“Prevent needs a major overhaul and integration into a wider system to which all those susceptible of being drawn into violence can be referred,” it said.
The UK’s Prevent counter-terrorism strategy “is no longer keeping the country safe” and needs a “radical overhaul”, an independent commission has found.
It said 90% of people referred to the scheme are turned away because they have no obvious ideology, even though they can go on to commit violent crimes.
In a wide-ranging report, the commission also recommended narrowing the definition of what constitutes terrorism to provide greater clarity.
And it called for decisions by government to proscribe organisations to be reviewed every five years to ensure proportionality. That recommendation comes as the Home Office faces a legal challenge over its decision to ban the activist group Palestine Action.
‘Not fit for purpose’
Full details of the commission’s findings – based on a three-year review into the UK’s counter-terrorism measures – will be unveiled at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank in London today.
The starkest conclusions are about Prevent.
“The evidence we had shows that the present approach to Prevent is not fit for purpose,” said Sir Declan Morgan, a former chief justice of Northern Ireland who chaired the commission.
Underlining the failure of the scheme, Axel Rudakubana – the Southport murderer who stabbed three girls to death and attacked 10 other people at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July last year – had been referred to Prevent three times.
But no evidence had been found of a fixed ideology, so his case was closed in 2021. The teenager committed the atrocity three years later.
“The Independent Commission on Counter-Terrorism says that Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy is no longer keeping the country safe,” according to an executive summary of the report.
“It calls for a radical overhaul of Prevent to make it part of a broader initiative dealing with violence and no longer based on a flawed radicalisation model.”
A changed terror threat
The commission found there is no evidence that radicalisation is a predictor of whether a person will become a terrorist.
It said terrorist threats in the UK have morphed from plots by groups such as al Qaeda or Islamic State to “self-initiated” individuals with “complex, mixed, unclear or unstable ideologies”.
As a result, there has been a surge in referrals to the counter-terrorism scheme.
“This risks overwhelming Prevent and missing individuals being drawn into terrorism,” the report warned.
It said more than 58,000 people have been referred to Prevent since 2015, but more than 90% had no counter-terrorism concerns.
Sky News: continue reading
See Related Article Below
Dozens of babies and toddlers referred to Government’s flagship anti-extremism Prevent programme
More than 100 babies and toddlers have been referred to the Government’s Prevent anti-extremism programme.
New data showed 45 infants under the age of one were referred to the scheme over eight years, up to 2024.
Of those, 29 cases were over concerns they had been exposed to Islamist radicalism.
There were 91 referrals for children aged one and two over the same period, of which 67 concerned Islamism.
Additionally, the names of 75 three-year-olds were handed over Prevent, including 54 for Islamist concerns.
It is thought the infants and very young children were referred to the scheme as part of child protection measures, after radicalisation concerns were raised over a parent or older sibling.
In all there were 388 referrals for children below school age over the eight year period, showed the Home Office data, which was obtained by the website Hyphen.
[…]
Home Office data published last week showed referrals to Prevent spiked by more than a third in the wake of the Southport attack.
There were 6,350 cases referred to the Government’s flagship programme between the day of the murders, July 29 last year, and the end of March.
It marked a 34 per cent jump on the same period in 2023-24.
But the scheme still appears to be underplaying the jihadist threat and focusing on Right-wing extremism, despite warnings raised about the imbalance in an official report published nearly three years ago.
Nearly 1,800 cases of suspected far-Right extremism were referred to Prevent in the year to March, compared with just 870 cases of suspected Islamist extremism.
A major report published in 2023, commissioned by the Home Office, warned Prevent had become ‘politicised’ because officials feared being labelled Islamophobic or racist.
The review by Sir William Shawcross, former head of the Charity Commission, said: ‘At present, 80 per cent of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s live investigations are Islamist while 10 per cent are extreme Right-wing.
‘The fact that only 22 per cent of Prevent referrals for the year 2020-21 concerned Islamism suggests a loss of focus and failure to identify warning signs.’
However, the latest data shows the proportion of Islamist referrals has slipped to just 10 per cent of the total.
Daily Mail: continue reading
Featured image: Sky News
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