Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential risks resulting from the Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit’s observation of (a) social media complaints about Prevent and (b) children's social media accounts.

The former Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU) was subsumed into the Office of the Independent Prevent Commissioner (OIPC) upon its creation in 2025 and no longer exists. Prior to the transfer of its functions to the OIPC, StaCU was part of the Commission for Countering Extremism. The exercise referenced in StaCU's 2024-25 annual report was undertaken as part of its independent oversight function, and the report was commissioned and published independently of the Home Office. As the OIPC does not currently undertake social media monitoring, neither StaCU nor the OIPC has collected any open-source observations about Prevent on social media websites since 1^st March 2025.

The open-source observations described in StaCU’s 2024-25 annual report were gathered as part of a specific and time-limited exercise to better understand how the delivery of Prevent was being discussed online and assess whether social media observations could help identify complaints or concerns requiring StaCU’s investigation. StaCU received information from a media monitoring service that identified publicly available references to Prevent, including material from open-source social media websites. This was an exploratory exercise, not an ongoing monitoring function.

Neither the Home Office, StaCU as a unit, or the OIPC holds a list of people or organisations that criticise the Prevent programme.