Prevent’s failure to stop Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been blamed on incompetence and a “tick-box” culture by former staffer Charlotte Littlewood.
Speaking on GB News, she said: “I think when we ask the question, is it Prevent’s fault, that’s probably too broad a question. What we know is that this was never referred up to Channel.
“It didn’t move from the first responders who would have got the call, possibly from the school or the home, to say ‘we’re worried about this individual.’
“The Prevent practitioner who took that call then did not decide, when filling out the form about risk and ideology, that it should be passed to Channel. So unfortunately, I think this is a very localised failing.
“I don’t understand, considering at the time he had a ‘mixed/unclear/unstable’ category, why, considering he’d engaged in various ideological inclusions [such as] the IRA, an inclination towards mass shootings.
“I know that in 2019 he’d wanted to go and stab what he saw as racist bullies, so perhaps far-left extremism.
“These are ideological leanings. Yes, it’s mixed. It’s unclear, we’re now calling it ‘colliding ideologies’. Why was he not referred under that stream?
“And I think that’s because that is unclear and it’s misunderstood, and there needs to be a lot of training rolled out across the country on this increasing and emerging threat.
“Most of the cases [referred to Prevent] have been mixed and unclear so we need to understand that better.
“Prevent cases come in as a risk, perhaps from the school. They’ve had training, they’ve noticed that this child or young adult is engaging with a dangerous ideology or becoming violent towards classmates.
“There’s a phone call. A Prevent practitioner takes that, fills out a risk assessment, essentially. And if they find that person to be capable of violence, holding an ideology and a potential terrorist, it then goes to the Channel panel.
“This is safeguarding, police and a multi-faceted channel with different parts of the local authority and police sit around and decide, ‘what do we provide for this individual? Is it mental health support? Is it specific ideological counselling?’
“Somebody had the form to fill in and didn’t fill it in correctly which is something that I found when I was in Prevent.
“We often had Prevent practitioners who had been brought in, maybe from other areas, maybe the charitable sector had been moved in and didn’t quite have the grasp of radicalisation and extremism.
“We really need to have the top people who really understand this threat in these positions, and sometimes that was about a fear of having people who understood it perhaps too well being overzealous with referrals.
“There was sometimes a dulling down of skills.
“I believe that this is incompetence and I believe that the incompetence around colliding ideologies is quite broad.
“And we’re seeing young men in particular, alone in front of the computer, not being radicalised into any particular ideology, but just being fascinated by violence.
“And where do we put that? Where does that land? I think it should land, in this case, definitely with Prevent. Sometimes the ideology is really unclear.
“How come Child Services, with four or five phone calls, didn’t pick this up? Maybe there needs to be more on people who are just fascinated with violence.
“The system is very sophisticated. It works very well when implemented properly. We’ve had a review of Prevent and the recommendations haven’t been implemented.
“There will be a case review. That’s great, but another broad review of thresholds. William Shawcross has already looked at thresholds and made recommendations.
“So I do think we need to stop putting public funding into more reviews and implement what we already have.
“That has been a problem [of people not wanting to cause offence] I personally experienced that as an issue. But in this case, no, it was the fact that it was mixed/unclear and he was so incredibly violent with a very confused idea of, what did he want to be?
“Far left? killing racists? Did he want to be IRA? Did he want to be al-Qaeda?
“It was the lack of clarity over where he wanted to put his violent tendencies that caused him to fall through the cracks.
“That [mixed] box existed, but it was removed. So ‘mixed/unclear’ did exist, but it ended up being so confusing for practitioners, they decided that it needed to be refreshed.
“It’s the civil service. It’s a ‘computer says no’ bureaucratic, tick box exercise.
“There needs to be flexibility. A massive failure here was communications.
“Another thing I experienced often in Prevent is there is a completely blanket ban on speaking about cases.
“Now, obviously, if you’re going to have contempt of court on an issue, that’s difficult.
“But here, pre-riots, it would not have caused a problem for the investigation to have said ‘he’s not a migrant and he didn’t come on the boats.’
“I think communication has been a big failure. Prevent needs to communicate better. It needs to train its practitioners better, and it needs to understand, yes, it’s a developing and emerging threat of just a fascination with violence amongst particularly young men.”
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