Prevent facing rising demand and capacity strain

Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said the UK’s Prevent programme is under increasing pressure, with record numbers of referrals expected this year and limited capacity across local services to manage them.

At his first media briefing as head of Counter Terrorism Policing, Taylor told assembled journalists that referrals into Prevent, the government scheme that aims to stop people being drawn into extremism, are already outpacing previous years.

“We are on course to having a record number of Prevent referrals this year,” he said. “We would see around 7,000 or 8,000 referrals a year. This year we are at 6,000 already and projecting more than 10,000.”

He told the Home Affairs Committee last week that the increase represents about a 37 percent rise on the usual total. “The capability is there, but I do not think the capacity is there,” he said. “The system is not built to deal with this volume of demand.”

Taylor said the referrals now reaching Prevent are more complex than before, with a growing proportion involving people with “mixed, unclear or no ideology.” Many of those cases, he said, fall closer to social or mental health support than to counter-terrorism. “Prevent is set up to deal with terrorism; it is not set up to deal with all these other things,” he told MPs. “At the moment, one of the challenges we have is that Prevent works, and therefore it becomes the obvious place to put people.”

More than half of the cases sent to Prevent are later closed as non-terrorism matters and passed on to other services. “Over half of those are referred into other organisations, 32 percent into education, 22 percent into health, 18 percent into local authority and 13 percent into local policing,” Taylor said. “They are cases where we have said, ‘This is not a terrorist threat, but we do believe there are interventions needed.’”

Taylor said this pattern reflects a wider strain on the public sector. “There is a risk that we become the big front door for all vulnerabilities,” he said. “We need a multi-agency, well-funded triage process at that front end.”

He described the current system as overstretched but not ineffective. The challenge, he said, is that Prevent is being used to manage vulnerabilities far beyond its original scope. “There is a lot of activity, a lot of demand and a lot of challenge in identifying those people who are thinking about doing something versus those who are going to go and do something,” he said.

Some referrals, he added, stem from misunderstandings about Prevent’s purpose. “We have some examples where you would laugh,” he told MPs. “A kid at primary school who watches ‘Kung Fu Panda’, then goes into school the next day, kicks a pupil and is referred into Prevent. That sort of thing is not what we want.”

Even so, Taylor said it is important that professionals continue to make referrals where they have genuine concerns. “We do not want to stop referrals being made, because we want the professionals to make the assessment,” he said.

His proposal is to develop a coordinated system that can filter cases more effectively and ensure appropriate interventions are available. “If you get this multi-agency effective triage system at the front end that is properly funded, with the appropriate interventions that sit beneath it, you create a system-wide approach rather than what we always do, which is talk about Prevent,” he said.

Taylor said that would allow Prevent to focus on its core purpose. “Prevent can then focus on those things that it is there to do, which is to prevent people from becoming terrorists,” he said.

For Taylor, the issue is not that Prevent is failing he was keen to stress but that it is absorbing problems that were never designed to be its responsibility.