more years in the future
• they're deported from the UK
• they're deceased

If you are on the VHA, will inclusion affect your family or friends?

Inclusion on the VHA alone will not affect your family or friends. Each person is scored on their own basis, and a family or friend will not then be included in the VHA because they are associated with an individual who is on the VHA, unless they meet the criteria themselves. Action taken in respect of an individual who is on the VHA may affect family or friends. Where appropriate, the impact on family or friends will be considered in deciding what policing action to take. If there is an impact on family or friends, this ought to be justified by reference to the rationale for the policing action taken.

Will the existence and use of the VHA be disclosed at court?

The existence of the VHA will be in the public domain, but the VHA itself will not be available outside the Met and no information about whether an individual is on the VHA or not will be provided to the courts as evidence. The tool is for intelligence use only. The Crown Prosecution Service shall be informed that the VHA was used when deciding to take police action, which in turn gathered evidence that forms part of a case, however the VHA itself will not be shared.

Will a person who is on the VHA be told they are on the VHA?

As the VHA will focus on the most violent individuals, in most cases we will be unable to disclose this, just as we don’t disclose when someone is under investigation and subject to proactive policing measures.

We will consider Right of Access Requests under the Data Protection Act 2018 on a case by case basis.

In the event the individual seeks to review the decision by the Met to refuse to provide the information, he or she will be notified of their right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the Met, when required to, will provide the reasons for non-disclosure to the ICO for consideration.

What has happened to those that were on the GVM? Have all of them moved to the VHA? What has happened with those that haven’t?

The VHA is not intended to transfer the personal data of the same individuals who were on the GVM. Whilst a percentage of individuals who were on the GVM may also feature on the VHA, there will be a significant number who do not meet the VHA scoring criteria. These individuals may feature as part of other processes, however this will be as a result of other information rather than their membership of a gang.  

Why have you moved from the GVM to VHA?

In recent years, including as a consequence of an ICO enforcement notice, we worked closely with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) to improve the working of the GVM. The focus of that work was on reducing, or ideally eliminating, disproportionality in the GVM while the processes around its use were made more transparent.

Research conducted by MOPAC in October 2022 found there was an over representation of young black males on the overall GVM population as compared to both police recorded offending and victimisations cohorts. Understanding the drivers of this disproportionality was a difficult and complicated task, but ethnicity could not be ruled out.

These were also some of the themes raised in a judicial review challenge to the GVM commenced in early 2022.

This indicated to us that the work that had been done internally and with MOPAC had not had the desired effect of reducing or eliminating disproportionality in the GVM. Consequently, the Met reached a legal agreement with the parties after these proceedings were brought.

Following the latest MOPAC research and the judicial review, the Met committed to the complete redesign of the GVM, which would be informed by academic research, improvements in statistical methods and engagement with partners and communities.

Following lengthy engagement with communities is was apparent that violence in its totality was the overwhelming concern rather than gang violence in isolation. The Met made the decision to decommission the GVM and move to prioritising violence through an existing tool, the VHA.

How does the VHA differ from the GVM?

The VHA differs from the gangs violence matrix in the following key ways:

• The overall approach of the VHA is through a lens of the most violent offenders, rather than targeting gang members and/or gang-associated violence.
• The scoring for the VHA is based on a different scoring methodology, combining the Cambridge Harm Index and Office of National Statistics Scoring. It is an academically recognised assessment.
• Unlike the GVM, there is no opportunity for an officer to manually adjust the scoring.
• The VHA will not be shared with partners. Intelligence/information about an individual will only be shared on an individual case by case basis, where there is a policing need/duty to do so. In such cases, the intelligence/information may be shared, but an individual’s presence on VHA will not be shared.