Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK’s Prevent counterterrorism programme should be extended to include people fixated on violence but who have no specific ideology, according to a government-commissioned report.
Prevent, set up in 2003 and expanded after the 7/7 London bombings, would function better if it was formally connected to a broader system for safeguarding and protecting against violence, according to findings published on Wednesday.
“As the nature of the threat evolves, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish terrorist from non-terrorist extreme violence,” Lord David Anderson, who led the report, told the Financial Times. “Prevent needs to be able to deal with both.”
Anderson was asked to investigate the functioning of Prevent after the murder of three young girls in Southport, north-west England, last summer by Axel Rudakubana.
That July, 17-year-old Rudakubana fatally stabbed the girls during a dance class and attempted to kill eight other children and two adults who intervened to protect them.
Rudakubana’s case was rejected by Prevent on three separate occasions, as his interest in violence did not appear to be linked to any specific form of terrorist ideology.
Anderson was also asked to look into the case of Ali Harbi Ali in the years before he stabbed the sitting MP David Amess to death in 2021.
The programme has faced fierce criticism from human rights lawyers, teachers and some members of the Muslim community who argue operatives look for threat where it does not exist and that its deradicalisation programme does not work.
Anderson acknowledged that Prevent was “controversial” and that it had failed in both the Rudakubana case and the Ali case. However, he said that “at its best, Prevent can achieve heartening and inspiring results”.
He added that the most “promising direction of travel” for the programme in the longer term would be towards creating a “big front door” for all individuals exhibiting radical and violent tendencies irrespective of their ideology or crime type.
Individuals would then be referred to a multi-agency safeguarding forum that would be able to direct them to the most appropriate type of support, whether it was mental health services, social care or counter-radicalisation interventions, including Prevent.
Anderson also said that Prevent needed to improve its tracking of online radicalisation, arguing that a national open-source intelligence unit would more effectively help police to identify people being influenced.
About 7,000 people were referred to Prevent in 2023-24. The average age of a person referred to the programme is 16, with 40 per cent aged 11 to 15.
