We Need to Talk About Prevent

Over the past few months, the TaxPayers’ Alliance sent hundreds of freedom of information requests while researching Prevent, the Government’s counter-terrorism programme designed to stop people becoming terrorists. FOI requests to local councils, questions to the Home Office, requests for the most basic financial breakdowns – where the money went, who received it and what it was spent on. The majority were refused outright through a myriad of exemptions.

When we asked Birmingham City Council for basic figures on Prevent funding, the council invoked four separate exemptions: national security, law enforcement, health and safety and commercial sensitivity. The national security argument was particularly creative. Even aggregate funding figures, according to them, ‘could be used, alongside other FOIs, to build up a detailed picture or “threat map” of how Prevent resources are allocated’. The implication is that any financial transparency about Prevent, however aggregated, constitutes a threat to national security. The Home Office applied identical reasoning when asked about which civil society organisations receive its grants, despite £2.4 million going to 52 such groups in 2024-25 alone. The public interest in disclosure, they concluded, was outweighed by the need for secrecy.

This is not how it used to be. When the TaxPayers’ Alliance last examined Prevent in 2009, detailed funding breakdowns were available through FOI requests to local authorities. What we found was a clear example of the state’s counter-productive, misallocated and inappropriate spending.

Over £12m had been distributed to community groups with insufficient monitoring of how it was spent, including approximately £850,000 directed to Muslim Council of Britain affiliates, an organisation the Government would later designate for non-engagement after its leadership took positions contradicting fundamental British values. These problems came to light because transparency existed. Today, the same questions go unanswered.

Prevent has now drifted dramatically from its counter-terrorism purpose

This matters not just as an abstract point about transparency, but also because the available evidence strongly suggests money is still being misallocated. The 2023 Shawcross review found that millions had been awarded to contractors providing ‘demonstrably ineffective’ services, and that poor due diligence had ‘sometimes meant taxpayers’ money actually being spent in support of those whose views run against Prevent’s objectives’. One recipient organisation’s leader had publicly praised the Taliban and described proscribed groups as ‘legitimate resistance groups’. The problems the TPA exposed in 2009 were not historical aberrations but recurring failures. The issue is that we simply cannot see them now.

The secrecy is made worse by evidence that Prevent has now drifted dramatically from its counter-terrorism purpose. In 2024-25, 56% of the programme’s 8,778 referrals involved no ideological component; individuals with mental health conditions, autistic teenagers, young people with complex needs but no discernible terrorism risk. These are people who may still need support, but not through a counter-terrorism programme operating under national security exemptions.

Ideology, it is worth noting, is central to the legal definition of terrorism: by design, safeguarding individuals with no ideological driver is not counter-terrorism work. Practitioners seem to know this too. Of those non-ideological referrals, 93% do not go on to be adopted as Channel cases. Yet the system continues to process them through counter-terrorism channels with all the associated opacity, and national security exemptions, designed to protect genuinely sensitive operations, are routinely deployed to shield what is largely welfare and safeguarding expenditure from public view. When Birmingham refuses to disclose its Prevent spending on the grounds that it could assist anyone ‘wanting to commit terrorist offences’, it is, in the majority of cases, really protecting information about support services for vulnerable teenagers.

More than half of Prevent’s caseload has no obvious national security sensitivity, and the exemptions applied to it are indefensible. To solve this, non-ideological cases should be handled through transparent safeguarding systems subject to normal FOI obligations. This would mean a leaner and more properly focused counter-terrorism programme where national security exemptions are actually justified.

Then there is the question of whether Prevent is even focused on the right threat. Approximately 75% of Counter Terrorism Policing investigations with MI5 relate to Islamist terrorism. Yet Islamist cases now account for barely one in ten Prevent referrals, while the Shawcross review found that extreme right-wing referrals had ballooned and non-violent Islamist extremism was being systematically under-prioritised. The cases Prevent handles and the threats MI5 actually investigates point in opposite directions. And the opacity that surrounds Prevent means there is no external mechanism for verifying whether this is being corrected, or whether Channel panels, increasingly overwhelmed by complex-needs cases with no terrorism connection, are missing instances of genuine radicalisation in the process.

What makes the present moment especially troubling is the Government’s apparent anti-transparency agenda and potential FOI clampdown. The Government is now considering reducing the cost threshold for processing FOI requests which would give public bodies wider discretion to reject requests. Meanwhile, in March the BBC broadcast an episode of their drama ‘The Capture’ in which a character filing freedom of information requests to the Home Office about immigration was treated as a marker of potential extremism.

It should go without saying, but filing freedom of information requests is not extremism; it is a vital tool that taxpayers can use to hold their government to account. After receiving backlash, the BBC called it fiction, but at a moment when the Government is discussing curbing FOI rights, the cultural signal could not be clearer.

The Anderson review, one of several independent examinations of Prevent in recent years,  was clear that ‘maximum openness needs to be the default’. It is worth noting that when the independent Prevent commissioner asked the Home Office to substantiate its own claimed 90% Channel success rate, it was unable to do so. A programme that cannot answer to its own reviewer will not answer to taxpayers either.

When transparency existed, and the TPA looked, we found public money going to questionable organisations and funds distributed without adequate monitoring. These failures emerged despite FOI scrutiny. The secrecy that has replaced it does not make the programme safer; it simply removes the mechanism by which failures can be identified and corrected. The Shawcross review found those same failures persisting into the 2020s. Whether they persist now, nobody outside the Home Office can say. The terror threat level in the UK has recently been raised to severe. At that moment, we need our counter-terrorism infrastructure to be focused, effective and operating at the highest possible standard. Instead, what we have is a programme that cannot account for its own spending, cannot substantiate its own success rate, has allowed mission creep to turn it into an unfocused safeguarding triage system, and has spent almost two decades making itself less visible to the people funding it.

Opacity does not protect our counter-terrorism systems; it undermines them and risks allowing resources to be diverted away from genuine extremist threats at a time when Britain can least afford to do so.

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This article (We need to talk about Prevent) was created and published by CapX and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Anne Strickland