Prevent Strategy

Lord Patel of Bradford Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel of Bradford]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend, Lord Noon, for having introduced this debate. Prevent is a very important strategy and one that I am very familiar with, having been asked by the previous Secretary of State for Committees and Local Government to undertake a rapid review of the original Prevent strategy. Over a period of several weeks, I visited 12 local authority areas and spoke to more than 700 people about their experiences of and attitudes to the Prevent strategy. The confidential report that I produced for the Secretary of State outlined a number of areas where I thought there needed to be improvements. Some of these issues have been addressed in the current revised strategy, which on the whole I welcome, but there are two particular issues which I believe need further clarification. Firstly, how are people, especially young people, engaged in Prevent? Secondly, how are professionals and elected officials being given the skills and confidence they need to challenge extremism and the way in which this causes further segregation between communities?

I shall speak first about the engagement of young people, and as the chairman of an organisation called the International Forum for Community Innovations, otherwise known as TIFCI. TIFCI works with a wide range of community groups across the country and has just finished a piece of work on extremism and the risks for young people from radicalisation. The work explored the issues for young people and the particular risks they face from radicalisation and extremism. During the course of the work TIFCI spoke directly to over 130 young people and children of both sexes, from a wide range of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds. In the first place, the risk they most strongly identified was that from the far right, particularly the EDL, which they perceived to be causing disruption and harm to their sense of belonging and community cohesion. We very clearly should not take our focus off the threats posed by the far right. But what struck me even more strongly was the near universal view that, as young people—a key group who are identified as being most at risk—they were not actively consulted or involved in finding solutions and strategies to deal with the problems. Many of them said, when commenting on the work programme of TIFCI, that it was the first time anyone had even asked them about this issue. Does the Minister agree that young people, especially those at risk, should, wherever possible, be involved in and actively engaged with any work undertaken in this area and could he say something about what is being done to encourage this?

From my experience, including the work that I did reviewing the previous Prevent strategy, I believe that the second key issue concerns the skills and confidence among professionals and elected officials on the ground and their ability to challenge people and to address some of the issues that divide our communities. I strongly believe that they have not been adequately equipped to do this. Sadly—I have seen evidence of this many times in my work on community engagement —there remain deep divisions in our society and too many communities live separate lives, having little or no contact with their neighbouring communities even within their same town or ward. I agree with my noble friend Lord Noon that it is this division, the lack of community cohesion integration that is the greatest threat to our security. It is in this failure to have people meeting and interacting with each other outside their immediate family and community networks that the greatest risks of extremism and radicalisation take hold. If we recognise this then we can start to move away from thinking simply about one religious group or another and begin to work with whole communities and finding solutions that truly promote integration and challenge extremism. This is going to take high quality training for professionals and elected officials and at local levels we need to see clear implementation plans that provide direction and leadership. I would be very grateful if the Minister in his closing remarks could explain what plans are being developed to implement training and capacity building for professionals, youth workers, social workers, and very importantly, elected officials, to ensure that they can take the leadership on addressing these important issues at a local level.