Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
180-227)
MS SHEILA
LOCK, MS
HEATHER WILLS
AND COUNCILLOR
ALAN RUDGE
11 JANUARY 2010
Q180 Chair: Can I just ask each of
you to say which council you are from, maybe starting over here.
Ms Wills: Heather Wills, I am
Head of Community Cohesion & Equalities from Barking and Dagenham
Council in London.
Ms Lock: I am Sheila Lock. I am
the Chief Executive of Leicester City Council.
Councillor Rudge: Councillor Alan
Rudge, Cabinet Member for Equalities & Human Resources, City
of Birmingham.
Q181 Chair: Thank you very much indeed.
We are interested obviously in exploring your specific experience
rather than general principles, if we may, so if each of you could
just explain what you think are the key issues that you have learned
from dealing with violent extremism in your particular area and
whether there are aspects of your own local communities which
have influenced the way in which you are approaching the issue?
Ms Wills: I think the importance
of understanding Prevent from a local perspective is absolutely
fundamental, which goes back to the point about the role of local
authorities working as part of local strategic partnerships. We
have each understood the issues and the challenges of Prevent
as they affect our own local area and I am very conscious that
the issues in Barking and Dagenham are very different from the
issues that Robin has been facing in Waltham Forest or down the
road in Tower Hamlets, and that is something about the levels
of people in the population who are already radicalised or who
are at risk of radicalisation. It is a real continuum and therefore
the interventions that we have and the nature of our action plans
will vary very much, so that is why it is very important for us
to each understand the local context and develop our own action
plans, albeit informed and supported by the learning that our
colleagues elsewhere in the country are doing.
Q182 Chair: The answer I was hoping
for was a specific example from Barking and Dagenham of what you
believe in your borough are the key issues that you are focusing
on, particularly given you have extreme right wing activity going
on as well.
Ms Wills: For us the work that
we do on Prevent is very much embedded within our wider
approach to community cohesion and therefore we certainly would
not see it as something separate. It is just as important that
the wider population does not form a mistaken view that there
is a problem with radicalised Muslims in our borough; there is
not. What we have identified is there is a risk of radicalisation,
risk of extremism and therefore it is appropriate that we put
in place measures to prevent that happening in the future.
Q183 Chair: I am still having difficulty,
pragmatically, specifically how do you do that?
Ms Wills: To give you an example,
one of the focuses of the programme that John Denham has focused
around is about improving and increasing the resilience of communities
to deal with these issues themselves, so for example we are developing
a community forum for Muslim communities as a subset of our local
faith forum to build capacity in local community leaders so that
they can take leadership and ownership of this and as they identify
concerns in their communities we can support them rather than
the local authority going in there and doing it to people, so
it is about building capacity, confidence, understanding of the
risks of the prevention agenda in local Muslim communities.
Q184 Chair: The same question obviously
but in relation to Leicester?
Ms Lock: Leicester is a very diverse
city, as members of the Committee probably know. Our approach
generically has been one of partnership with the agencies including
the police, probation, local prisons and with local community
groupings. We are very much taking an approach that is unique
to Leicester. I would not in any way suggest it is an approach
that can be provided in other places for some of the reasons Heather
has already said, but the main elements of our approach have been
firstly to understand our communities better. That is because
the nature of the way Prevent funding has come to us has
made assumptions, I think, that the Muslim community is a homogenous
group and our own experience has been that that is not the case,
and therefore we have had an element which has been about social
research, working with our local universities to understand our
communities better and to understand our Muslim communities better.
Secondly, to make sure that our approach is rooted in a sustainable
strategy for cohesion which is about strong, resilient neighbourhoods
which have an accountability democratically to local ward engagement
processes. Thirdly, to focus on specific work with groups that
we know we need to work with on the Prevent agenda, so
young people, women in particular, promoting the next generation
of community leaders, specific mentoring support for vulnerable
people are some examples of some of that specific work that we
have undertaken.
Q185 Chair: I believe you have renamed
the programme. Is that right?
Ms Lock: Yes, we do not talk about
Prevent in Leicester. Prevent for us created a number
of issue in terms of creating a barrier that we felt was unnecessary,
so we retitled it and talk about moderation and the way in which
we mainstream moderation as part of our community cohesion strategy.
Q186 Alison Seabeck: Is that programme
just using Prevent money or are you drawing in funds from
elsewhere?
Ms Lock: No, it uses a variety
of funding coming together, so in effect what we create is a virtual
pooled pot of funding which enables us locally to determine how
best we set that against a set of priorities, so we use some of
our money around neighbourhoods, we use some of our money that
is delegated towards community meetings and democratic accountability
but we also use some of the money that is available to us through
Prevent resources. What we have tried to do is develop
a coherent strategy that recognises that there is a continuum
here that we are talking about from building strong, resilient
communities that can cope with all sorts of issues, through to
dealing with those issues which are at the very far end which
are, quite rightly, the jurisdiction of the police, those issues
that are hard end, but also making sure that it is rooted in a
strategy for tackling disadvantage and some of the reasons why
people exhibit extremist behaviour perhaps because they are disenfranchised
from the local systems of democracy.
Q187 Mr Betts: Just two follow-up
points. First of all, have you any problems with the CLG or the
Home Office approving funding being used in that way? Secondly,
is the funding of those programmes available just for use within
the Muslim community or within the wider community as well?
Ms Lock: In terms of the first
question we had some difficulties initially, yes, and that probably
will not come as a surprise. That was because the funding was
so rigidly interpreted in relation to Prevent and was to
some extent at odds with the approach that we wanted to take locally
and that we wanted to take on the basis of consultation we have
had with our community groups. We stuck to our guns really and
felt that if we were going to make use of that money that a broader
spectrum and a broader approach was necessary. To some extent
that has been reinforced in the later guidance and in John Denham's
speech in December. I think that was really important to us. In
terms of the specificity of applying the funding to just Muslim
groups, we wanted an approach in Leicester that enabled us to
talk about building strong, resilient communities across the piece
that made resilience have a resonance for our community groups,
whether we were talking about Muslim extremism or the activities
of the far right, and so talking about a virtual pooled budget
approach around neighbourhoods enabled us very much to take that
kind of approach where we could be more distributive in our allocation
of funding across a broader spectrum of services to be available
at local and community level.
Q188 Dr Pugh: Could I ask you about
the word "resilience" and your use of it because it
does intrigue me what exactly this word means. Is it possible
to have a community becoming more resilient but less well integrated
or cohesive with the wider society?
Ms Lock: I think that is possible.
That is why what you have to have is an approach that is about
building strong, healthy communities in the context of safety
but also in the context of making sure that you have cross-community
dialogue. I guess that is why we took that kind of broader approach
in Leicester to thinking about what resilience actually meant.
For us it meant working with communities to make them stronger
to all sorts of issues but also making sure that across the city
as a whole that there were opportunities for better cross-city
dialogue between different communities. That was really important
because the geography of Leicester is you have very settled patterns
where communities have settled in the city. Just as you heard
in the earlier evidence that no local authority is the same, I
think it would be wrong to assume that every single neighbourhood
is the same or indeed the needs of one group, particular faith
or religious group in one area is the same as that particular
group in another area of the city. They are hugely diverse.
Q189 Dr Pugh: So communities can
be resilient but not lose any of their natural traits? I imagine
that very orthodox Jewish communities that exist in parts of London
and Manchester are incredibly resilient but inward looking to
some extent and you are suggesting that part of resilience is
ability to negotiate with the outside world?
Ms Lock: Absolutely and to be
outward-looking not just inward-looking and to use that as a strength
so that what you are doing is playing into a city like Leicester
the strengths that some of those communities bring rather than
looking at it from a deficit model.
Q190 Chair: Can we move on to Councillor
Rudge from the Birmingham point of view.
Councillor Rudge: This was brought
about because I was going to initiate something in my own right.
We had Operation Gamble which was a police operation in Birmingham
which caused considerable emotion in parts of the community as
to the way it was carried out and the way it was operated, and
the way information was leaked to the press and media. As a result
of that I held various meetings in the Council House with people
representing the communities and areas which were most affected.
Q191 Chair: What year was this?
Councillor Rudge: This was early
2007. Out of these meetings I tried to work out what were the
areas that they most wished me to lead in activities to reduce
the potential of upset and, you might say, to create more resilience
in the communities and also reduce the chances of misinterpretation
of what is taking place and also to look at the way in fact it
tainted areas which just because they had someone who had some
criminal intent it tended to taint the whole area where the criminals
were located as if they were all part of the same thing. As a
result of this five themes came out, which I put in my report
to you. The things which came out were media, women, young people
and projects which linked things together. They were the ones
of maximum concern particularly the way the media had played it
out and where they did not feel there was trust as to where the
operation had taken place and it was maximising disturbance. As
a result of these meetings I decided that it would be appropriate
for me as leader of community cohesion as a separate thing to
try and work out how we could deal with the issues they had mentioned.
Fortunately, at the same time the Government said that they were
interested in preventing violent extremism, so as a result of
that it looked as though that funding would be very apposite in
trying to achieve what I wanted to achieve, so we put forward
a bid which was made up of 11 different parts under those headings.
Fortunately, we were successful and we received £525,000
as a pathfinder project. We had a nine-month period and that would
test out these different things. The important point was that
we were allowed the topics we had chosen which we thought were
the ones that would be effective, so we were allowed to proceed
with the ones we had chosen and thought of, which is why obviously
I was pleased to have the opportunity of that extra funding because
otherwise I would not have been able to carry out all the projects;
I would only have been able to carry out a few of them because
we would not have extra funding. At no time have we overplayed
the title. We have minimised the title. We did not go as far as
Leicester but we tended to use the phrase "PVE" rather
than "Preventing Violent Extremism" because it was not
popular because of its misconnotation, but nevertheless if you
explained what we were trying to do and where we were coming from
was the result of three big meetings in the Council House, they
knew that what we were doing was what they wanted to have done
so they tended to say so long as you did not pronounce it heavily
and use "PVE" the issue went away. In the future I think
that is something that needs to be looked at as to whether that
is the appropriate phraseology to use for what we are talking
about.
Q192 Chair: Have you had parts of
the community that have not got involved because it is called
Prevent?
Councillor Rudge: We must have
had really though they would not have said that to me. Obviously
the direction of the categories we are talking about in themselves,
to satisfy the criteria of the PVE programme, meant they to be
orientated towards people of the Muslim faith or deemed to be
Muslim communities and that was a narrowly defined part of the
original pathfinder.
Q193 Chair: So you have focused yours
entirely on the Muslim community not the wider community?
Councillor Rudge: We were advised
that was way to claim the money and those were the projects we
did. Somewhat similar to the previous speaker, we have been attempting
to broaden the scope of the use so that we can build up resilience
in all areas which are affected by any forms of extremism which
is of a nature which could lead to violence but not necessarily
be of violence because obviously incitement can be as provocative
as actually doing and of course it can encapture people into what
they want to achieve, what they have incited which ends up in
violence.
Q194 Alison Seabeck: How comfortable
are you as local authorities in terms of dealing with organisations
in your individual areas who may be seen by others to be slightly
more extreme or difficult? Would you embrace those organisations
if they wanted to participate or if your Muslim communities felt
they ought to be participating?
Councillor Rudge: I certainly
do not think I would use the word "embrace". What we
are trying to do is prevent people from joining organisations
that we might consider a threat to the stabilisation of our city
and our country, and so therefore one would be very cautious if
we were advised to do it and we would we have to investigate it
very carefully. People do get handles which perhaps they do not
deserve sometimes.
Q195 Alison Seabeck: How do you make
a judgment? If you have a mosque for example which perhaps may
not be signing up to the Prevent programme because they
would rather do it their way, who feel that whilst they may not
be directly be involved there are certain individuals who they
think should be involved but you have concerns about them, how
do you deal with them?
Councillor Rudge: It is very kind
of you to give me an easy example. I would obviously include any
mosque which wanted to enter into a dialogue or any organisation
of that nature. If you are talking about a prescriptive group,
I think I would—
Q196 Alison Seabeck: No, I am not,
I am talking about groups in the community who may well perhaps
have sprung up fairly recently, that perhaps do not have a long-term
history in the community and therefore it is quite difficult to
judge precisely where they are coming from. People get a bit suspicious
about new groups popping up but which may well have a lot of backing.
It may be a group of young people. We know groups do appear. How
would you engage with them?
Councillor Rudge: I would engage.
Q197 Alison Seabeck: They are not
somebody your local councillor knows.
Councillor Rudge: I would have
engaged regardless of the PVE programme because it is part of
my desire to create a city which is harmonious where people get
on together. If you ignore groups you are creating problems for
the success of what I am trying to achieve so they would have
been engaged anyway. PVE fortunately gave me some funding which
I could specialise in engaging in those areas. A perfect example
is misplaced publicity was created about a mosque in our own city
and it had a programme on the television. I have got very involved
with that mosque and that mosque itself has now gone through our
governance arrangements and has a very healthy democratic structure
in its operation, of its own choice, with our help wherever they
required our help, and they now are a major part in our community
and are playing a major role in the success of our city.
Q198 Chair: Can I just ask on that,
would you feel equally happy about interfering in a church or
a Sikh temple that seemed to have a not terribly democratic mode
of operation?
Councillor Rudge: The important
thing is we do not interfere. I would not interfere in the first
place but what we gave was options and opportunities and entered
into a dialogue and said what we could offer.
Q199 Chair: Would you enter into
a dialogue with a church?
Councillor Rudge: If they wanted
help. I do enter into dialogue with all the faiths. I have set
up a faith round table. In fact I am meeting next week in my faith
round table and the important thing is to engage with them if
they want assistance and ideas. We inform each other. I have got
a list of things for my faith round table which includes faith
auditing of the voluntary work they do and I would be more than
pleased to embrace all the major faiths in our city which play
an important role.
Q200 Chair: Ms Seabeck's question
about the quality of engagement to the other two?
Ms Lock: I was just going to say
the nature of local partnerships is critical to deal with the
kind of issue that you are raising. As in Birmingham, Leicester
also has a very active multi-faith group as well as a variety
of community leadership groups that meet on a regular basis to
talk about some of those issues around allocation of funding.
However, I also think that the way in which you allocate money
in itself is not the end of the process. It is also about the
accountability that comes with funding received. I think there
are challenges around how you measure whether the money is being
used for the purposes for which it is being given. For me locally
it has been one of the challenges around the use of some of the
national indicator set and indicator 35 which is around preventing
violent extremism. For me one of the indicators that is much more
helpful in measuring impact at a local level is—and I am
sounding very anoraky now—NI2 which is the one around sense
of belonging locally because I think that gives you an indicator
set that can give some very tangible outcomes and outputs that
you expect and that you can then monitor the way in which funding
is used as a contributory factor to that outcome set.
Q201 Alison Seabeck: Just to come
back on that, do you have a sense that money going in through
the programme is better targeted at that particular indicator
than the other one?
Ms Lock: Yes,
Q202 Alison Seabeck: Because you
are more likely with the other one, as we heard in previous sessions,
that money just goes to odd little conferences with nice dinners
and does not actually get down to the problems.
Ms Lock: For me at a local level
being able to frame a set of outputs and outcomes that link to
that sense of belonging indicator has been much more helpful in
measuring whether giving funding has made a tangible difference.
Q203 Chair: Can you answer the original
question?
Ms Wills: Yes I would certainly
endorse that as well. For us national indicator number 1 is one
part of our local area agreement.
Q204 Chair: Remind us what that one
is.
Ms Wills: The percentage of people
who believe that people from different backgrounds get on well
together, the community cohesion indicator. We saw that as a major
priority. For us NI35 is a self-assessment, it is a check-list
of are you putting things that are seen as the right inputs into
the process. The outcomes, as my colleagues says, are in national
indicators 1 and 2 in particular. That is why we took that decision
in our local area.
Q205 Alison Seabeck: Finally a question
that has again come out of other evidence is a lot of this is
being seen to be top-down. Even at local authority level it is
still seen to be top-down. What advice would you give to Muslim
organisations about how they can best engage and participate and
feel part of the programmes in your individual local authorities?
Ms Wills: Where we started at
the very beginning when there was a suggestion that we would be
a pathfinder authority is we brought together all of the community
contacts we had and talked with them about how do we think together
we can address this. So we have a steering group made up of community
representatives, representatives of the council and the police,
and together we work to pull together an action plan each year,
so it is not about the council imposing actions, it is about the
ideas and the engagement being very much from the community within
the context of the Prevent objectives that are set for
us.
Q206 Alison Seabeck: But all of you
at some point say there is a gap in terms of women and young people
here. Any advice to the wider public who are going to be reading
this?
Ms Wills: We are fortunate in
that we have two very strong community organisations for women
in the Muslim sector locally and they are on our steering group.
We have got some very good work with young people going on by
a number of the organisations who are on our steering group as
well, so we very much recognise it as a priority and it has been
part of our action plan throughout.
Ms Lock: I would endorse the comments
made by my colleague from Barking and Dagenham but I would also
add that sometimes I think we make ourselves feel better by thinking
that you go out there and you encourage people to apply and you
somehow cover the spectrum, and it does not work like that. I
think that you have to really work at the way in which you engage
local communities, not just Muslim communities but the whole spectrum.
I think that is why local authorities are in a good place to deal
with these kinds of issues because you have that democratic accountability,
but you also have lots of front-line services out there on the
streets talking to people about all sorts of things. I think that
in itself can act as a particular catalyst to try and make sure
that you get that broader representation of engagement that is
necessary.
Q207 Chair: Councillor Rudge?
Councillor Rudge: I agree with
what Leicester said then. My own view is although you cannot be
top-down you cannot automatically give the monies to organisations
and obviate your responsibility to try and work out what really
is going on. You have to go down to the very base level. What
we have tried to do in a number of our youth inclusion projects
and youth opportunity projects, for example, is to go right down
to the workers who are delivering at the face with the youngsters
and they produce programmes with us and we finance as they go
along. We do not just give lump sums to people and then they do
what they want with it. The point about it is we are at the very
level of meeting the people who we want to build the resilience
in, the ones who could easily be influenced to go in the wrong
direction, the ones who we want to feel they are part of our city
and are appreciated and reengage them if they are being disengaged
into our city. The projects we are doing like that satisfy both
criteria. They have sufficient confidence that we have clear accountability
and we have sufficiently involved ourselves as the local authority,
we are not just passing it on to someone else, and we are right
down at the level where we are supposed to be dealing with people.
I agree with Sheila that I think local authorities have the best
opportunity being a democratically elected group who should have
their feet on the ground in their communities to help deal with
the situation in a basic way.
Q208 Mr Betts: Just following up
this issue about how we can measure success in terms of this programme.
I suppose at one level we do not end up with extremists who do
things we would rather they did not do. I want to follow up on
this idea that you can get a better measure in terms of sense
of belonging, which I think Sheila Lock referred to, in terms
of creating an atmosphere where extremism is reduced. First of
all, I am not quite sure how you measure that. Perhaps you could
advise me. Secondly, is it not quite possible that you can have
a sense of belonging amongst the vast majority of the community
but the ones who do not have that sense are the ones we ought
to be worried about because they are still detached and alienated
and we have not got to them?
Ms Lock: I think there is a validity
in what you are saying around how do you make sure that in measuring
the money it has made a difference to the very people you want
to make a difference to. Of course, we do have with indicators
1 and 2 an opportunity through things like the Place Survey to
measure in our surveys of local residents within our cities whether
they feel part of the city, whether they feel engaged in what
is happening in the city, and that whole process of democratic
engagement in particular, but we also have other measures at a
community level, and I think the complexity of what we are talking
about here is that there is not one answer to many of these difficult
problems that we face and you have to draw information and evidence
about whether it is working from many sources and triangulate
that. If you simply took NI1 NI2 and said we will measure that
once a year or on a six-monthly basis, or however you decided
to do that, and that will be our measure for judging success,
that in itself would not be enough and I think that is why for
us locally sitting some of this work within the context of what
we are doing in our neighbourhoods and what we are trying to do
in the city as a whole gave us a much broader set of things against
which we could judge whether we were making a difference because
this is a continuum from people becoming disaffected for all sorts
of reasons at a local level, through poverty or education or all
sorts of things, right through to those people who then take those
grievances to the far extreme and become involved in activity
that is not appropriate, so one solution on its own, one set of
frameworks will not give you the kind of answers to the complex
questions that you face.
Q209 Mr Betts: Does that mean we
cannot measure success?
Ms Lock: We can measure success
in terms of looking at whether the way in which at a local level
we are working is making a difference to the way in which people
feel about where they live, but on its own that will not be enough;
we have to do other things. That includes doing some of the hard-edged
stuff which our police colleagues are most actively involved in,
which is identifying those individuals who are going to go on
to be involved in violent extremism and dealing with that. I think
that is quite rightly the territory of our colleagues within the
police.
Q210 Mr Betts: Can I just follow
that up. It is an issue that has come out from time to time that
the police quite rightly have a community policing role which
fits very well with some of the things you have just been describing,
and clearly there has to be a good working relationship with the
police on these issues. The police also have that hard edge and
counter-terrorism officers may approach things in a slightly different
way. How do you ensure that when working with the police and recognising
they have that hard-edged role (and sometimes local authorities
may need to approach some problems in that way as well) you do
not give a stigma to the whole of the programmes you are trying
to debate because "you are only getting this funding because
we think you are likely to be extremists"?
Ms Lock: Those kinds of challenges
are the kinds of challenges that people in local government leadership
face all the time about the way in which on the one hand you deliver
services but sometimes you might deliver services that people
do not want. We do that in a lot of circumstances. I think the
dialogue that you have at a local level amongst partners is really
critical, so if you are evaluating information that is available
to you, you are making those kinds of judgments about when the
line is reached at which the matter quite rightly becomes a matter
that on a single agency colleagues need to deal with. For me and
for Leicester on some of these issues around some of that very
hard-edged set of risk factors that suggest that at a local level
criminal activities are carried out, that is a police matter.
My role as a local authority chief executive is very much about
making sure that we have good strategies locally that encourage
people to get on well together and live in our community safely
and protected. I accept that in this current climate there are
some individuals that quite rightly police colleagues have to
deal with.
Q211 Chair: Can I just ask you on
that, do you think it should be the police who should be leading
Prevent or the local authority? I accept that both should
be involved but who should be leading it?
Ms Lock: My view is that local
authorities should be leading it and my view is based on the fact
that this is really about us working to prevent radicalisation
and to make sure that people do not reach that point where it
becomes a criminal matter. I think that local authorities have
a very good track record in delivering a whole range of preventative
services at a local level and recognising where that line is and
being able to pass that on when that is appropriate, but I think
if we are talking about ways in which we work with our communities
and ways in which we engage with our communities, the best people
to have that local leadership role are local authorities in partnership
with their LSPs at a local level.
Q212 Dr Pugh: You used the word "radicalisation"
and I notice it was used earlier on, but in fact Prevent
in terrorism is not about preventing radicalisation, it is about
preventing violence. Is it the local authority's job to inhibit
people from holding radical opinions?
Councillor Rudge: I think it really
depends what you mean by radical opinions. Most people are not
quite sure what radical means most of the time.
Q213 Dr Pugh: Let me give you an
example. Obviously foreign affairs features in the radicalisation
of some people anyway. If you have quite strong views on international
affairs that differ markedly and radically from the rest of the
population, is it the local authority's job to prevent them?
Councillor Rudge: If that person
advocates certain steps to achieve the support of the aims which
he is talking about and thereby encouraging people to take steps
which would destabilise his community he lives in and his country—
Q214 Dr Pugh: So you are not against
people in their communities holding radical views so long as they
preface that or add to that the fact that they do not advocate
violence?
Councillor Rudge: I think we have
to accept that people are entitled to have different views but
if the views threaten the actual structure of the society that
the person is residing in then it has reached a stage where it
is of concern to us. If you are trying to have a cohesive city
and you have somebody who is breaking it up or fragmenting it,
you have a worry.
Q215 Dr Pugh: In the case of Barking
you have councillors who have some quite radical views, do you
not? Is it your job to prevent people having radical views like
that as a local authority? There might be a general view that
people ought not to have those views and we combat them politically
but is it the job of the statutory local authority to prevent
people from having those views given that some of the elected
members are elected on those views?
Ms Wills: Given that you are particularly
referring to the Barking and Dagenham context, clearly there is
an official opposition in the council made up of the British National
Party which is a perfectly legal party and therefore it is legal.
Q216 Dr Pugh: Are their views radical?
Ms Wills: There are some people
who would count them as that.
Q217 Dr Pugh: Do you count them as
that?
Ms Wills: The distinction I would
make is that the council has a responsibility where there is a
risk of violence and, as Councillor Rudge says, where there is
a risk to the stability and the community cohesion of the local
authority.
Q218 Dr Pugh: Do the views of those
elected members have that threat?
Ms Wills: On the majority of occasions
the local members pursue their role as local councillors. Whether
they be councillors or members of the public, if they were to
get involved in a violent demo for example, then clearly our colleagues
in the police and we would be concerned about that.
Q219 Dr Pugh: Can you though accept
that there is distinction between preventing somebody from terrorist
action, where they would need to take a series of steps to find
out about bombs and all that kind of thing, affiliate to a network
and so on, and preventing people from adopting views which you
and I would regard as radical and in some cases wholly unacceptable?
There is a difference, is not there?
Ms Wills: The issue is that this
is an agenda and set of the objectives that are about prevent.
There is a continuum—
Q220 Dr Pugh: It is a preventing
terrorism not preventing having radical views strategy, is it
not?
Ms Lock: Yes. What we have to
be aware of is that there is a continuum of views that will start
with a number of risk factors and we need to be aware of those
risk factors and have a range of interventions we can put in place
when we see those risk factors rather than leaving it to a stage
where people have become so radicalised that it is very difficult
to make interventions.
Q221 Chair: We are actually getting
somewhere here. To use the BNP prism, you could say that those
individuals who are likely to go out and indulge in racist attacks
are quite likely to have been radicalised through membership of
the BNP expression of racist views, which is not to say that every
member of the BNP is necessarily involved in violence. As part
of the Prevent programme, and specifically as part of the
Channel project, if you are looking at individuals who
may be on the route towards violence, do you include in that individuals
who are members of the BNP expressing racist views and suggesting
everybody who is not white should be sent home again? Is that
also a trigger?
Ms Wills: Can I be clear for the
record the work that we are doing in Barking and Dagenham following
the objectives of the Prevent programme are very specifically
targeted at reducing the risk of violent extremism in the Muslim
community.
Councillor Rudge: That is correct.
The Government did say that. It did also say in the note that
we should challenge extremist ideologies and support mainstream
voices, which is quite clear as well. I think the whole point
we are saying is if anyone who wants to disrupt what we are trying
to do in community cohesion—the left, right or centre through
violent extremist ideology—our job is to try and challenge
it from the point of view of the community.
Q222 Dr Pugh: I may be a person who
is against a degree of community cohesion, say for example a Muslim
who would like to see Sharia law in a very strict form common
throughout the whole of their particular community. That is quite
a radical view in the UK and quite exceptional in the Muslim community.
It does not follow from that necessarily that they are advocating
a violent solution. It is the case that they have a radical view
and it is the case that their view is counter to community cohesion
but it is nothing to do with extremism per se, is it?
Councillor Rudge: It depends what
you are talking about. If you are thinking it might engender extremism
then you ought to consider it. For example, I have advised the
Minister, and he has agreed, that we should tackle other areas
and we should not stick narrowly to Muslim areas because other
areas are affected by what you do. One criticism we frequently
have is, "Why are you always putting funding in certain areas
and ignoring other groups of people completely?" You have
to get a balance to win your community over. If you want to look
at it we are doing two other areas outside because we want to
measure the effect of things that are being said on other communities
and how they feel about it. If you are trying to prevent you are
trying to get to a stage where you can prevent, not after the
event. We are trying to be there at an early stage to build resilience
and it needs to look at all communities. One of the things they
could consider about the PVE programme is widening it, as the
Secretary of State was saying, so it does not exclude looking
at the issue which I have just mentioned.
Q223 Dr Pugh: So what you are saying
is that funds which are allocated essentially for preventing violent
extremism can also be deployed to discourage people from forming
groups, affiliations, sets of beliefs and so on which would render
them less cohesive with the rest of the community?
Councillor Rudge: I never said
anything like that at all. What I did say was that people in other
areas can be affected by what is occurring and we may need to
consider what the effect is on that area and consider whether
we can assist in this because we may need to prevent other issues
arising as an effect and that is something we ought to consider
because that is a knock-on. What we have actually said are there
any initial things—the words are of course "preventing
violent extremism"—and that could cover any form of
problems. Other areas are affected by what you do. If you constantly
put money into certain areas other people affected may well feel
isolated themselves so we have to consider the big picture as
well when we are doing this. I am sure many people in some of
our communities and other ethnic communities feel the same. You
have to think of the whole picture and Preventing Violent Extremism
was narrow because at the time (and still) there was a prevalence
in certain areas where we need to build up more resilience, but
we cannot ignore other areas at the same time.
Q224 Chair: Ms Lock, on this issue
of quite how far local authorities are going to get into policing
thought.
Councillor Rudge: They do not
do it at all.
Ms Lock: The local authority role
is not to act as "thought" police very clearly but it
does have a community responsibility to ensure that it has an
area which is safe which takes appropriate steps to actually keep
people safe by talking with local people in a way that is partnership.
I think the debate has just illustrated exactly why Prevent
on its own cannot deliver the kind of safe communities that we
are talking about and local authorities have got to see Prevent
as part of a range of activities taking place at a local level
to deliver safe communities. The assumption that somehow you have
Prevent and you apply it to your Muslim population and
it will be okay is nonsense because actually Prevent in
itself is creating enormous tensions between sections of the Muslim
community for some of the reasons that have been already highlighted
in the question, because the way in which you can use that funding
to help minimise the risk and create protective factors, which
is what we are trying to build for some people who potentially
might go down that extremism route, the money is a very finite
pot anyway so it has to be targeted as appropriate.
Q225 Dr Pugh: Are we not muddying
the waters a little bit here. You talked about safety. In my example,
I would find it deeply regrettable and sad if a small section
of the Muslim community who quite happily wished to pursue a style
of life as in fact Orthodox Jewish communities have done in certain
parts of the country which in a sense cuts them off from the wider
community, which follows strict norms which they are very comfortable
with themselves (although other people may not be) and it would
make them, in your view, less resilient and less community cohesive
but it certainly would not make them safe. It would also make
their views more radical. I do not think you can use safety as
a basis for actually discouraging all the things you wish to discourage.
Ms Lock: Resilience for me is
not just about safety. It is about a whole set of community factors—
Q226 Dr Pugh: I am trying to figure
out what.
Ms Lock: —which are part
of a city and part of that democratic engagement and that democratic
life. I think the way in which we have approached it in Leicester
is very much to say Prevent is a stream of funding that
comes in that is very much targeted at that Muslim community,
but what a wasted opportunity that would be if we just saw it
in that way. What we have tried to do is see it in a much broader
kind of way that links to neighbourhood planning and community
cohesion. I think that is legitimately within the realms of a
local authority's work.
Q227 Chair: Thank you all very much.
If we could move on to the last set of witnesses.
Ms Lock: Thank you.
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