Community Engagement Principles and Extremism Definition

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris]

The Home Secretary will have the chance to talk about the counter-extremism strategy in due course, but I assure the hon. Gentleman that we have been looking at the early signs from that review, and these were talked about in December by my hon. Friend the Security Minister. To some degree these were about the places in which hate festers rather than about legislative changes.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Our thoughts today are with the families of those three poor little girls and with everybody who was hurt in that terrible event last summer. It is inexcusable that state agencies missed vital opportunities to intervene in this devastating case, including at three crucial points following Prevent referrals. These failings shine a grim light on the significant cracks in our public services, following years of spending cuts and underinvestment. Will the Minister join me in calling for the public inquiry to consider the role of austerity since 2010 as a contributing factor to these terrible failings?

[Alex Norris]

Again, I am afraid I cannot pre-empt what the Home Secretary is about to say, but the hon. Lady will have the chance to put that point to her soon. In our community strategy and our attempts to ensure that communities are resilient ones where people can live together in harmony, we are of course considering what was said in Dame Sara Khan’s review, and one of the underlying causes that she raised concerns about was austerity. We need to make sure that we have well-resourced public services. We also need to ensure that people do not feel that there is any division in the allocation of resources that is in some way targeted against them. We know that that should never be the case and would never be the case, so of course we are considering that as part of our communities work.