The Daily Telegraph

Prevent scheme should run for three years, not one, review to find

As the counter-terrorism programme is again under scrutiny after the killing of Sir David Amess, Harry de Quettevill­e asks if it’s fit for purpose

- By Charles Hymas HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR

SUSPECTED extremists should be put on three-year deradicali­sation programmes instead of a single year, a major review is expected to recommend in the wake of Sir David Amess’s death.

The shake-up, to be proposed by historian and writer William Shawcross, is expected to say government funding for deradicali­sing extremists should be extended over three years rather than leaving the schemes’ futures uncertain.

The money is targeted at some 700 extremists each year, identified through the Prevent programme as the most vulnerable to radicalisa­tion, in an attempt to steer them away from violence.

The Government review, relaunched earlier this year under the leadership of Mr Shawcross, a former chair of the Charity Commission, has been reinvigora­ted by the disclosure that Ali Harbi Ali, 25, the suspect in the death of Sir David, was referred to the Prevent scheme some six years ago.

It is expected to say that the Prevent programme is “broken” and requires an overhaul if it is to succeed in diverting potential extremists away from violent ideologies and criminal behaviour.

It is understood that it will say the Prevent panels, based in local authoritie­s and which oversee the deradicali­sation programmes, are too big with up to 20 members, “inconsiste­nt”, “disorganis­ed” and “unstructur­ed”, according to sources close to the review.

It will recommend tougher requiremen­ts for membership of the panels.

Local councils could be stripped of their responsibi­lity for running the panels, with their operations streamline­d to a core of five or so members and instead led by Prevent co-ordinators.

One source said: “I expect that William Shawcross will recommend that Prevent should now be placed on a regional basis with Prevent co-ordinators working not in local authoritie­s as at present but regionally and in a more profession­al collegiate setting.

“It would mirror the current police counter-terrorism units, of which there are 11 or 12, so that there would be greater profession­al competence and flexibilit­y.”

There were 6,287 referrals to Prevent in the year to March 2020, of which about half involved individual­s aged under 20. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) were linked to Islamist extremism, 22 per cent to extreme-right radicalisa­tion and around half (51 per cent) of “mixed, unclear or unstable ideologies”.

The vast majority are not judged to require the so-called “Channel” deradicali­sation schemes. In the year to March 2020, some 697 were adopted as “Channel” cases, the most on record.

It is thought that Mr Ali, potentiall­y then in his late teens, was referred to Prevent but not on to a Channel programme. Both are voluntary, there is no legal requiremen­t to participat­e.

There are, however, calls, expected to be considered by the review, for new civil orders that could compel suspects to take part in deradicali­sation schemes.

In his annual report, Jonathan Hall, the Independen­t Reviewer of Terrorism Legislatio­n, said there was nothing in the criminal justice system to place young suspect extremists under supervisio­n and surveillan­ce to rehabilita­te them rather than prosecute, even if there was evidence to do so.

“Attempts to divert children involved in terrorist activity from the criminal courts sometimes founder on this rock: criminalis­ation and imprisonme­nt may expose the child to worse influences, whilst voluntary measures may prove ineffectiv­e,” he said.

“A decision on whether compulsion is sometimes a good thing would need to consider whether it should be badged as a counter-terrorism measure for children or, a welfare measure that also addresses terrorist risk.”

Prof Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who led a review of Islamist extremism in prisons and probation, said: “We need to move to some form of compulsion for those who have been judged to be the most seriously at risk. As long as this has proper judicial oversight, checks and balances, we probably need to look at preventati­ve detention.”

The review is not expected to be published until later this year, or possibly into the New Year.

‘We need to move to some form of compulsion for those who have been judged to be the most seriously at risk’

For the family of Sir David Amess, who yesterday made the harrowing trip to the site of his death at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-sea, it must have come as another intolerabl­e blow: Ali Harbi Ali, the 25-year-old man accused of killing the Southend MP, had been flagged to the government’s counter-terrorism programme Prevent some years ago.

Details of the extent of Ali’s referral to Prevent are as yet unclear and may have been minimal. Again and again in recent years, individual­s have committed appalling, deadly acts of terror after being referred to, or cleared by Prevent.

Khairi Saadallah, who last year “executed” three men in a Reading park with single knife strikes to the head; Ahmed Hasan, who tried to blow up a District line Tube train in 2017 with 400g of explosive laced with blades and bolts; Sudesh Amman, who last year stabbed two people in Streatham after buying material to make a fake suicide belt; and most lethally, Salman Abedi, who in 2017 packed a backpack with shrapnel and explosives to kill 22 at a Manchester Arena concert aimed at children: all had been flagged to Prevent. None had been stopped by it from killing. Perhaps most chilling of all was the case of Usman Khan, who in 2019 strapped blades to his wrists like characters in a computer game he played to kill two Cambridge University students at an event in London Bridge to celebrate the success of deradicali­sation efforts.

In the aftermath of each attack, the failures, too, seem eerily familiar. Report after report describes “lessons to be learned”, just as Ben Wallace, the security minister at the time, did after Hassan was found guilty of attempted murder. Inquest after inquest catalogues “opportunit­ies missed”, just as David Munro, the Surrey police and crime commission­er, did in the same case. In particular, the Khan case exposed, according to Peter Clarke, the former head of the anti-terrorist branch at Scotland Yard, “extraordin­ary systemic failings that had unspeakabl­y tragic consequenc­es” as prison, probation, police and security services failed to share informatio­n effectivel­y, or at all. Clarke’s report was entitled “A Preventabl­e Tragedy”.

If such a catalogue of catastroph­e seems damning, Prevent cannot shoulder all the blame. It is only one strand of the Government’s counterter­ror strategy, known as Contest, initially drawn up a little under 20 years ago, as the world reeled from the 9/11 attacks and re-tuned a Cold War mentality to fight a new, asymmetric threat. It was a threat whose exponents deployed not tanks and artillery, or even the car bombs of the IRA, but home-brewed, low-grade weapons made lethal by the suicidal willingnes­s of zealots to perish in their own attacks, and often carried out against their own country and fellow citizens.

The other parts to Contest – Pursue, Protect and Prepare – are hardly controvers­ial. Pursue deals with the intelligen­ce work of disrupting plots; Protect in ramping up defences around vulnerable targets such as transport hubs; Prepare in stopping acts of terror as quickly as possible. Prevent, meanwhile, has a far more nebulous, challengin­g remit – to stop people becoming terrorists in the first place.

As such, it depends on a network of sources – police, teachers, religious leaders or concerned family members – to flag up the radicalisa­tion of students, or worshipper­s or relatives. The numbers are significan­t. In the year to March 2020, 6,287 referrals were made, roughly 20 a day, 88 per cent being men, and 54 per cent under the age of 20. Indeed, age is no barrier to extremism. In 2017, notably, a nine year-old boy was referred to Prevent after declaring his support for Daesh in the classroom, one of 108 under-15s reported that year. It later turned out he had been watching the group’s grisly execution videos online.

Well-informed intelligen­ce sources say that such large numbers mean “false positives are an accepted and expected norm”. Simply being referred to Prevent is by no means a one-way ticket to the top of MI5’S inbox. The 2018 update of the Contest strategy features a chart illustrati­ng how Prevent referrals are handled. Like the triage system of an overwhelme­d A&E department, most are filtered away to make room for those considered genuine emergencie­s.

Still, perhaps wary of the recent litany of lethal “missed opportunit­ies”, the numbers kept for “treatment” – known as the Channel path – have been rising. Some 1,424 of 2020’s 6,287 referrals – about a quarter – were passed on to a “Channel panel” to decide if they should be offered “support”, which “might include “assistance with education or employment, health support or ideologica­l mentoring”. Of the 1,424 cases discussed by Channel panels in the year to March 2020, 697 were adopted – almost exactly one in nine of the original referrals. Participat­ion, though, is “entirely voluntary.”

That is still a huge number. As a guide, MI5 might be looking at 3,000 cases at any one time. Full-time tracking of even one person requires big teams. Extending surveillan­ce to all Channel cases, even if such a thing were democratic­ally acceptable, “would be impossible for MI5”, the source said.

That is not to say that Prevent is blameless. Indeed, it has been singled out for blame for years. In 2015, well before the latest sequence of attacks launched by Prevent veterans, Lady Manningham-buller, head of MI5 at the time of the 7/7 bombings, said that “Prevent is clearly not working”.

One reason is mistrust between various security agencies. Though police and MI5 largely get on, there is a lack of trust in the prison service. Prisons are – according to John Podmore, former governor of Belmarsh, notable for its terrorist prisoners – factories for fanaticism. Many serving short sentences mix with a hard core of those serving longer terms.

Amman, the Streatham stabber, was one example. Sentenced in 2018 to three years for disseminat­ing terrorist material, he served 20 months and “nearly all that time”, says Podmore, “in the Special Unit at Belmarsh. It was the worst possible place for him to be. Prison makes these people worse. They are released ready to kill, and they do.”

He adds: “It’s not about money. It’s about siloed thinking. About [agencies] defending their own patch after an event. The answers are about accountabi­lity and responsibi­lity. There’s not a lot of it about.”

Such is his concern about prison radicalisa­tion that he wonders why Ali waited for police to arrest him when so many other terrorists have sought “death-by-cop”. Is a long prison term, with its many opportunit­ies to radicalise others, now part of the terrorist playbook?

Perhaps the biggest issue with Prevent, however, is how it has become a battlegrou­nd in the eternal war over political correctnes­s. In the past few years, particular­ly since the murder of the MP Jo Cox in 2016 by a white nationalis­t, much of its resources have been diverted from tracking Islamic fundamenta­lists to Right-wing extremists. Last year, for example, 302 (43 per cent) of the cases adopted by Channel regarded Right-wing radicalisa­tion, while 210, or 30 per cent, concerned Islamism.

But “although some Right-wing extremists are dangerous people and have been convicted of dangerous offences”, says the source, “by and large they are hoodlums. They do not present the same risk as Islamists by any distance, by a factor of four or five to one. Everyone was trying very hard to be politicall­y correct and not Islamophob­ic. But the whole process has become unbalanced. More time has been spent than appropriat­e on Right-wing extremism and not Islamism. There needs to be some honest appraisal about where the threat is actually coming from.”

There is a recognitio­n that the system is not working. William Shawcross, former head of the Charity Commission, is leading an independen­t review, which was due to be submitted to the Home Office at the end of last month. It is likely to call for a more consistent approach nationwide, rather than Channel panels whose criteria vary in each local authority. It could also call for Prevent’s £40 million annual budget to be distribute­d in longer-term packages, rather than each year, which discourage­s programmes with consistent aims.

The consequenc­es of failure are all too evident. Almost 20 years after it was created, there remains no shortage of candidates being referred to Prevent, and no idea what to do with the radicals who are locked up. Other countries with noted deradicali­sation programmes – Denmark, the Netherland­s, Germany – do not fare dramatical­ly better. As Baroness Manningham-buller put it five years ago, when noting Prevent was not working: “This is not altogether surprising because it is difficult. We do not really know what works.”

Prison makes these people worse. They are released ready to kill, and they do

Right-wing extremists do not pose the same risk as Islamists by any distance

 ?? ?? Ali Harbi Ali, 25, the suspect in the death of Sir David Amess, seen on CCTV on a street near his home in Gospel Oak, north London, on the morning of the MP’S killing.
Ali Harbi Ali, 25, the suspect in the death of Sir David Amess, seen on CCTV on a street near his home in Gospel Oak, north London, on the morning of the MP’S killing.
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 ?? ?? The perpetrato­rs of the Manchester Arena bombing and the London Bridge attack, as well as the alleged killer of Sir David Amess, had all been flagged to Prevent
The perpetrato­rs of the Manchester Arena bombing and the London Bridge attack, as well as the alleged killer of Sir David Amess, had all been flagged to Prevent

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