Today I can update the House on the initial steps arising from the counter-extremism sprint initiated by the Government in July, designed to ensure that the UK’s strategies and systems to prevent radicalisation are functioning effectively, and addressing the full range of threats that we currently face as a country.
National security is one of the Government’s foundations and fundamental to our plan for change. We must therefore first and foremost recognise and applaud the continued excellent work carried out by counter-terrorism police, security and intelligence agencies, and other experts working on prevention across the country. Since March 2017, MI5 and the police have together disrupted 43 late-stage attack plots.
The UK’s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, was established after the terrible attacks on 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005. Made public in 2006, CONTEST has continued under successive Governments and evolved over years in line with the threat.
The four pillars of that strategy—prevent, pursue, protect and prepare—are of long standing and set the standard globally for a comprehensive counter-terror response, but the threats that the strategy is designed to tackle have also become more complex:
Islamist terrorism remains the primary threat, followed by extreme right-wing terrorism, and there is an increasing number of cases where the ideological driver is mixed or unclear;
The internet continues to act as a central enabler of radicalisation, facilitating increasingly easy access to extremist material and like-minded individuals;
While the majority of previous terrorist incidents have been perpetrated by adults, increasing numbers of young people are being drawn towards violent ideologies; and
Terrorist groups based overseas continue to present a significant threat to the UK, but the most common manifestation of terrorist risk in the UK in recent years has been cases involving individuals or small groups acting without direct support or instruction from a wider terrorist network. Additionally, the threat landscape is more interconnected and complex than at any time, with terrorist threats interacting with a state threat of unprecedented scale and severity and the challenge of organised crime.
This requires a response from Government agencies, law enforcement and the public that is informed, agile and integrated. As our first response to the Home Office’s counter-extremism sprint, I am today setting out action and next steps that will be taken in five key areas.
National security funding
First, in the light of these increasingly complex and rapidly changing threats, law enforcement partners and agencies need appropriate levels of resource. As announced in the provisional police funding settlement 2025-26, counter-terrorism police funding will increase next year by £140 million (14%) to £1,160 million, ensuring that counter-terrorism policing has the resources it needs to deal with the threats we face. Separately, the Chancellor confirmed in the autumn Budget on 13 October an additional £499 million funding for the single intelligence account, which includes MI5, SIS and GCHQ, showing our commitment to ensuring that our agencies are equipped to do the job.
Youth diversion orders
Secondly, we need new measures to address the growing proportion of young people who are featuring in counter-terrorism casework, as highlighted in the latest official statistics:
13% of all those being investigated by MI5 for involvement in UK terrorism are under 18, which is a threefold increase in the last three years;
Arrests of under-18s for terror offences have increased from just three in the year ending September 2010, to 32 in the year ending September 2024; and
11 to 15-year-olds now make up 40% of all referrals into Prevent, and half of all cases adopted by Channel where the age is known (up from a third in 2017).
These concerning trends have been flagged by Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, who said they are
“seeing far too many cases where very young people are being drawn into poisonous online extremism”,
and by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, who has said that
“the profile of alleged terrorist offenders is getting younger, and includes children who may accurately be described as vulnerable”.
Most recently, on 5 December, UK counter-terrorism policing, working with Five Eyes counterparts, issued a joint call to action on youth radicalisation, stressing that they are
“increasingly concerned about the radicalisation of minors, and minors who support, plan or undertake terrorist activities”.
It is clear that while the UK has a robust counter-terrorism toolkit, including measures to prevent the escalation of terrorist risks, those tools are not currently well designed for intervention with young people.
The Government therefore intend to introduce youth diversion orders—a new counter-terrorism risk management tool specifically designed for young people, building on recommendations from Jonathan Hall KC.
Police will be able to apply to the courts for a youth diversion order, permitting them—in partnership with other agencies—to intervene earlier and to impose conditions such as engagement with Prevent interventions or restrictions on online activity. The courts must deem these conditions to be necessary and proportionate to mitigate terrorist risk.
Strengthening Prevent
Thirdly, we need reforms to strengthen the Prevent programme.
Prevent has been an integral part of our counter-terrorism machinery for the last 20 years, supporting nearly 5,000 people away from radicalisation since the introduction of the statutory Prevent duty in 2015. Over that period, dedicated counter-terrorism police and multi-agency partners have worked tirelessly and effectively day in, day out to divert individuals away from terrorism.
However, Prevent must continually adapt and improve to deal with challenges and keep pace with the changing nature of the threats that the programme is meant to tackle.
In particular, as backed up by recent reviews and statistics, it is not always clear to practitioners what kinds of cases should be dealt with under Prevent, which should be referred to other services, and what the responsibility of those services should be.
The reforms of recent years, including better training for frontline staff, updated guidance and a new Prevent assessment framework to strengthen decision making by police and Channel panels, have all sought to address this confusion, but more needs to be done.
Concerns over low numbers of referrals for Islamist extremism have still not been addressed, and at the same time a lack of clarity remains over whether Prevent should be confined to cases of clear ideology or should also be picking up cases where the ideology is less clear, or where there is a fixation with violence.
Therefore, the Home Office is taking forward work in a number of areas, including:
Conducting an end-to-end review of Prevent thresholds, updating policy and guidance, including on repeat referrals, to ensure that they reflect the full range of threats we see today;
Broadening the interventions available to people supported by the Channel early intervention programme. In addition to ideological mentoring, we will seek to reflect the diverse drivers of radicalisation, by exploring options to support at-risk individuals with cyber-skills, family interventions or practical mentoring, working to reduce the threat of radicalisation in the increasingly complex cases we see;
Undertaking a strategic policy review to identify and drive improvements in how individuals referred into Prevent who are neurodivergent or suffer from mental ill health are supported and managed; and
Strengthening our approach to the monitoring and oversight of referrals that do not meet Prevent thresholds, by launching a pilot in January to test new approaches to cases that are transferred to other services to ensure there is proper monitoring and requirements in place.
Creation of a Prevent commissioner role
Fourthly, we need to ensure that there is a means of regularly and robustly checking the effectiveness and quality of the programme in different parts of the country, in line with our wider programme of reform to drive up performance and standards in other areas.
I am therefore announcing today that we have begun a recruitment exercise to appoint an independent commissioner of Prevent, with a specific remit to review the programme’s effectiveness and identify gaps, so any problems can be fixed early. This will include ensuring that we have robustly implemented recommendations from previous reviews and overseeing delivery and evaluation on the steps I have set out above.
An interim appointment to this role will be announced shortly to enable swift work to begin, and an open and fair recruitment campaign will run in parallel to select a permanent Prevent commissioner.
Social media and radicalisation online
Finally, we need stronger action to tackle online radicalisation, in the face of growing evidence that the increasingly violent and extreme ideological material that young people in particular are accessing online is transforming the way in which they are radicalised.
In response, we are strengthening action to tackle this online radicalisation and protect our young people from harm. Yesterday, Ofcom published new codes of practice to drive implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023.
Next steps
In the new year, we will provide further updates on these measures and on action to counter terrorism and extremist radicalisation arising from the counter-extremism sprint and other work under way. We recognise the need for a whole-of-society approach to confront the threat from terrorism, and that everyone in our society should have the confidence and peace of mind to go about their lives freely and without fear. That requires greater vigilance than ever and stronger action than ever to identify, prevent and relentlessly pursue terrorism and violent extremism wherever it is found.
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