A flagship police initiative invented by a criminal justice policy think tank to cut violent crime has failed to make any impression on weapons offending, according to a Home Office commissioned evaluation. A 2-year pilot of Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs) reveals that only one weapon was recovered from 315 searches under the power, at a cost of 12,600 hours of police officers’ time.
SVROs were first proposed in 2017 by the Centre for Social Justice and brought into law under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 with the stated aim of tackling serious violence and knife crime. The power allowed officers to search individuals given SVROs any time, any number of times, anywhere in public, without reasonable grounds for suspicion.
Trialled by Merseyside, Sussex, Thames Valley and West Midlands police forces between April 2023 and April 2025, the Home Office evaluation found that SVROs had no effect on preventing violent reoffending and that the weapon find rate from searches under the power was just 0.3%. Reoffending of any type actually increased by 17% and weapon possession by 5% over the period.
The results are particularly troubling given that before the pilot began the Home Office acknowledged that there was ‘no evidence of their impact on overall crime’ and that increasing the use of SVROs ‘would not necessarily increase the number of weapons detected and seized’.[HK1] [JB2]
When SVROs were first proposed, StopWatch were one of several groups who raised concerns that such an extraordinary police power would increase the likelihood of already overpoliced individuals becoming easy targets for stop-searches without evidence of a deterrent effect.
The evaluation has shown those concerns to be correct. Individuals stopped and searched under the power increased by 20%, ‘a reflection of increased police attention and detection’, according to the evaluation report’s authors. It was also unclear how SVROs would change ‘underlying offending behaviour’: some individuals were reported to have become reclusive, avoiding public spaces entirely to prevent searches, suggesting that SVROs may hinder reintegration rather than support it.
Other findings of note included an ‘unexpected disproportionality’ of cases where homeless individuals were subjected to multiple stop and searches, and the large numbers of SVRO applications made by police forces rejected by the courts because they were ‘not necessary, proportionate or in the public interest’. Only a quarter (25.7%) of SVRO applications reaching the courts were ultimately granted.
Habib Kadiri, StopWatch executive director, said:
The irony of Serious Violence ‘Reduction’ Orders is that contrary to the name, they did not, in fact, reduce serious violence. If police are to be granted such an invasive power that allows officers to stop and search people without reasonable suspicion, there should be clear evidence that the power works. The evaluation does not provide that evidence. Instead, it shows increased police surveillance, multiple searches of vulnerable individuals, evidence of people withdrawing from public life, unjustified and disproportionate applications by police, all for no reduction in violent reoffending. The failure of the pilot should prompt policymakers to banish SVROs from the statute books.