Report: Prevent anti-terrorism scheme is so fearful of seeming racist it may be ...

Report: Prevent anti-terrorism scheme is so fearful of seeming racist it may be ...
Report: Prevent anti-terrorism scheme is so fearful of seeming racist it may be ...

The Behavioural Insights Team is based in a red-brick mansion block a few streets from Downing Street.

You have probably never heard of them. The unit was once part of the Cabinet Office, however, and is now a global consultancy which works closely with governments, public bodies, businesses and other organisations around the world.

In 2018, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) — headed by Professor David Halpern, a former chief analyst at No 10 — produced a report, commissioned by the Home Office, to evaluate the effectiveness of deradicalisation programmes introduced in the wake of 9/11.

Among these was the multi-million-pound flagship Prevent scheme.

This is the programme, it has been widely reported, that Ali Harbi Ali, 25, who has been charged with the murder of MP Sir David Amess, was referred to when he was 17, although he is not understood to have been placed on the part of it (Channel) for those deemed most at risk of radicalisation.

A police officer cradles a traumatised girl huddled in a police jacket after the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017

A police officer cradles a traumatised girl huddled in a police jacket after the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017

The findings in the unpublished report — by researchers from BIT — was damning. In short, they concluded that a culture of political correctness has stopped Prevent carrying out the very work it was created to do, in many of the grassroots projects they scrutinised.

They do not actually use the words ‘political correctness’ but you cannot read their findings and come to any other conclusion.

Staggeringly, more than 95 per cent of the 33 projects aimed at vulnerable individuals in schools, youth centres and sports clubs (most were believed to be funded by or fell under the label of Prevent) were ineffective, the study found.

Under the current system, public officials have a statutory duty to report anyone showing radical tendencies, such as the expression of anti-Western sentiments. Those who are flagged are then screened by local authority panels, made up of community representatives such as teachers, NHS workers and the police. The most serious cases receive mentoring or are brought to the attention of the security services for further assessment.

It sounds convincing in press releases and information packs pumped out by Whitehall.

But the Behavioural Insights Team found programmes had been let down by ‘facilitators who were uncomfortable dealing with sensitive topics and would often refuse to engage if they were brought up’ . . . teachers who were ‘afraid to bring up race or religion with their students’ for fear of appearing discriminatory . . . and reported success rates of 90 per cent which were ‘not believable’ and not backed up by a ‘sufficiently robust standard of evidence’.

Not believable.

These were the words of Dr Antonio Silva, a senior adviser with BIT who conducted the research with colleague Simon Ruda. And, remember, this was Home Office data he was talking about.

In fact, the officials themselves, they discovered, were evaluating the impact of their own projects — which is ‘likely to have affected the accuracy of their findings’.

The Home Office says that the Behavioural Insights Team did not analyse Channel cases or referrals.

But the work done by Prevent in schools and clubs around the country — precisely the kind of initiatives studied by BIT — are a vital part of the Prevent programme.

Silva and Ruda presented their findings to the Society of Evidence Based Policing conference at the time. The findings were reported in the trade publication Police Professional in 2018.

‘The headline results may seem disappointing but the good news is we now know what doesn’t work and have identified a few things that do,’ Simon Ruda told the audience.

‘I hope those who commissioned the study [the Home Office] will be commended for breaking the mould and that the insights we’ve learned are shared widely.’

In fact, the Home Office has never released the report, which received little coverage outside the article in Police Professional. The Home Office says it ‘does not recognise’ the findings and insists Prevent is a success at steering participants away from the threat of radicalisation.

One of the people who attended the conference was Peter Neyroud, a former chief constable of Thames Valley Police.

He said he was shocked by the lack of openness when he spoke to us this week. ‘There needs to be transparency,’ said Dr Neyroud, who is studying deradicalisation programmes on behalf of the so called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and the UK.

‘If you cannot publish the data — an explanation of what you are doing and the outcomes you are getting — it does not encourage people to get involved in it.’

Now a review into the Prevent strategy conducted by William Shawcross, due to be presented to Home Secretary Priti Patel shortly, is expected to recommend that counter-terrorism police are given a much greater say on whether people at risk of radicalisation are placed on anti-extremist programmes, because they are likely to be less cautious about antagonising faith groups or intervening in cases involving people from ethnic minorities.

This was precisely the flaw highlighted by Silva and Ruda in 2018.

At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that the sheer number of referrals to Prevent — 6,287 in the year to March 2020 — is daunting.

Ministers insist it is important not to judge the programme by the failure to stop every attack.

‘Ultimately, no strategy can be watertight,’ said a source in counter-extremism. ‘It is very difficult for Prevent to identify someone who has not come to the notice of statutory agencies [such as the police].’

Nevertheless, it would be hard to argue against the fact that the failings highlighted by the Behavioural Insights Team, precipitated by a culture of political correctness that seems to influence so much of modern life, make it much less likely that individuals like this are ever even picked up in the first place.

Three-quarters of offenders in prison for terror-related crimes and the vast majority of suspects on MI5’s terror watchlist are Islamist extremists.

Even so, they represent just 22 per cent of all Prevent referrals and 30 per cent of Channel cases (who receive ideological mentoring). By comparison, far-Right extremists make up 24 per

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