MI5 ‘should work more closely with businesses’

MI5 should work more closely with businesses to spot and ideally prevent the sale of bomb-making equipment to potential killers such as Salman Abedi, the Anderson report recommends.

Security services should also share their existing intelligence more closely with councils, neighbourhood police and other agencies, it suggests, a move that could now be piloted in Greater Manchester.

And the referral process under the government’s ‘Prevent’ anti-radicalisation programme should also be strengthened, it says.

David Anderson has issued a total of 126 recommendations in the wake of his review into the actions of the security services in the months and years prior to the Manchester attack.

Most are considered too operationally sensitive to publish and will now be circulated internally among security agencies.

But some have been included in his public report. They include a recommendation that MI5 co-operate more closely with the private sector, ‘for example to improve the detectability and even the preventability of purchases of potential explosives precursors by would-be terrorists’ such as Abedi.

That is one of a number of ways in which the report suggests MI5 could strengthen their monitoring of people not currently under investigation, but whose cases lie on file. Abedi fell into that category in the months prior to the Arena attack. The report also recommends MI5 share its information ‘more widely beyond intelligence circles’, including with councils and police.