Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Lord Scriven and Baroness Brinton

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 13A and 13B. I want to comment on my noble friend Lady Buscombe’s contribution a minute ago. I am not sure that it helped the Minister. I think it explained why we need Amendments 13A and 13B, because the most important thing about implementing Prevent is to recognise that each of our communities differs and that each community, area and specified authority should have due regard to the impact in order to understand it and to pass that message back to central government to understand the change in the nature of terrorism and radicalisation.

That is why I believe that Amendment 13B is valid. It is an extra tool in the box to make sure that we are monitoring what is happening, at whatever level and in whatever specified authority, to the range of people it is going to affect—including, interestingly, pupils who are under sixth form and under student age. What is happening is not consistent across the country. There may be young girls in one area talking about going to Syria; there are young Muslim British girls in other areas who are appalled by that. As a society we need to understand the nuances of that. The briefing that we have had from the Muslim Council of Britain sets that out very clearly. The one thing that we must do is to make sure that we do not have alienation on a grand scale. We need to understand that what is happening is not the same in every single community.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend in Amendment 13A. I want to share my experience as a former leader of Sheffield City Council to say how difficult this is. We make a grave mistake by talking about the Muslim community as though it is a homogenous group of people. They are people with many different beliefs, different processes and different understandings of what is happening worldwide. When I was leader of Sheffield City Council, very strict central guidelines came in with Prevent. That ended up setting not just community against community but different people of the same community against each other, because we were not allowed to have leeway to make judgments or to put in place policies and practices that were relevant to our local context.

What became clear to me, and to many other council leaders across the country, was that unless we got it right from a bottom-up approach, by working with and for those different people in the community, we would alienate more people than we brought in. One of the key findings of the Audit Commission report on the last Prevent programme back in 2008 was that there should be more of a bottom-up than a top-down approach. I have no doubt that the Government’s intentions are well meaning. I have no doubt that there is a view that if you have a set of guidelines from somebody in Whitehall, it is applicable across the country. However, my personal experience tells me that it is best to be more bottom-up than top-down on these issues, otherwise we will not just set community against community but cause tension because of the people within those communities who have different opinions.

I ask the Minister to consider this amendment very seriously. Past experience of my own and the Audit Commission report of 2008 make it very clear: a top-down approach which does not take this into consideration as a major part of implementing Prevent will have unintended consequences and will mean that we have good intentions but bad implementation of something that we all support.

Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Lord Scriven and Baroness Brinton

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want to make a couple of brief comments on Amendment 103A. I echo my noble friend Lady Warsi’s comments about a review of the Prevent strategy, for all the reasons that others have spoken about. We also need to look at where different approaches have been taken. I think I spoke at Second Reading about Watford, but what I did not say is that Watford took only the community money; it did not take the surveillance money. Actually, Watford was the one place in which, on the Sunday after the Paris shootings, the traditional march in honour of the birth of the Prophet became a march in honour of those who had died. Members of the community other than those of the Muslim faith joined in that march. That is where community work through Prevent is at its best. My worry is that we have not seen a proper survey of Prevent, although it has been in operation for the best part of a decade.

I return briefly to Amendment 103A. My noble friend Lady Sharp said that the reasoning behind this probing amendment might seem slightly contradictory, but it seeks to get to some word definitions. There is a further problem around definition: the Bill itself talks mainly about “terrorism” while the statutory guidance talks about “extremism”, but the balance between the duty on extremism versus terrorism is quite distinct. I certainly cannot marry up the clauses in the Bill with some of what is set out in the guidance. I would be grateful if my noble friend could help with this as well.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for not having taken part in the Second Reading of the Bill, but I was out of the country. I wish to speak to this amendment because I was the leader of Sheffield City Council at the time when the Prevent strategy came in. I think that we may be going down the road of repeating past mistakes. When Prevent was brought in, it was not statutory but it was driven by a lot of central guidelines. It became clear to me and many council leaders that these central guidelines were not appropriate to our communities. The community of Sheffield is very different to the community of Bradford just down the road. The complexity of dealing with something like radicalisation requires a deep and thorough understanding of the community and context within which people work. Statutory guidance will mean that flexibility will go and straitjackets will come in because someone at a top-down level will decide that they know, from Whitehall, what is best for every community in this country

The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, made a very strong point. Until we know what actually works, how can anyone write evidence-based statutory guidance? Work has been done on this internationally. Rik Coolsaet, an expert at the University of Ghent, who used to be the adviser to the European Commission on Radicalisation, said very clearly that we do not yet know internationally what does or does not work on a deradicalisation strategy. Exactly what is going to be evidence-based in the statutory guidance? I asked a Written Question, which was responded to on 26 January:

“how many public bodies as defined in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill do not meet the provisions of the Prevent duty guidance consultation document, according to each category of public body”,

but the Minister was not able to answer. The Government do not know. This is a really important point: if we do not know exactly what is happening out there already, if we do not have an evidence base for what works, how can we say to public bodies, which understand the context of their locality far better than anybody else, “You have to do this to prevent people from radicalisation or extremism”?

Furthermore, it is important to understand that where the best international examples exist—noble Lords have already given two examples, particularly that of Hayat—it is not on a statutory basis nor via a statutory body but it is a community, bottom-up approach that is dealing with this, in not just a sensitive but an effective way. While I do not for one minute doubt the genuine and important reasons why the Government have started on this road, I believe that it will have unintended consequences that will not help the problem but could mean that statutory bodies at local level will have to deal with a greater and more difficult problem. I therefore ask the Minister: what evidence base will go into the statutory guidance which will help, and can he guarantee that it will be contextualised for the different and varied communities around this country?

[Baroness Brinton]

I would like to add to that last point and ask the Minister for an evidence base post-2009, because much has happened in the university and college sector since that date. It would be helpful to know this, given that his letter to those of us interested in this issue referred only to incidents before 2009.