The Prevent Strategy
Infiltration of Public Sector Services by Policing Agencies
The prevent strategy costs the British tax payer 17+ million pounds per year.
Infiltrating the Public Sector, such as mental health services resulting in the criminalisation of vulnerable persons such as X in the name of counter-terrorism and safeguarding the uk.
”….If organisations do not accept these fundamental values, we will not work with them and we will not fund them.Second, we will prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and ensure that they are given appropriate advice and support. We will build on the successful multi-agency ‘Channel’ programme, which identifies and provides support for people at risk of radicalisation. Third, we will work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalisation. Here, progress has been made in recent years, but it is patchy and must be better. So we will work with education and healthcare providers, faith groups, charities and the wider criminal justice system…
…We conclude that, properly handled, programmes of this kind are essential. They should pre-empt and not facilitate law enforcement activity. They will not be a means for covert activity. Safeguards will ensure their integrity and, in particular, appropriate protection of data.3.32 This area of Prevent will build upon Channel, the existing multi-agency programme to identify and provide support to people at risk of radicalisation. Channel has had some success. The programmes will address the risks from all forms of terrorism. They must draw on the expertise of policing, local authorities and community organisations.3.33 Organisations commissioned to provide support to vulnerable people are in a position of great influence. They must be credible and able to reach and talk to people at risk. But we will not fund, or work with, extremist groups for this (or any other) purpose….
…They will not be a means for covert activity. Safeguards will ensure their integrity and, in particular, appropriate protection of data. This area of Prevent will build on Channel, the existing multi-agency programme to identify and provide support to people at risk of radicalisation. Channel has had some success. The programmes will address the risks from all form of terrorism. They must draw on the expertise of policing, local authorities and community organisations. Organisations commissioned to provide support to vulnerable people are in a position of great influence. They must be credible and able to reach and talk to people at risk. But we will not fund or work with extremist groups for this (or any other) purpose….
…But we do know that some people who are supportive of terrorist groups and ideologies have sought and sometimes gained positions in schools or in groups which work closely with young people. One of the 7/7 bombers, for example, worked as a learning mentor with children at a school in Leeds.10.31 The majority of referrals to the Channel programme (described above, pages 74-81) have been under 25, with most aged between 15 and 19. Very few have been younger…
…We are particularly concerned not to encourage or create an environment where children are referred to the support programmes discussed in the previous chapter (for example, Channel) unless there is very clear evidence that they are being radicalised and there is clearly no alternative or more proportionate means of dealing with the issue. Referring very young people has rightly been a source of community concern and risks undermining the credibility of the Channel programme as a whole. 10.47 We believe that schools of all kinds can play a role in enabling young people to explore issues like terrorism and the wider use of violence in a considered and informed way. According to a survey by the UK Youth Parliament in August 2008, 94% of young people said they thought schools were the best environment in which to discuss terrorism…
…work with the Charity Commission to ensure that schools that are charities and under their jurisdiction comply with charity law;• work to reduce the risk that children and young people are exposed to extremist views in out of school hours provision; and• help children’s services work with schools and other agencies, including Channel, to identify children at risk of radicalisation and take necessary steps to protect them from harm…
… Health (Infiltration of Public Health Service)
10.134 Healthcare in England includes a range of complex services delivered through many organisations. The National Health Service (NHS) spans primary care, acute hospital care, community and mental health care, dentistry, pharmacy and delivery of services such as prison health. 1.3 million NHS workers have contact with over 315,000 patients daily and some 700,000 workers in private and voluntary healthcare organisations see many thousands more. 10.135 Healthcare professionals may meet and treat people who are vulnerable to radicalisation. People with mental health issues or learning disabilities (such as Nicky Reilly and Andrew Ibrahim, separately convicted in 2009 for terrorist-related offences) may be more easily drawn into terrorism. We also know that people connected to the healthcare sector have taken part in terrorist acts in the past. 10.136 The key challenge for the healthcare sector is to ensure that, where there are signs that someone has been or is being drawn into terrorism, the healthcare worker can interpret those signs correctly, is aware of the support which is available and is confident in referring the person for further support. Preventing someone from becoming a terrorist or from supporting terrorism is substantially comparable to safeguarding in other areas, including child abuse or domestic violence. 10.137 Until recently, there was no Prevent programme in the health sector. Since January 2010, Prevent has been piloted in nine Strategic Health Authority regions in England, in areas such as mental health, primary care, drug and alcohol programmes, prison health and school nursing. In these pilot regions, the Department of Health has issued guidance and a toolkit for frontline workers and training for some 700 people.87 A consultation by the Department in September 2010 showed that health practitioners had little or no prior knowledge of Prevent. 10.138 Across the sector, regional Prevent coordinators work closely with other local delivery partners to ensure the health contribution to the Prevent strategy is coordinated with wider activity. The roll-out of Prevent is improving channels of communication between the health sector and the police, as well as other cross-agency links. 10.139 There are some 12,000 students training for health qualifications within universities each year. Work has started to ensure that Prevent is included in the undergraduate curriculum. Current activity needs to be extended to cover the premises where university clinical training takes place within the healthcare estate. 10.140 The Department of Health has already made links with the Charity Commission and the National Council of Voluntary Organisations to enable further training. This is important given that the White Papers which outline the future provision of commissioning in the health sector open up opportunities for all private and voluntary health care organisations to deliver NHS care alongside NHS organisations. At the time of writing, these papers were out for consultation.8810.141 Since the launch of the Department of Health’s guidance and toolkit in December 2009, there has been an increasing shift in the regional management of Prevent towards the safeguarding and nursing areas. This has facilitated take up and familiarisation. Situating Prevent within safeguarding will ensure it continues regardless of future changes to NHS organisational structures. It is also in line with wider attempts to mainstream Prevent in other sectors. 10.142 The Department of Health has also supported the review of the ‘No Secrets’ guidance on safeguarding adults.89 This will embed the principles of Prevent within existing processes for safeguarding vulnerable adults and enable healthcare workers across the country to understand the parallels between Prevent and existing support and intervention processes. 10.143 Given the very high numbers of people who come into contact with health professionals in this country, the sector is a critical partner in Prevent. There are clearly many opportunities for doctors, nurses and other staff to help protect people from radicalisation. The key challenge is to ensure that healthcare workers can identify the signs that someone is vulnerable to radicalisation, interpret those signs correctly and access the relevant support. 10.144 In common with other sectors, uptake of Prevent in the health sector has not always been consistent. This has been partly due to the unfamiliarity of the subject matter and partly because early training was not always appropriate. ACPO’s internal 2010 review of Prevent policing has also identified issues regarding information sharing in the sector. 10.145 The Department of Health will need to ensure that the crucial relationship of trust and confidence between patient and clinician is balanced with the clinician’s professional duty of care and their responsibility to protect wider public safety. Where a healthcare worker – be that a speech therapist, community psychiatric nurse or general practitioner – encounters someone who may be in the process of being radicalised towards terrorism, it is critical that the individual is offered the appropriate support. We believe that clear guidelines are needed for all healthcare managers and healthcare workers to ensure that cases of radicalisation whether among staff or patients are given the attention and care they deserve. 10.146 Evaluation of Prevent referrals in the health sector is improving but, as with other sectors, is incomplete. The Department of Health is addressing this issue. 10.147 Over the next year, the Department of Health will aim to deliver Prevent through those local organisations who manage mental health and offender health, prior to covering wider health communities such as primary care and hospitals. It is key that these organisations address Prevent through organisational governance and policies. Over the life-time of this strategy the Department will: • develop knowledge and carry out awareness raising events for frontline workers in the public, private and voluntary health sectors;• strengthen work with partners such as BIS, to ensure that Prevent principles are properly embedded in university hospital trusts;• further develop awareness-raising and training products;• raise awareness of the parallels between Prevent and safeguarding guidance and procedures for adults and children to promote gradual mainstreaming of Prevent;• improve guidance of corporate governance policies and procedures to allow referrals and concerns to be raised with confidence; and• work with regional and local health organisations to expand support to Channel groups and other key partners to ensure that they have access to appropriate advice and support through healthcare interventions…
…Practitioners reported that they had difficulty in ‘measuring the distance travelled’ by young people before and after an intervention had taken place. Many projects relied on participant feedback: this tends not to be a reliable measure. One project sought to develop a psychometric tool for measuring impact but this required considerable resource. 10.184 In October 2010, funding ceased for 33 projects assessed by OSCT and the YJB to be focusing on cohesion-type issues. The remaining 20 projects focused more on de-radicalisation and counter-radicalisation. In the future, services of this kind will be made available through YOTs across the country, with a focus on priority areas. YOTs will utilise standardised risk assessment procedures and will have access to community-based support projects and other interventions providers through Channel. 10.185 We believe that work to support young offenders and people vulnerable to offending is critical to the long-term success and credibility of Prevent. We judge that future work should be focused on ensuring that front-line members of staff are trained to recognise the signs of radicalisation and are aware of the support available to them. This should include a robust understanding of the referral process and the existence and nature of interventions that may be available through a range of providers, including Channel. The YJB and MoJ will work to ensure that any high risk young person that comes to the notice of the youth justice sector will be identified and offered appropriate support. 10.186 In common with many other areas of work, we consider that OSCT should have provided greater clarity on what was required from the outset from the YJB interventions and exercised greater and more consistent levels of oversight and monitoring. Many of the problems identified by the University of Huddersfield could have been overcome with greater clarity from the outset…
… Policing
11.18 The police have played a central and a vital role in implementing the last Prevent strategy. That contribution is reflected throughout this document in work to disrupt people engaged in radicalisation; in support to vulnerable people and the innovative Channel programme; and in work alongside and within key sectors, including education, health, the internet, criminal justice and with faith groups. Policing has played a galvanising role in developing local Prevent partnerships and bringing together a wide range of other organisations to support the strategy.11.19 Central to police work has been a network of Prevent coordinators developed in 2008 at both regional and force level. This network has been supported by new Prevent Engagement Officers (PEOs) who connect counter-terrorism policing, neighbourhood policing and communities. PEOs have developed community contacts and an understanding of community issues; identified Prevent-related risks; generated Prevent projects and shared information with Prevent partners to support strategic objectives.11.20 Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) form part of Neighbourhood policing teams and work with local communities to provide a visible police presence and build relationships with the public. PCSOs contribute to Prevent objectives by helping PEOs to build trust and confidence in policing and create stronger and safer communities.11.21 In common with other areas of Prevent, we have found it hard to assess the overall impact of Prevent policing, although for some projects (for example Channel) that is easier than others (for example, support to Prevent work in schools). We note polling that indicates that Muslim respondents were more likely than the general population to give a positive appraisal of the police (excellent or good) and least likely to rate the police as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.105 We have seen no evidence that Prevent work has damaged police and Muslim community relations. We believe the evidence points in the opposite direction.
The police and local communities are now talking to each other about the threat of terrorism – and ways to reduce it – in ways that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago.11.22 A contributing factor to the trust built in communities has been the extent to which Prevent policing officers and staff have represented the communities they have served. In 2010, a staff survey revealed that over 30% of posts were of black or minority ethnicity. This compares to a national average of 4.6% for police officers and 7.4% for police staff. 11.23 On occasions, the police role in Prevent has been seen as disproportionate for a programme intended to deal with people who have not yet engaged in illegal activity. There have been allegations – to which we have referred several times in this review – that Prevent has been a pretext and means for spying on communities. In the course of this review, some police officers have expressed concern to us that at times they have been left taking responsibility for Prevent delivery in some local areas to an extent that they also find unwelcome. 11.24 In the early days of the programme, Prevent funding was used by forces to recruit Prevent Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Officers (CTIOs) as well as PEOs. Of the 321 new dedicated Prevent police officers in 2008, 80 were CTIOs (67 of whom were funded by OSCT), distributed across 42 forces.105 Innes, M., Roberts, C. and Innes, H. (2011)
11.25 The role of CTIOs was to work alongside PEOs and neighbourhood policing teams, to inform and guide their community engagement and to determine how local police and partner resources should be focused to deal with any threats. 11.26 Using information in this way is a central, routine element of effective policing. Communities expect local police to act on the information that becomes available to deal with any risks. But the language used to describe this activity encouraged the view that the police may be engaged in covert (rather than overt) activity around Prevent which in turn undermined trust. To address these concerns, ACPO and OSCT ceased all future Prevent funding of CTIOs from the beginning of the 2011/12 financial year.11.27 We have noted that funding for Prevent policing has been greater than funding for local authorities and that the police have very often been able to recruit more people to deliver Prevent than their local authority counterparts. To some degree (but not entirely), that explains the mismatch in burden sharing. It is also true that very often police officers were more familiar with counter-terrorism than others and therefore adapted faster to Prevent. We also note that some local authorities have been reluctant to engage in Prevent, in some areas reflecting concerns from elected councillors. We believe that this is changing but we are conscious that it remains an issue.
11.28 We regard Prevent as a programme which is not owned by policing but in which policing has a central role to play. Prevent must be a cross-Government and cross-community programme to meet its objectives. The changes made to this new Prevent strategy are intended to address objections to the proportionality of the strategy and the role of the police in it. We have also indicated above that we must keep under close review the balance of investment in policing against local authorities and communities. 11.29 But we are clear that policing has a key role in the delivery of aspects of all three of the objectives set out in this new strategy. We place particular priority on projects to disrupt terrorist and radicalising material on the internet and radicalisers working in this country; the further development of Channel-type projects; and stronger relationships with key sectors, including education, and with faith groups and organisations.11.30 It is clearly essential that Prevent policing develops community trust. We have made clear that the allegations that Prevent is a pretext and means of spying undermine that trust. 
Prevent must not be used for this purpose.11.31 Policing is not devolved in Wales. However, the police operate in a delivery landscape where a number of key delivery organisations are devolved. The Welsh Counter-Terrorism Unit (WECTU) works closely with the Welsh Assembly Government to oversee the implementation of Prevent…”