The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Tuesday 21 January.
“With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a Statement on the Southport murders.
None of us will ever forget the events of 29 July. The school holidays had just started, and little girls were at a dance class to have fun, dance and sing. A moment of joy turned into the darkest of nightmares. We think especially of three little girls—Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King and Alice da Silva Aguiar—their precious smiles and the dreams their families had, and we think of their families’ agony to have that future so brutally destroyed. They are in all our hearts and prayers, as are those who survived the attack but live with the physical and emotional scars. Nothing will ever take away their trauma and loss, and we will ensure that they receive the support and care they need in the years to come.
We think, too, of the police and first responders who ran into that scene of unspeakable horror. The courage they showed and the lives they saved are public service at its very best.
Yesterday, Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all charges. He stands responsible for one of the most barbaric crimes in our country’s history—the most vile and cowardly attack on little children who could never defend themselves, carried out in the most horrific and traumatic way. The Crown Prosecution Service has described him as
‘a young man with a sickening and sustained interest in death and violence’
who has
‘shown no sign of remorse’.
On Thursday, before sentencing, the prosecution will set out what happened that day and the nature of those offences.
Now that the conviction has been secured, the families, the people of Southport and the entire country need answers about how this horrendous attack could ever have happened. The Government have been constrained in what we could say up to this point about Rudakubana’s past to avoid prejudicing any jury trial, in line with all the normal rules of our British justice systems, because nothing is more important than securing justice, but now we can start to lay out that background.
Multiple different agencies were in contact with Rudakubana and knew about his history of violence. He was referred to Prevent three times between December 2019 and April 2021, when aged 13 and 14. Between October 2019 and May 2022, Lancashire Police responded to five calls from his home address about his behaviour. He was referred repeatedly to the multi-agency safeguarding hub. He had contact with children’s social care, the Early Help service, and child and adolescent mental health services. He was convicted of a violent assault against another child at school and was referred to the youth offending team. He was excluded from one school and had long periods of absence from another.
All those agencies had contact with him yet, between them, they completely failed to identify the terrible danger he posed. How did he fall through so many gaps? It is just unbearable to think that something more could and should have been done. There are grave questions about how this network of agencies failed to identify and act on the risks. There were so many signs of how dangerous he had become, yet the action against him was far too weak. Families need the truth about why the system failed to tackle his violence for so many years.
That is why we are setting up an independent public inquiry. Like the Angiolini inquiry into Wayne Couzens, it will begin work on a non-statutory basis so that it can move quickly into action, but with statutory powers added later, as required. We will set out the terms of reference and appoint the chair once we have consulted the coroner and given the families the opportunity to comment. In addition to examining what went wrong in this horrific case, I am also asking the inquiry to consider the wider challenge of rising youth violence and extremism.
I have been deeply disturbed at the number of cases involving teenagers drawn into extremism, serious violence and terrorism—including Islamist extremism, far-right extremism, mixed and confused ideology, and obsession with violence and gore. In just three years, there has been a threefold increase in under-18s investigated for involvement in terrorism. Some 162 people were referred to Prevent last year for concerns relating to school massacres; the Met Commissioner has warned about
‘young men who are fixated on violence ... grazing across extremist and terrorist content’;
and Five Eyes counterterror partners have warned about growing radicalisation of minors, happening as so many of our children and teenagers are being exposed to ever more disturbing materials online. An online ecosystem is radicalising our children while safety measures are whittled away.
The Online Safety Act 2023 illegal content codes of practice come into force in March and the child safety codes should be in place this summer, but companies should take responsibility before then. The prosecution will provide more detail on Thursday about material Rudakubana searched for online, but I can tell the House that the Government are this week contacting technology companies to ask them to remove the dangerous material that he accessed. Companies should not be profiting from hosting content that puts children’s lives at risk.
Let me set out four other areas where we are taking action in advance of the inquiry. First, on Prevent, the Government and counterterrorism policing jointly commissioned an immediate Prevent learning review during the summer, and I will publish detailed findings following the sentencing. The three referrals took place between three and four years before the Southport attack, including following evidence Rudakubana was expressing interest in school shootings, the London Bridge attack, the IRA, MI5 and the Middle East.
On each occasion, Rudakubana’s case was assessed by counterterrorism policing, but in each instance there was no onward referral to specialist Channel support. The learning review has concluded that the referrals should not have been closed, and that cases such as these, given the perpetrator’s age and complex needs, should be referred to Channel. It concludes that too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology, without considering the vulnerabilities to radicalisation, or taking account of whether he was