Speeches and Statements

Prevent strategy: background and next steps - speech to the BCU Commanders Conference

Speech by Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary, at the BCU Commanders Conference on 16 April 2008. The text below is as prepared.

Introduction

I’m delighted to be here to speak to you today, and particularly grateful to ACPO for organising this event.

I think it’s a mark of the importance that the police service as a whole attaches to preventing violent extremism and protecting our communities that so many of you are here today.

As senior officers, you have a crucial and trusted leadership role in delivering policing priorities in your areas. In making a real difference to the daily lives of our communities.

And when it comes to turning words into deeds – and making a reality of our strategy to protect communities from the threat of violent extremism – I can think of no more important or experienced group of people.

I’d like to pay tribute to the leadership that Norman [Bettison] has shown – and for his comprehensive understanding of how the service can help to transform the way we police the threat we face from terrorism.

Building on the values that already underpin your work, Norman has rightly identified a series of challenges for the service – including closer working with other agencies and with communities themselves. I share his confidence that you will meet them.

Today I would like to set out the background to the Prevent strategy and its key themes, as well as the next steps I believe are necessary to deliver it.

And I’m delighted that Hazel Blears is here as well – I am sure she is no stranger to many of you – to talk about the community aspects of Prevent.

The context

The CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy has four main components:

• pursuing terrorists and disrupting the immediate threats we face
• protecting our infrastructure and our borders
• preparing for any incident that may occur
• preventing radicalisation in the cause of violent extremism.

Since 09/11 and 7/7 the focus of our counter terrorist policing work has been on investigating and disrupting the terrorist networks that threaten the UK and our interests
overseas – the Pursue strand of CONTEST.

A great deal has been achieved. And it is worth reflecting for a moment on your successes so far in countering a terrorist threat that is serious, and sustained, and set on undermining the safety of all our communities.

Working with the security and intelligence agencies, you have brought perpetrators to justice – with 59 convictions since the beginning of last year.

In 2004, you stopped two key Al Qaeda operations that were both intent on causing mass casualties.

In 2005, your work enabled us to identify those involved in the 7/7 bombings, and to quickly detain those planning the 21/7 attacks.

More recently, the conviction of individuals in the ‘soldier plot’ in the West Midlands and other CT trials have demonstrated your ability to respond quickly and effectively to the changing threats we face.

In recent days, our television screens and newspapers have reported on the detail of the prosecution case in the alleged airline plot, and the number of forthcoming trials
indicates the level of your activity in bringing suspected terrorists to court.

As you know, the terrorist threat is very different from any we have faced in the past. It is less predictable and more international in nature, and it is of an unprecedented scale. More than 200 groups or networks and around 2000 individuals are being monitored by the police and security services.

I see senior police and security service officers on a regular basis to review current CT operations and what this means in practice. And the level of threat has led us to significantly increase the police resources devoted to counter terrorism.

New regional hubs have an important part to play in your work, and we will be expanding a fourth hub outside London – as well as devoting significant new resources for the Met. Together, these amount to some four hundred additional officers in the next three years.

You will be all too aware of the importance we must now place on acting quickly – often in the very early stages of investigations and before evidence has been gathered – to disrupt terrorist activities.

This is the rationale for the additional legal powers that your senior officers have requested and which I am now taking through parliament, including the provision to temporarily extend the limit of pre-charge detention in exceptional circumstances.

Pre-charge detention is an important part – but only a part – of the range of measures we need collectively to protect our security. Despite recent court rulings, I will also continue to seek deportation of foreign nationals living here who have been implicated in terrorist activity.

Vital though this activity is, success in countering terrorism means more than the effective pursuit and disruption of terrorists.

Certainly, it requires contingency planning and physical security, the Prepare and Protect aspects of CONTEST, where much progress has been made.

We know that there is a ‘small minority’ who threaten the safety of all communities in Britain – and we also recognise that we can neither arrest our way out of the problem nor protect ourselves to the point where the threat disappears.

The long-term challenge – the one you are addressing today – is preserving both our security and the values on which our society depends by preventing terrorism in the UK.

That means dealing with the consequences for our communities of those violent extremists who want to sow seeds of division.

It means preventing the vulnerable from being dragged into radicalisation and violent extremism in the first place.

As we have seen, it is in the wake of terror plots that Muslim communities can come under most pressure.

Understanding of the common values that bind us together – respect for the law, tolerance of others, freedom of expression and religion – can suffer. Sympathy for difference can be tested. The good work being done by Muslim leaders and others in our communities can be undermined.

The perverted form of Islam spread by violent extremists damages us all. If they are allowed to succeed – if they go unchallenged – our efforts to build a cohesive society
and to protect all in our communities become vulnerable.

The strategy

When the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism was established last year to coordinate our broad-ranging response to the threat, one of its early priorities was to
reassess the existing Prevent strategy.

That approach had already achieved a great deal in supporting community organisations in their efforts to challenge violent extremism, and the new Prevent strategy builds squarely upon this work.

It has identified five key challenges that we need to address and two capabilities that we need to develop. These are based on an assessment of what drives radicalisation in this country, and they will be at the heart of all that we do in response.

First, we need to challenge both an ideology and an image of terrorism. The ideology promoted by terrorists misreads a great religion, and wilfully distorts history and politics for its own purposes. The image glorifies the role of the terrorist and calls the indiscriminate killing of civilians heroic.

We need to challenge the propagandists for violence – and where necessary arrest, deport and exclude them – and protect the schools and universities, as well as prisons, where they operate.

We need to identify those who we believe are vulnerable to these propagandists, and support them wherever we can, through the better understanding we are now developing of the factors that place people at risk.

Like the other aspects of crime prevention you deal with every day, there is no single or easy solution. You, like a number of other agencies, come into regular contact with many of these people and we need to provide them with support, avoiding recourse to the criminal justice system where we can.

As Hazel will emphasise, much of our strategy depends on the work of our communities. In supporting their efforts, we need to understand the grievances that can encourage radicalisation – helping to resolve them where we judge we should, and being prepared to debate them at all times.

Two capabilities underpin the strategy as a whole. Constantly improving our understanding of what and who drives violent extremism – and improving the way we communicate about the threats we face and how we are responding. A new Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre Prevent Unit, now being set up, will generate more of this information and get it to you quickly.

This cannot be a strategy for government or the police to deliver alone. It must be a collaborative effort. We have worked hard to develop the strategy together, and to secure support for it across central, regional and local government.

But yours is a vital role in our efforts. Your work with local authorities, CDRPs, the criminal justice system, health and education agencies is key to the Prevent strategy’s delivery. And as your own Prevent plan recognises, that work depends for its success on engaging, supporting and understanding communities and civic society.

But the ideology that impacts on our neighbourhoods and communities can be inspired from overseas. Our strategy needs to be not only local, but international.

It is the Islamic world, governments and communities, that can best challenge it. The propagandists for violent extremism sit offshore; and our communities travel regularly overseas where they are directly subject to a range of influences that can further the radicalisation process.

One of our key achievements in the past few years has been the creation of an international network to conduct our counter terrorist work.

But I am clear that we now need another international network, which will look rather different, to tackle the Prevent agenda.

I had a glimpse of that network during my visit to Pakistan and Bangladesh last week.

The new government in Pakistan is determined to tackle the social and economic issues that it believes can create a climate for radicalisation.

It wants to take on the unregulated madrassas that provide a space for the propagandists of violent extremism. And it wants to challenge the world view of the terrorist, and communicate a credible counter narrative that will have an impact on communities in Pakistan and on communities here.

The same is true of Bangladesh, where the government is seized of the need to develop its own Prevent strategy, and alive to opportunities for starting a dialogue with its diaspora communities here. Bangladesh and Pakistan are seeking our assistance on this work. We have already done a great deal together, led by Foreign Office and our Department for International Development.

And last week I agreed with my counterparts to set up working groups to take forward our increasingly complex counter terrorist agenda in both these countries. Practical examples of closer working that I now want to explore could include inviting moderate imams from South Asia to support their counterparts in communities in Britain.

Delivery

Today’s seminar is rightly about delivery and not just strategy. We have developed practical programmes to ensure we will meet the challenging objectives we have set ourselves. And we have allocated funding to these programmes across government, some £90m million this year alone. We have committed ourselves to key targets this year:

• we are putting in place the structures to deliver Prevent
• we are developing work to support vulnerable individuals, communities and institutions, such as funding the crucial work that Anne Owers identified as
  necessary in her report this week
• we will continue to disrupt the propagandists for terrorism
• we will develop new material to better inform our work.

I have just agreed – with the Prime Minister, Hazel and my other Cabinet colleagues – a Prevent Delivery Plan that sets out in detail how we will achieve these objectives.

When I launch a public version of the Delivery Plan next month, I will also set out some detailed guidance to you and other local leaders on its key elements.

The ACPO Prevent strategy makes it clear that policing plays a key role in this Delivery Plan. I am grateful for all the work that has gone into it, and I want to confirm to you today that the additional funding secured in the Comprehensive Spending Review will be used to provide more than three hundred new police posts across the country over the next three years.

These will be officers and staff dedicated to Prevent – in addition to the almost four hundred new officers and staff to work on disrupting active terrorist networks that I have already mentioned.

Building on your existing work, the resources allocated now to Prevent will enable us to develop a new kind of counter terrorist policing.

Numbers, of course, do not tell the whole story. I wholeheartedly agree with the key principle in your strategy that Prevent should be delivered not just through new specialist officers but through the existing resources allocated to mainstream neighbourhood policing.

As much as other dedicated units, neighbourhood policing can incorporate Prevent activity as part of its core business – and I share your recognition that we must be more proactive about doing so.

It’s about using the specialist knowledge available to work in partnership with our communities, and it’s about knowing what works and what is already being achieved with vulnerable people and institutions.

It is time to move from a situation where we have excellent management of the operational consequences of counter terrorist work – in West Yorkshire, West Midlands, London, Manchester and other parts of the country – to one where the routine business of local policing includes:

• working with local communities to identify vulnerable individuals
• tackling those who disrupt neighbourhoods
• engaging with partners to address underlying social problems.

This is happening to good effect in many areas. With the additional resources now available, and with the support of the ACPO Plan, I believe we can put this approach
into practice much more systematically. 

Conclusion

I want to make three concluding remarks.

First, we need to be clear that the Prevent and Pursue agendas are closely linked. Your work to stop people becoming or supporting terrorists is not just about better engagement and support for communities and individuals, important though that is. It’s also about disrupting those who glorify terrorism – and prosecuting them where it is right to do so.

Second, Prevent needs to link to other policing priorities. This activity may be new, but the principles of the approach will be familiar. Many of you have made real progress in reaching out to communities through your existing counter terrorist work, and you are all working closely with vulnerable individuals on action to tackle drugs, guns and gangs.

Prevent can, and should, build on the experience and expertise you have developed elsewhere. And you should feel confident that the knowledge and skills you and your officers can bring to this challenge will be effective.

Finally, I repeat what I say about ownership of this strategy. To succeed, it needs to be shared. We have provided a framework and we will continue to update this as we make progress. We are providing funding, and guidance when you need it. We are looking to you for feedback on this, and for turning the strategy into delivery.

Through a shared analysis of the threat and a common purpose in delivering our response, I know that we can meet the challenging objectives we have set ourselves for the coming year. In doing so, we can all make our country a safer place to live.