Interim Independent Prevent Commissioner Lord Anderson’s report ‘Lessons for Prevent‘, covering the assassination of Southend Conservative MP Sir David Amess at his constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex; and what Lord Anderson terms the 2024 ‘killing spree at a childrenโs dance club in Southport’.
The report states that several years before their respective attacks, both murderers had been referred by their schools to Prevent โ the Home Office programme
designed to stop people being drawn into terrorism. “Preventโs Channel programme for early intervention had the capacity to address concerns of the kind that were flagged to it. In neither case did it do so.” Amess’ murderer was adopted into Channel, ‘but the programme of mentoring that was planned for him was allowed to peter out when it had hardly begun’, while the Southport murderer’s case was three times rejected by police without reaching Channel.
The report describes the work of Prevent as ‘sensitive and contested terrain’. It adds that the Prevent work ‘is to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. That is a difficult and delicate task, whose success can never be guaranteed.’ As the report points out, ‘disengagement (still more deradicalisation) is always difficult to achieve, and it is the nature of Prevent that not every intervention will succeed’.
In the Amess case, the report says the murderer was referred to Prevent by his school in 2014; then came ‘a long string of failings’, mostly ‘the product of poor judgement, poor communication and lack of follow-through. An initial meeting with the ‘Intervention Provider’ (at which the future murderer concealed his true beliefs) was not followed up by any of the further meetings that the police had commissioned.
In the Southport case, the murderer had been referred to Prevent by his school three times between 2019 and 2021; the report describes the murderer as ‘a troubled teenager who was already showing signs of both an interest in terrorism and some disturbed and violent characteristics’. The report raises the question whether โviolence-fascinated individualsโ or VFIs, who have no particular ideology but may have the potential to commit crimes with strong similarities to acts of terrorism, should continue to be accommodated within Prevent. The report also asks a longer-term question ‘of whether Prevent could be more effective if embedded within a comprehensive violence prevention strategy’.
Among the report’s recommendations are that ‘public transparency about the structures, systems and statistics of Prevent should be the default position’; and that a Cabinet Office task force should ‘lead exploratory work into the possibility of formally connecting Prevent to a broader safeguarding and violence prevention system’.
About the report
Lord Anderson drew on central and local government, local and counter-terrorism policing, education and the NHS, community support organisations, NGOs in the UK and abroad, academia and local communities. You can view the 169-page report at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lessons-for-prevent.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Belfair Methodist church hall, scene of the Amess murder, October 2021.
