UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 65-ivHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFORECOMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE
PREVENTING VIOLENT EXTREMISM
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935 |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee
on
Members present
Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair
Mr Clive Betts
Andrew George
Anne Main
Dr John Pugh
Alison Seabeck
Mr Andy Slaughter
________________
Witnesses:
Mr Minhaz Khelya, from
Q261 Chair: Can I welcome you to this afternoon's session on Prevent? I think we have agreed, exceptionally, that one of you or all three of you are you going to do a very brief presentation to start.
Mr Khelya: My name is Minhaz and I am
from
Ms Carroll: The National Steering Group was made up of a diverse group but this is important because terrorism and violent extremism do not just affect young Muslims; they affect all communities. With the NSG being such a diverse group, this encouraged other groups at the events to come along and talk about how it affects them as well. Community cohesion affects all young people. I am from a Gypsy background so necessarily some people would not think that would affect terrorism but, having all the different groups, it brought a different opinion to the table each time.
Mr Clews: I was just going to talk about three of our recommendations and findings which came from the report and relate that to a couple of points made by Minnie.and Lisa. The first was the point Lisa just made. It is quite disempowering as young people to see our report be completely ignored by government. For example, when it targets Prevent as a whole, it targets the Muslim community as a diverse range group of young people, we find it quite disempowering and disengaging to see that going on, especially when we are so diverse. We acknowledge that terrorism and violent extremism affect young people from every community and every background. For example, in the south west, you had three examples of Andrew Ibrahim, Nick Reilly and more recently with Abdulmutalab. Even though he did convert to Islam they are not just very typical terrorists. Also on Minnie's point, we create safe spaces for young people to talk about the issues of terrorism and violent extremism. One of the key findings from our report was that young people did not trust the police to run similar conferences. What we have found out from this work is that the police do intend over the next year to run a series of conferences around terrorism and violent extremism to consult with young people, basically doing what we have just done. That is quite shocking, as young people do not trust the police and there is no relationship there for them to work on. Thirdly, we made a constructive criticism to DCSF on the terrorism toolkit, based on consultations with teachers and youth workers. From what we heard and in our opinion, it was not working and it was not being as effective as potentially it could have been. When we presented that view to them, it was completely shot down and ignored. That is really where we would like to finish and welcome your questions if you do have any.
Ms Carroll: The Department for Children, Schools and Families - we have been waiting six months for an answer on funding, which is leaving us disheartened as a national group but also all the other young people who are waiting for an answer to see if this project is going to be brought forward and carried on.
Q262 Chair: Have you largely engaged with the Department of Children, Schools and Families or with any other government departments?
Mr Clews: The project itself was funded by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Department for Children, Schools and Families and also the Home Office, so we have engaged with all three but primarily DCSF.
Q263 Chair: Not with DCLG, which is our parent department?
Mr Clews: No.
Q264 Chair: We are slightly circumscribed as to the critique of other departments that we can get into, if I may say that to you. Obviously, we are particularly concerned about the programme that CLG is funding in communities through Prevent. Does the Youth Parliament have any view about the sorts of organisations that CLG is engaging with and funding in various places, including I imagine Blackburn, and whether young people in those areas are being properly involved and consulted?
Mr Khelya: We have heard of the Muslim Advisory Group. I think that is run by the DCLG. We were also invited by the DCSF to give a joint presentation on the report that we compiled in July. We thought that it was not fair because they were basically jumping on our bandwagon. We did this work and they wanted to take credit for it. That is as far as we know about the Muslim Advisory Group.
Mr Clews: From our findings, overwhelmingly young people have said that they do not approve of tokenistic youth organisations, especially because they have acknowledged themselves that it does affect young people through their different communities. Why is there a Young Muslim Advisory Group but not a Young Christian Advisory Group? Why is there not a Young Hindu Advisory Group? It seems to me that it is all tied to the one community when the problem is not exactly with that community.
Q265 Chair: Are you defending your own turf and suggesting that if the government wants to consult with young people it must do it through the Youth Parliament?
Mr Clews: I would not necessarily say that, no. I think what I am saying is that terrorism and violent extremism is an issue which affects young people from all communities and Prevent needs to be reflective of that. I do not want to score any own goals here today.
Q266 Alison Seabeck: I want to ask you very quickly about sounding boards and the government's Muslim Advisory Group. You said why not have other groups involved. Do you think there is any value at all in having feedback from this particular group? Do you have any sense that this particular group is representative of young Muslims for example, because often we find we have a group of people who have their own agenda and purport to be representative. Would you say this group was representative of young Muslims, from your experience?
Mr Khelya: I would not say they were representative, as the UK Youth Parliament, to be honest and that is basically because members of the UK Youth Parliament are elected by their local young people.
Q267 Alison Seabeck: How many Muslims are members of the UK Youth Parliament?
Mr Khelya: 18 per cent.
Q268 Chair: I am not asking you personally but can the Youth Parliament maybe provide us afterwards with any data on the number of Muslim members of the Youth Parliament? I guess I would want to ask on that whether, when the issue was discussed - I accept this is not just an issue for young Muslims - was there a variety of Muslim viewpoints or did the Muslim members of the Youth Parliament tend to have rather similar views to each other? I am just asking how broad the debate was within the Youth Parliament.
Mr Clews: Do you mean with respect to the conferences?
Q269 Chair: Yes. With respect to the issue about terrorism and violent extremism.
Mr Clews: I am not sure I understand the question.
Q270 Chair: One of the issues that has been put by other witnesses in relation to the government's engagement with members of the Muslim community for example is whether it is only engaging with a relatively narrow band of opinion within the British Muslim community - that would apply to young British Muslims - or whether it is also engaging with the more radical fringes whom, it can be argued, are particularly important if the government is trying to engage and affect young people who might be drawn to more extreme views. I am simply seeking to understand whether, in the events that the Youth Parliament organised, the strength of Muslim opinion that was expressed was a wide one including what might be described as quite immoderate and extreme views, or whether it actually was fairly mainstream.
Mr Clews: The statistics are here in our report, which I am sure you have seen. At the back of it, it does outline the number of young Muslims. Obviously we have not gone into the details, whether they are Sunni or Shi'ite, but I am sure with further consultation we will be able to.
Chair: I was thinking more about the views expressed.
Q271 Anne Main: Can I put it a slightly different way? Are you a fairly self-selecting group? Therefore, Muslims within your group are fairly moderate in their views so all the views expressed to you are quite moderate? In the debate you had, were you confident that you yourselves were attracting people from a wide spectrum of Muslim views?
Mr Khelya: I would say it was variable in each region. I was at the north western regional conference and we invited loads of groups from different backgrounds and many from different Muslim backgrounds as well. We had quite a lot of people attending but obviously anyone could have come to that. It does not matter what kind of views they held. I think there were students from a mosque there as well. I would say they would not have the same moderate view as I would have as a Muslim who has been involved in the UK Youth Parliament for about four years.
Q272 Anne Main: In my community there is a Muslim community of about 5,000. Some might say that radicalism happens for example in giving leaflets out at mosques or whatever. Does the Youth Parliament have representatives from the communities that may have been approached in that way to give you that sort of input? Are you confident that you have a broad enough input in the Youth Parliament?
Mr Khelya: The Youth Parliament is a
base group but we do also have networks.
For example in
Q273 Anne Main: Do you feel that by the government going down the route of specifically asking Muslims they are actually going to get not a broad view like you have but maybe a slightly unrealistic view?
Mr Khelya: Some will have that view, yes.
Q274 Anne Main: Because it is targeting one group by faith, not even by country or background.
Mr Clews: On the representation of different communities with Project Safe Space, young people from a variety of different backgrounds were invited to the National Steering Group for Project Safe Space. It was not solely exclusive to the UK Youth Parliament. For example, we do have representatives from the Young Muslim Advisory Group. We also have representatives from loads of different organisations like the Advisory Helpline. It just shows that we were not targeting groups in particular. It was open to everyone and it was fair.
Q275 Anne Main: Of course community cohesion is a strong part of that., some people might say, by ignoring young white youths who might get involved potentially or, as Lisa was saying, Traveller youths who are disaffected because of potentially being stigmatised by communities. Would you say that your group has more views to offer than potentially one Muslim group?
Mr Clews: Yes.
Q276 Mr Betts: The evidence we have taken from a whole variety of groups is that one of the things that has come out from criticism is, by its very nature, when government engages in whatever form in whatever process, it tends to be what are called the usual suspects who get involved. In some ways, you are a bit like part of the establishment, are you not? You might feel it is a comfortable way for you to get your view across but those who do not see themselves conforming very much are probably not going to engage with you in this process. Is that a concern to you? Have you any ideas how we might ----?
Mr Clews: I see that as a criticism of
you guys because there are not any opportunities for young people from those
backgrounds to get involved in events like this and Project Safe Space. We did one conference in
Q277 Mr Betts: One of the things I suppose we are trying to get at as well is whether you can necessarily get at people who may have some extremist views that could eventually turn those people into performing acts of terrorism and extremism and whether they will ever engage in these processes, or whether you do need things like the Channel Project, which you are probably aware of. If it becomes known to someone that there is an individual expressing extremist views that might give rise to concern, they should report that to authorities in various ways. Do you think the Channel Project should operate in parallel with what you are doing or is it something that you would be very worried about getting involved in at all because people might think you are just informants to the police? Have you any ideas about that?
Mr Khelya: It could lead to that. In the UKYP survey we did online, 60 per cent of 1,000 people said they would not attend the conference if the police were there, so obviously it means something if young people are running it for young people.
Q278 Alison
Seabeck: On this Channel Project which is designed to
identify young people who are at risk from a range of sources, how comfortable
do you feel that that for example teachers are looking at notebooks and looking
for stories, comments, that could be potentially considered extreme? Clearly one of the bombers who came down from
Mr Clews: I am going to relate it to
something. I went to the Copenhagen
Climate Change Conference in
Q279 Anne Main: I would welcome your view.
Mr Clews: I do not think it is the right way of going about it. You should be openly challenging these ideologies and having a debate in a safe environment, which is what we advocated last year. Without that you are not going to get anywhere. I do not think teachers feel comfortable giving that kind of information to the police.
Q280 Anne Main: All the evidence suggests that the evidence is not going to the police. Of the 220-odd people who have been highlighted, it has not gone to the police. It has been taken up and dealt with in house by teachers or taken to a slightly wider, more expert group to have that sort of debate. In that scenario, are you content because the evidence does suggest it is not actually going to the police. Would you be happy with that response if it is in house, dealt with by the teachers in school, or not?
Mr Clews: It is kind of going beyond what they are required to do. Teachers are there to teach young people. They are not there to snoop for the police and that is the way it is perceived by young people. It is the way it is perceived by youth workers. It is the way it is perceived by teachers. If that is the way it is perceived, then you need to address it rather than talking about who is it going to.
Q281 Chair: Some witnesses have put to us that this is a form of child protection. Just as for example a teacher who thought from evidence that was in a student's work that they might be at risk of sexual abuse would feel that it was their duty to act on that, the same sort of reasoning would apply if they were gaining the impression that the young person was likely to be going off and blowing up other people and obviously blowing up themselves as well. Do you have any sympathy with that viewpoint? If you feel you cannot answer it, that is fair enough.
Mr Clews: I feel I can answer it. I just question the morals of Operation Channel when it does not tell the young people the reason why these teachers are going to be talking to them about their extremist ideology. It is not very moral.
Q282 Anne Main: Do you think maybe Channel is formalising something too much and that the in loco parentis role of a teacher already does? I used to teach. Many teachers would pick up on something that they were concerned about, whether it was even abuse of that child in their home, and take it through the appropriate channels. Do you consider that this is a formalisation of something and that is what is making you uncomfortable?
Mr Clews: I suppose so. It is a question for the teachers. I was in a room when a member of
Chair: Thanks very much indeed. We have noted your views about the DCSF, as I am sure they have.
Witnesses:
Ms Nahid Majid, Convenor of the Tackling Extremism Together
Working Group on Regional and Local Strategies, and Mr Arun Kundnani, Editor,
Q283 Chair: Can I start off by focusing a few questions on where government has been getting its advice from on the development and delivery of Prevent and in particular the research evidence base? Can I ask each of you whether you think the government is getting its advice from the right people and whether you believe that all the important advice and research has been taken on board?
Ms Majid: Initially, when the Preventing Extremism Together Working Group was set up in 2005, we had a whole range of people, about 50-odd people, from seven working groups and there was a whole range of skills and knowledge base on an international level to domestic issues, to local issues. In that sense, I think it started off very much on a positive footing. Unfortunately, a year and a half later that it took to get to the Prevent strategy in 2007, I think there was not enough thought perhaps on why particular recommendations were taken up. There was not enough dialogue at the time between why particular groups of people and particular forms of ideology were taken forward, so why the other recommendations for example were not taken up. On the second part of the question in terms of evidence, the work that I have been doing in the last four or five years as a DWP senior official on evidence research has provided a number of researchers on labour market conditions, demographic, discrimination - there are a number of facts for example about demographics in the labour market, the fact that 2008 labour force market statistics show that there is about a 74 per cent employment rate. If you compare that to Pakistani and Bangladeshi people, it was around 54 per cent. If you look at demographics, the fact that there is a younger generation of Muslims, the average being 28 compared to 41; if you look at child poverty rates that have been researched by Lucinda Platt, that was commissioned. It looked at child poverty rates between particularly ethnic minority communities and that was saying something like 20 per cent of white children live in poverty compared to something like 70 per cent of Bangladeshi children and 60 per cent of Pakistani children. It goes on to discrimination. Testing DWP has recently done has seen discrimination testing in the summer of 2009 which provided clear evidence of discrimination. In terms of that research, I do not think we have taken that into account in terms of dealing with grievance issues.
Q284 Chair: The government would not dispute that there is discrimination. The issue is whether that discrimination is at all relevant to Prevent, which is a slightly different question.
Ms Majid: It is but it is looking at the causes. We have been looking at is the symptoms rather than the causes.
Mr Kundnani: A lot of expertise based at both the national and at the local level has been bypassed. I agree with what Nahid has said about the value of that early part of the process, where a very wide range of views was expressed. I think what happened after that was that a particular, quite ideological interpretation of the problem took hold in government.
Q285 Chair: Where did that come from?
Mr Kundnani: Partly it was from particular think tanks.
Q286 Chair: Which ones?
Mr Kundnani: I think Policy Exchange
played a significant role. I think it
was the wider political climate in the media at that time that wanted to
emphasise religion and religious ideology as the overwhelming factor, whereas
the people who were I think more expert in these issues locally were talking
about a much wider range of factors. The
truth is, in terms of radicalisation in
Q287 Chair: Can I specifically ask you about whether you think government has a role at all in countering extremist religious ideology and, if so, how it should do it?
Mr Kundnani: I think government has a role
in empowering communities to combat violent extremism in all its forms. If it takes a religious form, it obviously
needs to be combated in that form as well.
The emphasis on the religious element has been overdone. Certainly I do not think there is no need for
some kind of Prevent like policy that empowers communities to combat
violent extremism. The problem with the
way it has been done is that it has focused entirely, up until recently, on
Muslim populations of the
Q288 Mr Slaughter: In the light of the report which you wrote for the IRR, is it your finding there that quite a significant part of the Prevent programme has involved the soliciting of information from individuals of a general nature rather than specific offences by the police and other agencies? Is that right?
Mr Kundnani: One of the findings was that a part of Prevent was the identification of individuals who were considered to be at risk of extremism on the basis of their religious opinions and drawing in a range of agencies involved in Prevent to be a part of that process of identification and that that information was then shared with local counterterrorism units of the police.
Q289 Mr Slaughter: We are not talking about passing information to the police or other authorities about somebody intending a specific illegal act. Are we talking about individuals who are already identified and trying to get information on them or are we talking about a more general fishing expedition?
Mr Kundnani: We are talking about a more
general attempt to identify people on the basis of their opinions rather than
on the basis of the likelihood of them being about to be involved in a criminal
activity. For example, some of the cases
that I have come across are of youth workers or teachers who have passed
details of an individual to the local Prevent board, which would include
the police, because that individual expressed a view about the legitimacy of
using violence in the
Q290 Anne Main: Do you think that is a form of McCarthyism?
Mr Kundnani: No. I do not think that kind of historic analogy
works specifically on this. I think
there are elements of some of the things that are happening in
Q291 Mr Slaughter: To what extent do you think this is happening? First of all, you say people in authority are passing this on - youth workers or whoever - to the police. Is that because they have been specifically asked to do so and have agreed to do so, or is it simply that they believe it is part of their general responsibilities?
Mr Kundnani: In some cases it is one; in some cases it is the other. For example, one youth worker that I interviewed told me that the police had asked him to ask serious questions to the young people he worked with which were questions that were designed to test the opinions of these young people on a range of political issues. There, the police were directly soliciting this kind of information.
Q292 Mr Slaughter: You say that is a specific example. Is it your view that it is widespread - ie., that this is almost endemic - or a built in part of the Prevent project?
Mr Kundnani: I think it is fairly widespread, yes. I interviewed around 32 people for this research who were involved in a focus group with around 24 people and stories like that were fairly common and familiar to most of those people. From all the conversations I have had since we published our research and with other youth workers who have come forward, this does seem to be fairly common. The police are putting pressure on people who are involved in working with young Muslims to pass this kind of information to them. It seems to be a lot of people's understanding that this is exactly what the Channel Project is meant to do.
Q293 Chair: Can you turn it round? What sort of thing do you think it would be legitimate for a youth worker or a teacher to report to the police as indicating somebody might be about to become involved in violence?
Mr Kundnani: If a youth worker or teacher thought that a student or young person that they were in contact with was about to commit a criminal act and that there was a clear picture there that that young person was preparing for some kind of act like that, of course that would be something that they would urgently need to talk to the police about. The law is defined quite widely in relation to terrorism so that a definition of a criminal act is actually very wide as it is. This is, to me, a different kettle of fish.
Q294 Mr Slaughter: Do you see it as inextricably linked with the Prevent programme which is either in the instructions that are going through from the police downwards or the perception that people who are involved in the Prevent projects that you do not get what might be the other benefits of Prevent unless you also have the element of surveillance and supervision?
Mr Kundnani: That is certainly the perception of some of the youth workers I have spoken to, that the surveillance element was tied to the other work they wanted to do and the funding was tied in that way.
Q295 Mr Slaughter: You say "perception" but is that because that is what they think or because that is what they have been told?
Mr Kundnani: It is obviously very hard to substantiate that as a clear cut thing. Certainly I have seen funding applications that have been submitted for example for a youth centre where this youth centre was targeted at young Muslims. The plan was for all of the computers to have some kind of surveillance built into them so that which websites young Muslims were looking at could be recorded. This intelligence gathering aspect of it was written into the funding application. That was an application to the Home Office. No doubt the response may well be that we never solicited that kind of project but it certainly seems to be commonplace in the way that people working on the Prevent project understand their work.
Q296 Mr Slaughter: Monitored by whom?
Mr Kundnani: The information in the funding application would be available to the police.
Q297 Alison Seabeck: You clearly seem to have the view that some of the measures to more mainstreaming means and mechanisms for tackling or identifying extremism through local authorities you feel are a better use of public money, a more productive use of public money. Can you explain why you feel in your evidence that moving away from mainstreaming would be better in practice than the Prevent programme?
Ms Majid: In terms of clarity, in terms of Prevent and cohesion, one does not follow necessarily to the other. The government is right to deal with terrorism but perhaps it is something that the Home Office should be focusing on as opposed to CLG and CLG focusing on issues of extremism. Yes, in mainstreaming, I know that was a large part of the work that we did when I was in government about mainstreaming ethnic minority politicians within generation issues, within the empowerment agenda that Denham is pushing forward.
Q298 Alison Seabeck: Because it is broader based, it causes an outstanding variety of views.
Ms Majid: It does not single out any community.
Q299 Alison
Seabeck: Some of the evidence we have received said we
do not have enough detail about what makes up a Muslim community. Is it important we have that or should we
disregard that on the basis of what you have just said and just treat them as
an amorphous whole? The evidence we
heard on our visit to
Ms Majid: The issue of faith has become much stronger in terms of identity now and I think it is an important issue for local authorities to address. From my experience in terms of employment, we did a lot of work on Muslim women and perception in work for example and why women did or did not want to work. It discounted a lot of work at the time which said that actually Muslim women did want to work and parents did try to encourage them. I think there is this cultural factor that needs to be taken into account.
Mr Kundnani: One of the things that has happened is that, with the situation around community cohesion policy, there was a kind of critique of this idea that you can engage with a community through a small number of community leaders or gate keepers and that you hoped that they were as representative of that community as possible and then you would be okay. That would be your engagement. I think that was an important lesson. You cannot do that. You cannot have this small number of community gate keepers. Prevent has brought that back because with Prevent local authorities suddenly say, "We need to make sure we have somebody reliable to talk to. We do not want to just throw the door open widely and bring in a lot of voices because we do not know who they are." You have fallen back to precisely what was problematic and what was critiqued by community cohesion.
Ms Majid: I am a Muslim but I do not know everything I need to know about being a woman. In the DWP we have an ethnic minority employment advisory group and they are not all ethnic minorities. They are professors and a huge range of diverse people, from business to the voluntary sector, who gave excellent advice. I think that is something which should be accommodated into the model.
Q300 Mr Betts: On this issue of community cohesion and Prevent, the Secretary of State made a speech before Christmas when he tried to clarify what the government's thinking was. Do you think he did clarify it?
Mr Kundnani: No, I do not think he did. It is not an easy area. The problem is that at the early stages in relation to preventing violent extremism there were here and there some positive projects. The way to deal with this is to try and build bridges between different communities and not just focus on Muslims alone. They were gradually put to one side and forgotten about as the thing unfolded and as it became clearer to the government that this was all about Muslims. In a way, there was a bit of quite progressive and useful community cohesion thinking at that early stage in Prevent. That was lost. Gradually also, Prevent had become more and more about this idea of promoting shared values and Britishness, which borrows the worst part of the community cohesion agenda, because that part is seen as a complete distraction from how you prevent violent extremism in practice on the ground.
Q301 Mr Betts: Why?
Mr Kundnani: Because, instead of focusing on a specific problem of individuals who may be on the path of violent extremism, you are trying to bring about a cultural shift across a whole community. That is what has happened in practice. Some of the government policy and language, more so under Hazel Blears, was about the idea that, in order to tackle the issue of terrorism and prevent terrorism, you need to bring about a complete cultural shift in the Muslim population, which was rightly seen by many Muslims as a distraction because that is a kind of attempt to change the whole population's behaviour when really you are focusing on a very small number of people.
Q302 Mr Betts: Should we be trying to separate out community cohesion and just say, "If these are good things we should be doing them", whichever community it happens to be, and if there is a need to pursue, identify and deal with certain individuals who may be at risk of becoming engaged in terrorism, that ought to be part of the Pursue strategy, not the Prevent strategy?
Mr Kundnani: I think that process of identifying people who may be on the path of violent extremism should be a part of Pursue. It should not cross over into anything that is about community cohesion.
Ms Majid: This is about roles and responsibilities and getting clarity of what Prevent is about. Is it about cohesion? Is it about extremism?
Q303 Chair: Can I just press you on that? What evidence have you that improving community cohesion would have any effect on the level of violent extremism at all? Ms Majid, it seemed to me in your earlier responses you were effectively suggesting that improving community cohesion - and none of us would argue against improving community cohesion - is an end in itself. You were effectively arguing, from saying that all the information you were giving about deprivation, that on attacking community cohesion, by improving community cohesion by reducing exclusion, you would prevent. What is the evidence?
Ms Majid: If we look at them, there
have been various reports that we have done about inequality and deprivation
with previous Secretaries of State looking at the link between inequality,
poverty and crime in
Q304 Chair: Violent extremism is not the same as criminality. It is a form of criminality but it is not the same as criminality or drug crime, or are you suggesting that they are all pretty interchangeable really?
Ms Majid: No, not at all.
Q305 Chair: Just focus on violent extremism. With respect, given that British society is very different from American, I am not sure you can easily extrapolate from one country to another. What evidence is there that improving community cohesion reduces violent extremism and therefore should be a part of Prevent?
Ms Majid: I do not know of any evidence that specifically relates to it. I know that what evidence we have about engagement in terms of work relates to better cohesion within communities.
Q306 Chair: That is a different answer.
Ms Majid: That is different to violent extremism, yes.
Mr Kundnani: The evidence that came out quite strongly in my research from youth workers in particular was that the root cause of violent extremism is quite complex and multi-faceted. No one thing is necessarily going to knock it out. There does seem to be a strong view amongst a lot of people I have spoken to that a key part of it is a sense of political disempowerment and a sense that the British political system is pointless. It does not listen to them. Therefore, violent alternatives become plausible. If that is even a part of the truth, then what youth work used to be more about, which is about empowering young people - particularly people on the margins of society - and giving them a sense of genuine engagement in our society's institutions is going to be incredibly useful as one part of preventing violent extremism. Unfortunately, too much of the way Prevent is thought about now is not about empowerment but about behaviour modification.
Q307 Dr Pugh: Just pressing you on this community cohesion point, which is very important to the inquiry, profiles that have been done of people who have engaged in violent extremism are quite detailed. We will know quite a bit about their background. On the evidence you have seen, does it suggest that people who become violent extremists come from less cohesive environments than people who simply crumble and get on with life, as it were?
Mr Kundnani: I think you would be hard pushed to find a clear cut picture such as that, where you can correlate ----
Q308 Dr Pugh: You could put them up as a sub-group and you could set them against the average Muslim population of the country. You could say that what these people seem to like more than most is membership of a cohesive neighbourhood.
Mr Kundnani: I would be surprised if you could make that correlation in that way.
Q309 Dr Pugh: The link between cohesion and violent extremism is unproven then?
Mr Kundnani: If you put it like that but I think the argument I would make is that there are strong reasons for thinking that empowering young people is going to be an important part of preventing violent extremism. That is not something that you can statistically evidence in the way you are proposing because there are just not enough cases and there are not enough clear ideas of what empowerment should look like in our society in any case. I am not sure that you can evidence this in the way you are looking for, I am afraid.
Q310 Dr Pugh: There are many cases of terrorists, are there not, who come from environments which are very standard environments, probably more cohesive than other kinds of environments. You have young Muslims who come from westernised homes. I would have thought that was a good counter example really and you would expect people from very entrenched homes where English is not their natural language to produce more terrorists if cohesion is a factor.
Mr Kundnani: As I think I have said already, the process of radicalisation is very complex and multi-faceted. I do not think you are going to be able to reduce it to the kinds of correlations that you are looking for in order to back up particular policy suggestions in that way.
Ms Majid: The socio-economic factor is not the factor; it is one of a whole range of factors. Of course some terrorists do come from quite well integrated backgrounds and so on but studies like the Home Office have done and I have done about pathways into terrorism and extremism show that people come from different sorts of pathways and backgrounds. People who are disenfranchised tend to become disengaged from mainstream societies, but I think that is why I am saying you have to not discount the evidence and the research that tries to determine the causes of that.
Q311 Chair: Do you think that the risk factors that are identified in CONTEST are the right ones, taking on board the fact that it is a complex constellation?
Mr Kundnani: The risk factors that are there in CONTEST over-emphasise religious ideology. The idea of a conveyor belt from particular forms of religious belief to terrorism I find does not stand up as a total picture of how people become radicalised. There is a lot of quite interesting argument for example from the French scholar of Islamism, Olivier Roy, who thinks that religion is totally irrelevant. It is a kind of window dressing on other things that are going on, whether they be psychological or political. As I was saying earlier, the point is that we are not going to find one model of radicalisation that is going to be the one we need to go with. We need to have a wide range and the problem with the way things are at the moment is that one particular ideologically motivated picture is being put forward as the only model.
Chair: Thanks very much indeed.
Witnesses: Mr John Denham MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and Mr Shahid Malik MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Communities and Local Government, gave evidence.
Q312 Chair: Can I start off, Secretary of State, by asking if you could explain as clearly and pragmatically as possible what difference you see being made in the Prevent programme as a result of your speech before Christmas?
Mr Denham: What I hope will happen - and I hope I can say at the beginning this does not mean this is not happening at all at the moment - is that it will strengthen at local level the understanding of Prevent partners about how the activities that they fund are intended to have an impact in the real world on the central objective of Prevent, which is to prevent people being drawn in to the type of extremism that advocates the use of violence. In other words, it is understanding the cause and effect that is expected. Prevent will inevitably fund, as the Committee will have seen, a wide, very diverse range of projects up and down the country. What we wanted to do was to set out very clearly what we expected them to achieve. That is why the speech in December was intended to put the focus on preventing crime taking place. The second thing that I hoped would happen as a result of the speech in December was that a number of myths that may have hampered the involvement everybody would have liked in Prevent may be tackled with increasing success at local level. Two I have obviously highlighted. I am sure we will come on to these in discussions. One is the idea that there is a surreptitious, secret information gathering programme which has made people worried about participating. A second is that in some ways Prevent itself goes wider in challenging people's views of international affairs and things of that sort than it actually does. It comes back to the central point: it is about trying to ensure that crimes are not committed.
Chair: That does cover a load of questions we were intending to ask which is excellent. I am going to alter the order in which we were going to ask them as well. I would quite like to set to one side for the moment the big question of how exactly you prevent crime if that crime is violent extremism, which is what we are talking about at the moment, and just concentrate for the moment on the myths tackling bit. Andrew, could I ask you to deal with myths tackling as it relates to whether Prevent was just a cover for secret information gathering?
Q313 Mr Slaughter: We have just had the benefit of hearing from Mr Kundnani. You will be aware of his report that was published recently. There are certain perceptions and in some cases he says he has documented the reality that in many Prevent funded projects there is an attempt to elicit from a fishing expedition information which relates to political views and general views, and this might point in a generalised sense towards extremist views. That may be interpreted as leading to some form of violent behaviour. Is that your view and is it the intention of the programme that that should happen?
Mr Denham: No. That there is a perception or belief is obviously true in some quarters, not least because of reports like the one that you refer to. That is an issue that we acknowledge. It is not any part of the aim of Prevent projects to carry out generalised information gathering on the political views or other views of people involved in the Prevent programme. There is a legitimate aim, which I would say would be recognised in all sorts of crime prevention areas, of trying to identify particularly young people who may be in danger of being drawn into more serious crime. It is something that would be absolutely taken for granted if we were looking at gun and knife crime or other areas of crime. The attempt to identify those who are vulnerable and steer them in one way or another is a legitimate aim. In terms of that particular report, the response of these two ministers and also of the Home Secretary to the initial report was to say to the officials, "Check this out. This is quite a decentralised programme. Let us try to investigate those instances given in the report that can be tracked down to real places or real events." I have to say none of the claims was found to be founded. Not all of them were capable of that type of analysis because they were too vague to identify, but all the ones we could we identified. There were some areas of misunderstanding. It is the case in most - I am not sure I could say all - crime reduction partnerships at local level that there are information sharing protocols between different organisations about people who might be vulnerable or be drawn into crime. What were sometimes presented as things specific to the Prevent programme were simply information sharing protocols which had been in place, in most cases, for many years before the Prevent programme had been established.
Q314 Chair: Are you saying that the instances that were given were not part of Prevent or that they did not happen or that you could not verify that they happened?
Mr Denham: All of the ones that were in the report, which I think were all Prevent cases that we can identify, were investigated and the claims were found not to be substantiated. I have to say that the view of the Home Secretary and myself was not to rubbish the report the first moment it came out and say, "This is completely wrong." We can never be entirely sure that things have not gone wrong out there somewhere and that is why we did ask officials to go and investigate, to check them out, and that was what was done.
Q315 Mr Betts: We have had examples given to us in the course of our evidence taking that youth workers have been asked as part of projects with Prevent money to ask certain specific questions to identify the views of young people. One particular example was given earlier today, that computers would be funded by the Home Office for a project involving young Muslims as long as there was a monitoring system to identify which websites they were looking at. There were specific examples given which certainly concerned us I think in terms of that very organised arrangement to monitor people's activities. Would it be possible now for officials to have a specific look at these allegations that have been made to us, because they are quite important?
Mr Denham: Of course we would look at any specific cases that have been made. I think there is a more fundamental point here which I made in the speech in Birmingham, which is that there should not be any information gathering exercise - as I said at the beginning, we are trying to identify young people who may be at risk; I do not know about this particular case you raise - and some of that work does involve real risks which are there from the internet. That is an issue where we have to tackle the risks that are there, but there should not be any information gathering processes which cannot be openly discussed. Part of our problem in this one is that there has not necessarily been a sharing of information about why information may be gathered, how Prevent operates, what the purposes of it are. We have said very clearly there is no reason for that to be in any way obscure or secret. It is the sort of thing that should be openly discussed with Prevent partners. To me, that principle of transparency seems to be the key principle to focus on going forwards.
Q316 Mr Slaughter: Those are examples, not answering the question, "Did they take place?" but answering the question, "Would these be suitable ways of information gathering for a Prevent project?" One, allowing computers provided they were used to monitor the websites used and, two, police officers were asking youth workers to pursue a line of questioning.
Mr Denham: I would be very uncomfortable - and we will check this out because I do not know if the case took place - about a secret project aimed at putting computers into people's hands to see where they went. That would seem to me to be setting up something for one purpose and doing another. We are all familiar with the idea that there are dangers in the internet of paedophilia and pornography. When we work with young people on IT projects, we raise awareness about them and we seek to keep young people safe. I think if you are doing an IT project with young people who may be targeted over the internet - and we have many documented cases of internet radicalisation - then building that into that programme is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The crucial issue here is are we straightforward and transparent about how things are done.
Q317 Mr Slaughter: At the other end of the argument, we have heard from a number of witnesses who have worked with young people on Prevent projects who thought they were good projects and they need some funding but, because they are tainted by the idea that there is a surveillance or security or derogatory purpose as well, that devalues them, makes them suspicious and makes people rather intimidated. Do you think that is a problem and, if it is a problem, do you not feel that it would have been better to disaggregate those two aims?
Mr Denham: The difficulty is this: if you take Prevent projects with young people, they are funded because the government has an aim at the end of the day. That is to reduce the likelihood of a terrorist attack taking place. That is why they are funded. They are not funded as general, youth work projects which happen to go to a particular community. There is an aim behind funding for Prevent. If you entirely separate out the reason you are funding them in the first place with the aim that you want to achieve, you might just as well take the sum of money and put it into mainstream youth work provision or things of that sort. What I think we are very used to is the idea that for example, in many urban areas, there are extensive projects aimed at dealing with youth gangs and guns and knife crime. None of us has the slightest reservation about saying, "We want to work with these young people because we think that in aggregate there is a risk - and a real risk to some of them - that they will get drawn into a more serious type of crime which could cost them their lives or the life of somebody else." We do youth work with them with a clear idea of diverting people away from that risk. It is not a perfect analogy and Mr Malik always tells me it is not a perfect analogy, but the analogy is there that a Prevent project has that aim of avoiding somebody being drawn into crime. The vast majority of people never would have been but that is the aim of it. The crucial thing is to have the honest discussion with those youth workers that says, "This is actually why we are doing this. This is how we make you feel comfortable about your role. This is what we need to share with you and you need to understand." Where projects have been funded where that discussion has not taken place in such a straightforward way, we may be in a more difficult position.
Mr Malik: When the allegations were first made in The Guardian, shortly afterwards as John said we did not dismiss them. We wanted to explore them. Once we started to realise that we could not find anything to corroborate what was being said, I spent about half an hour on the Islam Channel. There are about 1,000 or so Prevent projects across the country. Obviously the Islam Channel is something up and down the country that will be in many homes and living rooms of Muslims and indeed non-Muslims as well. I said that if anybody has any information whatsoever, if anybody feels uncomfortable about something that has taken place, if they feel there is some kind of spying going on that ought not to be going on, then please come forward. I also said that I do not believe it is the role of the police to be asking youth workers to spy on young people. I also said that I had no evidence that that takes place. If there is any evidence, please come forward. I have been on at least half a dozen visits across the country and met many different people from many different projects and I always ask them the question: "Do you feel that Prevent is infringing on your rights? Is it about spying?" etc. Indeed, many people felt that the allegation had made their job much more difficult. There was a young chap in Bristol who was running a very, very successful Prevent project and he was extremely frustrated and angry because, all of a sudden, something that he had been doing which he felt was making a real difference to the community in Bristol was tainted.
Q318 Chair: We have had evidence across the piece even before the report came
out that there were very significant numbers of groups within the Muslim
community across
Mr Denham: That was something we acknowledged quite early on in August, which is when Alan Johnson and I wrote saying, "If you are finding locally the use of the label 'preventing violent extremism' is a problem, then do not use it." In fact, in many places, people had already stopped using that as a label, so we entirely acknowledge the sensitivity of language and labelling and the need to be very open and transparent about the issues that we are talking about at the moment. I think we have moved things on and the impression I have is that those messages from central government have been recognised, although we have some way to go.
Q319 Mr Betts: From what
we heard in evidence from the Chief Executive of Leicester when we were in
Mr Denham: What you need to be able to do is to say how if you invest the money in this purpose you expect it to have an outcome that reduces the chances of people getting involved in this very serious crime. If people simply took the money and just devoted it to mainstream community or community cohesion activities those values might be of immense value in their own right but they might not be hitting the objectives of Prevent, of identifying and supporting vulnerable individuals, of enhancing the ability of communities to resist the ideas and arguments and organisation of those who would promote al-Qaeda-type terrorism in this country, so what we are saying to people is not that you should not absolutely do those organisations but you need to understand the connection between what you are investing in and the crime that you are attempting to prevent. We have tried to go some way to set out why Prevent and community cohesion are not identical. They are not interchangeable words. There is often an overlap between the two of them, and some activities will hit both objectives, but people need to be clear about what they are funding and why.
Q320 Mr Betts: We have heard the concern raised with us before that because of this confusion you have just been referring to it taints the programme and means that some very active groups of people will not apply for Prevent money when they could usefully use it for good purposes and that it might be better to take certain elements of the programme, particularly the Channel project, out of this whole arrangement and put it into the Pursue strand of the policy.
Mr Denham: You could always talk about where the boundaries lie. The Channel part of Prevent comes under those bits of Prevent which are led by the Home Office, and there is of course a spectrum here, but what would be a mistake, I think, would be to remove from Prevent those aspects of the programme which are designed at increasing the ability of communities to resist the dangerous ideas and to support not necessarily those young people who will get drawn directly into the Channel programme, who, by definition, will have been seen to have advanced quite a long way into the area of risk, but that broader group of young people who may be at risk of being drawn into this area. I think it would be a mistake to remove those key areas of the Prevent programme and say we will just call that "community cohesion" and not necessarily address those issues or we will just have Pursue and Channel. That strategy would be leaving a big gap in the work of Prevent at the moment.
Q321 Mr Betts: You also drew an analogy a few minutes ago with programmes to deal with disaffected youths who might be engaging in some sort of criminal activities, and then you went on to say that your colleague Shahid Malik had sometimes cautioned you about drawing that analogy because it might not be quite the right one. Why was that caution around? Was it because there are some differences?
Mr Denham: Because what we have usually debated is that, in practice, there are differences between a type of crime which has at its heart a particular type of violent ideology and the nature of the crime which is involved in gun crime. That is the difference.
Mr Betts: Thank you.
Q322 Dr Pugh: Just before I get on to the subject of local authorities, which is my main theme, as it were, we spent some time in Birmingham last week and we were shown YouTube videos which apparently show to the background of rap music things like American troops being attacked by the Taliban and so on. Clearly there are cases where if a young man is actually visiting websites about bomb-making equipment he ought to be reported by any self-respecting youth worker, but if a young man was found to be looking at these YouTube videos, which are apparently quite common and easily available, should the youth worker report him?
Mr Denham: I think the Channel system operates on the basis of referring to people to decide what needs to be done. It is difficult to know, knowing so little about the hypothetical context, but I think what it does back is the investment that Prevent is making, and I have seen this myself in Tower Hamlets, in increasing the awareness of young people about what is on the internet.
Q323 Dr Pugh: The youth worker has to make a decision and what I want to know is if you were that youth worker and you understood what the strategy is meant to achieve, would you report it?
Mr Denham: Again, it is impossible to know without the circumstances. What I would hope, though, Dr Pugh - and this is a challenge for us - is that the youth worker first and foremost would have received some proper training in the dangers that are there on the internet and how to respond appropriately. My guess would be that in the vast majority of cases there would be absolutely no reason to think about reporting somebody. This is the same issue, if you think about what then happens, as pornography and paedophilia on the net. It is understanding what is out there, understanding the discussions and being confident enough in the issues to have a discussion. Youth workers deal with these issues all the time with young people in all sorts of different contexts. Difficult issues come up. That is why we have youth workers. I would honestly say that the real answer to your question is rather than have somebody who does not know what they are doing getting into a panic and saying, "I think I must rush off to the authorities," let us make sure at local level, and I hope this happens, that Prevent partnerships have equipped youth workers with the skills necessary to deal with those circumstances. I would be pretty certain that that would do the trick in the vast, vast majority of cases. If you then have greater reasons for concern it might be different. I think what we have got to do is get ourselves out of this headline that the whole idea of the programme is some great vast pyramid where everybody gets reported up the system; this is about enabling people to deal with these issues confidently and effectively.
Q324 Dr Pugh: So you are expecting the youth worker to make a very nuanced decision to take account of the context and not just a particular episode?
Mr Denham: If a youth worker, for example, comes across a situation - and I deliberately choose a different context - where they are aware that a young women in a youth club is getting involved in an internet conversation with somebody who might not be suitable, we expect youth workers to make a judgment. There would be circumstances where the judgment might be that you are going to deal with that as an individual conversation about what is sensible and what is not sensible and all the rest of it. There might be circumstances where the judgment would be: "I am very worried about this person's vulnerability, somebody is talking about leaving home and I need to do something about it." We are generally confident in the ability of our professional workers with young people to exercise those types of judgments. I do not see any reason why with the proper training and support we cannot have a similar confidence in this context as well. Therefore it is more nuanced but this is what professional youth workers do. I think we need to train them, support them and then have confidence in them to make the right judgments. That will be across the spectrum, I think.
Q325 Dr Pugh: You referred to the whole scheme as quite decentralised a few minutes ago. Suppose a local authority decides that they do not really know what to do in order to prevent, other than to persist with community cohesion initiatives which seem to be good initiatives in themselves; is there a problem there?
Mr Denham: If people have really looked at all of their circumstances locally, they have got to make the best judgments, and if people have absolutely established that there are no issues to be dealt with or whatever, that they are going to move towards the community cohesion end of things that may well be what happens but you would want to have sufficient challenge in there to say have we really looked at all of the possibilities. The issue that we have just been talking about, the possibly isolated group of young people who are not at risk from anybody locally because nobody locally is pushing dangerous extreme violent ideas but may be at risk on the internet, is something that that sort of group might look at and say, "Have we covered all of the possibilities in this particular area?"
Q326 Dr Pugh: In terms of what local authorities are currently doing, looking at a range of programmes under your Department, where do you think the key gaps are at the moment?
Mr Malik: I think the
reality is that there are some authorities that are quite advanced. They have been doing work for many, many
years, work around diversity, work around community cohesion, and that means
that they are well-placed to actually take work forward on Prevent. There are other
authorities that have no real experience whatsoever. One of the reasons for having the national
conference on 9 December where some 1,200 people turned out to
Q327 Dr Pugh: You mentioned authorities but organisations within authorities have different experiences and one of the things we got from our Birmingham visit was the allegation that some organisations are very good at bidding for whatever pot of money was around at the time, and therefore could quite easily buy into the Prevent agenda, or whatever agenda was there, and other organisations who might be capable of doing better work simply did not know how to get those funds or did not want those funds in the first place or did not see how those funds applied to their work. How do you deal with that phenomenon?
Mr Malik: I used to be one of those organisations so I know exactly what you mean! Listen, I think unfortunately it is always going to be the case that you have local authorities who are perhaps risk averse and they go to what you might term the "usual suspects" who they know have got all the finance and administration side of things in place where there are not too many risks with the resources, and they are broadly good eggs, and they run with them. I do think, however, that the whole point of Prevent funding to an extent is to think outside of the box. It is quite clear that there will be some people who are doing good work that has a positive impact in terms of the Prevent agenda. If you look at some of the work that we have done centrally, we have looked at areas where there are gaps, so young people and women where there are big gaps, and at a national level we have got the Muslim Women's Advisory Group and the Young People's Advisory Group. If you look at a local level a lot of Prevent partnerships now are starting to develop things around young people and women because traditionally those are the stakeholders within that community that really have not been enfranchised. I think some of the national stuff we are doing links with some of that local work. There is no excuse really. We have got guidance as well at the end of the day. You asked a question about if an organisation is not too clear, there is this national guidance that they can turn to. They have got the Regional Government Offices. Within each Regional Government Office there are people who have expertise in this area, who work with local authorities, so there is a field of expertise out there that can support them and there is not really, I do not suppose, an excuse for local authorities not to be spreading some of the resources perhaps a bit wider, only for the sake of increasing the effectiveness because at the end of the day this is not about making people happy.
Q328 Dr Pugh: It is interesting you said about women's projects. One of our witnesses in Birmingham made the obvious point that all young terrorist males have mums, and in a sense to set yourself out on a terrorist route is to somehow turn your back on the family environment, and there needs to be, therefore, some thought about how the family environment deals with the situation. If you looked at all the local authority projects and you decided that actually the most effective way to spend money combating terrorism in this country was to give it to another department of government, because obviously cultural factors are a big element in encouraging extremism of one kind or another, and you decided that local authorities just did not know how to do the job, would you own up to that or are you already owning up to that?
Mr Denham: I am never
particularly defensive about the boundaries of the Department, Dr Pugh, but the
difficulty would be, I think, that if you say your local authorities are not
capable of leadership in this area as a permanent state of affairs, you have
then got to say who else is likely to be at a local level? There is really only one national agency
which I think would come forward as an alternative and that would be the Police
Service. I think there are real issues,
as everyone has recognised in all of the questions, and there is a spectrum of
activity here from areas which are clearly in the Pursue area, which is people who are already involved in this crime
who need to be tracked down, stopped and all the rest of it, through to those
who are really on the verges of it, that is the Channel project, to those who may be at risk, to the issues you do
in the communities that may be about resilience, like the work for example with
mothers, which is a key part of quite a number of local Prevent projects up and down the country. I believe that currently that work is best
done within my Department and the leadership of that work is best led by local
authorities because they are better placed to have the level of community
engagement that is necessary. There is a
caveat there. This is a real challenge
for most people in local authorities to whom, as for most of the rest of us,
these issues were entirely new just a very short period of time ago. We have expected local authorities to move
very, very quickly to understand perhaps more than they did before about the
dynamics of communities because it was only a few years before the
Q329 Alison Seabeck: We have heard powerful evidence from young people, the Youth
Parliament as well as individuals in
Mr Denham: There are two parts to that question. I am very well aware of the real dangers in the perception which has been there that the only dialogue of importance that takes place between the Government and the Muslim community is around terrorism and violent extremism. The point that was acknowledged by the Home Secretary and myself in August, and we have to continue to repeat it, is that it has to be clear that we see the bigger, broader and indeed more important relationship between the Government and the Muslim communities of this country as they are with all other communities. The issues, firstly, that are of general interest - jobs, housing, educational success, and all of those issues - and, secondly, issues specific to that community, in case of the Muslim communities the religious discrimination legislation, the Sharia finance instruments, all of those sorts of things that we have done. Is there still a risk that this is perceived both within government and outside government, in the media and in the community as a one-dimensional conversation? Yes, that risk is there, and until we challenge that successfully, which we must keep at all the time, then you will continue to hear those sorts of concerns. The second part of the question was other forms of extremism. We have this year developed both a much more explicit message and organisational focus on other forms of extremism, particularly the dangers of white racist extremism. The Connecting Communities programme will shortly reach well over 100 communities where we are trying to undercut the roots of that extremism too. It was really a choice of whether to run that as a separate programme or as a single pot of money. The view that we have taken is that there are quite significant differences, the differences between the actual circumstances of an international ideology promoted in the way that al-Qaeda does and the way that operates, and the roots of white racist extremism, which we are trying to address in part of the Connecting Communities message, and it was better as we developed the programme to develop them as separate programmes nationally. However, we are very clear that we would want people at local level to know what their strategy was to deal with extremism, using their mainstream money, any engagement they may have with Connecting Communities or their engagement with Prevent. There is an equally important message here that we are opposed to extremism wherever it comes from. In terms of sheer ambition to create destruction and death, it is still the case that al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism is the single biggest threat and we just have to recognise that but that does not mean that we are not going to be actively opposed to all types of extremism.
Q330 Alison Seabeck: What more can be done to reassure Muslims that the community as a whole is not potentially at risk of potential radicalisation, because huge distrust has been voiced during the course of this investigation?
Mr Denham: In part I think it has to be that we just keep repeating these same messages over and over again. We engage other parts of government. We constantly tell the story of the issues that we have dealt with. Last week in a different part of my job I was talking about the transformation of the educational achievements of young British Pakistani and young British Bangladeshi boys, one of the great educational success stories of the last ten years, addressing an issue of real concern in communities and in families, and we have got to keep saying we are doing those things, we are making real differences, and we will continue to do that.
Q331 Alison Seabeck: I hear what you are saying about the message and that is terrific but one of the other criticisms we have had, and it is not necessarily just in this section in your Department, is that because of the lack of continuity in officials, relationships between the Department and people on the ground chop and change and vary and people feel that they need a sense of continuity, they need to have a senior person to go to who has a long understanding of the issues that they are facing, and at the moment that is a genuine worry. It is to do with the way the Civil Service career structure works actually but it does not help.
Mr Denham: Yes, I am afraid we have probably both faced that problem in every single department and responsibility we have ever been in. What we have to do is to make sure the sorts of messages that we have been trying to give today and over the last few months sufficiently enter into - it is a jargon term these days - the DNA of the system so they are what we say all the time. If we do not do that and the message fluctuates month by month or personality by personality then we will not be successful; that is undoubtedly true.
Q332 Alison Seabeck: Are you looking at all at the way the formula is put together in terms of how Prevent is allocated and the way in which it looks at the size of a Muslim population in an area?
Mr Denham: We are quite open to looking at that. It is hard in absolute terms to justify the way that it is done at the moment other than it is hard, on the basis of our knowledge, to come up with a different system of funding allocation. When one has an ideal situation in mind it would be something that was more clearly risk-based and something that was able to take a coherent view at a local level on the relative needs of cohesion funding and Prevent funding, which, as you know, currently go out separately. That would be the ideal. There are two real obstacles to that at the moment, but I do not think they are absolute and forever. One is that risk-based funding clearly has a problem in that you are indicating somebody's assessment of risk and that has both a presentational and practical problem.
Chair: Who would do the risk assessment?
Q333 Alison Seabeck: That is the second one.
Mr Denham: The difficulty with it is if you did a risk assessment that was informed by for example the police or other agencies, it is probably something you would not want to share in public as part of your funding formula. The problem with the formula we have got - and I think we would both say the same as Ministers - is it is pretty hard to defend until you come to trying to actually construct a workable formula based on other information. I am being perfectly honest with the Committee. We would both like to move the funding formula on to a different basis. If it were possible to have an approach that at least was able to reflect at local level the relative needs of cohesion and Prevent rather than being separate exercises, I think there would be some advantages in that. Dr Pugh's question earlier highlighted the fact that the balance between community cohesion need and Prevent need may well vary from one area to another. At the moment we do not have a funding system for the two that reflects that. Technically that is much harder to do than to sit here and talk about it. I am not absolutely wedded to this and I do not think there is an issue of principle that I could defend behind what we do at the moment.
Q334 Andrew George: How much has Prevent prevented?
Mr Malik: I am happy to have a go. Let me just say that 2007-08 was the first year we had the pathfinder.
Q335 Andrew George: Of course.
Mr Malik: It is a very, very new programme. We have commissioned some national evaluation very recently. We have also had the Audit Commission do some work. If you were to ask me how many bomb plots has it prevented, Prevent is one element of the counter-terrorism strategy that we have. We know of at least 12 plots that have been thwarted. We also know that some 228 people have been convicted in the last eight years.
Q336 Chair: I want to try and get this a bit more specific because we have had enormous quantities of evidence about what one might call the theoretical underpinning of Prevent and Pursue and, to be blunt, I really do not want to go over again, which some of our earlier witnesses were doing, just re-quoting the academic evidence we have got for things. If I may Mr Malik - and this becomes a slight critique of the question - we all know that the point of this exercise is to stop terrorist events and we can all say that, thankfully, the number of terrorist events that has occurred in this country has been relatively small. With respect, I do not believe it is possible for you or anybody else to demonstrate that there is any cause and effect (well, maybe some of the stuff the police have done) in what Prevent is doing that you can relate to a reduction in crime.
Mr Malik: I beg to differ, Chairman, simply, for this reason - and I always welcome the Chairman intervening and criticising the questions!
Q337 Chair: It is the Chair's prerogative!
Mr Malik: It does not
happen often enough! Just to say I
think, broadly speaking, of course you are in comfortable territory when you
say that, but without any shadow of a doubt whatsoever I can confidently and
comfortably say that we know what some of the triggers are and we also know
some of the elements that can help to reduce the propensity of individuals to
engage in violent extremism. A lot of
the Prevent work that we do for
example focuses on enabling people to challenge violent ideologies. I think it stands to reason. It is probably commonsense that if you can
persuade people using Islam itself that a violent ideology that they are flirting
with is not the way of Islam, I think the propensity of those individuals to
engage in such acts is much diminished.
That is why we have funded a
Q338 Andrew George: I do understand what the Home Office is doing in terms of the hard infrastructure and the intelligence, et cetera, but what we have been talking about is softer community development processes. Really I suppose what I was asking and I thought was really contained in quite a deliberately short question (because I thought that was welcomed here!) is if you can give examples, perhaps confidentially to the Committee outside this evidence, of how the work that you have been talking about has contributed to the 12 plots being foiled which you mentioned as part of your answer earlier.
Mr Denham: It would be
extremely difficult to link the vast majority of the Prevent programme or even individual instances within those plots
to a track back from a Prevent-funded
programme. This is about developing
resilience of communities. We know that
in the case of the young man in
Mr Malik: Andrew Ibrahim.
Mr Denham: Andrew
Ibrahim. He was reported to the police
by members of the mosque. You cannot say
whether it was something about the Prevent
programme that led a mosque to say, "We have got concerns about this
individual, we are going to report them," because in the nature of this
programme looking at that direct causal trail is not going to be easy. The second thing is that there have been
since 2005, as I am sure the Quilliam Foundation said to you, big ideological
shifts within the world of radical Islamism with many more people, including
former supporters of al-Qaeda, contesting the al-Qaeda ideology. It is quite hard to distinguish those
international ideological events from things we have done here. This may be too vague for you but I was the
Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee when we did an inquiry in 2005-06. At that time we got huge amounts of evidence
that said that there was not a problem.
The bulk of the evidence said lots of people have been arrested, no-one
has been convicted, this is all got up by the Government and the security
services. That debate that there is not
an issue has been silenced over the last few years. There is a debate still about what you best
do about it but almost no-one comes forward now and says, "This is in the
imagination of the security services or the Government who are out to get
us." It has changed partly because of
the arrests and convictions and partly because of what has actually happened
including the
Q339 Chair: Secretary of State, can I follow up on that and feed back some of the evidence that we have been collecting during our inquiry. You said that it would be necessary for local authorities to understand the connection between the projects that they are putting forward and their effect on Prevent. We were given ample evidence of, as people described them, "Mickey Mouse" projects and "nice dinners" that had been funded by the Prevent programme in various places. Presumably those local authorities genuinely felt that they were somehow related to Prevent. What we would be interested in knowing is how rigorous the Department is being in challenging those, given that, as you said at the beginning, we are all on a discovery path here. It is not that local authorities are being deliberately obstreperous but they may genuinely not know what they should be doing in their local community to prevent.
Mr Denham: That is a
fair point, Chairman, and it is one that we touched on again in the speech to
the
Q340 Chair: How do you identify what is good practice when we would all agree that you cannot do the usual rigorous accounting of saying, "There were this many likely terrorists last year and there are that many this year"? How do you assess whether a project is working or not?
Mr Denham: Let me give you an example, Chairman, of one project that I visited, which I mentioned earlier, which is a Tower Hamlets project aimed at increasing young people's understanding of the internet. It is very difficult to say therefore five potential terrorists decided not to become terrorists, but in terms of having a group of young people whose understanding and ability to discuss what gets put on the internet, how propaganda is used, what might be motivating people, how to respond to it, is undoubtedly it is a real educational success within that community. When we have tried to produce good practice, the good practice guidance that was produced before Christmas, I think ten projects, are marked by the fact that they were not, "Here is a project and people did so-and-so". There is an analysis. It is like a school experiment in a way, "This is what we set out to achieve; this is what we did; this is how we assessed what worked." It is that quite rigorous, analytical view of what projects are about that we as a Department are trying to promote in the work that we put out amongst the Prevent partners and that is what we will continue to do.
Q341 Mr Betts: Can I follow up with an issue, and I think local authorities do find
this very, very difficult to deal with, as to whether there is any good
practice around that you can disseminate which might be very helpful. It was interesting what you were saying about
the mosques previously and how they have come forward and identified someone
who might be a potential threat. Some
young Muslims came to see me from not just my constituency but from around
Mr Malik: I have got to
say from my own experience seldom is the mosque the hub of this type of
activity. It is extremely rare although
there are some notable exceptions -
Q342 Alison Seabeck: Picking up both those points in a sense, you have already talked about local authorities relying on people they trust, the good eggs and so on, but, equally, we have heard evidence that some of those good eggs are running courses which are superficial, where there is no feedback, as a result of whatever has happened, and so people turn up, there is a lot of enthusiasm and interest and they get nothing and do not know where it is going and do not know whether their views are being passed on, or what the government response might be. How are you working with local authorities to ensure that they are not just making assumptions about the work being done because the people they are using are people they know?
Mr Denham: I would say two things. We have certainly published very clear guidance to local authorities on how to evaluate what they are doing. I am sure the Committee has copies of that. We have tried to produce the guidance that enables people to assess what they are doing. The second thing I think we need to say, Chairman, is neither of us have come here to say that every single Prevent-funded project is exactly the way we would like it to be. I do believe that huge numbers of projects are very, very good. It is very important not to rubbish the whole programme because we can all find cases where it is not working in the way that we would like it to do. What I hope the Committee would accept is what I have said, which is over the next year we very clearly have said as Ministers, after a period of time in which because everyone is feeling their way we have allowed a great variety of activities to develop and for people to choose what seems to be best at local level, we now really need to be looking much harder at what appears to be working and what risks need to be covered and how we deal with those. If I could take Mr Betts' point, if there really is a case where you have a group of young Muslims coming forward saying, "We have a voice, we are part of it," and there is no space for them within a local Prevent strategy to hear that voice come through, something needs to be addressed at a local level because you would not wish to waste the contribution that people are wanting to make and the insight they have.
Q343 Mr Betts: We have addressed the issue of it should not just be the usual suspects and we should try and reach out to a wider range of people, but how far do you take that wider range of people? Do you take it to the point where there should be active engagement with people who may not be advocating blowing people or buildings up but who are flirting with the edges of extremism and extremist views. Should we try to engage with those people as part of the strategy or simply refuse to talk to anyone who is not unambiguously against violence?
Mr Denham: Unambiguous opposition to the use of terrorist violence and the breaking of British laws has to be an absolute on the Prevent programme. Beyond that, there will be people who take very different views, say, to the British Government on international affairs or people who would be labelled as socially conservative that people may have other disagreements with, but the test is are they very unambiguous on their opposition to al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism. That cannot be negotiable, in our view, for the Prevent programme. Beyond that though there would be a wide range of opinion with which you would expect people to engage locally because there will be people who might disagree with some aspect of British foreign policy but who in terms of their own young people and their own community will be absolutely unambiguously opposed to violence and are therefore allies in the key aim which is of preventing crime.
Q344 Mr Betts: That view was challenged by a quite interesting presentation we had in Birmingham with a young man there who had been engaged with and presented a different view about his role as a Muslim in British society and the history of how Muslims historically had fought in the British Army in two World Wars, a young man who we were told was actually flirting on the edge of supporting violence and indeed thinking of going out to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban and had had his views changed by being engaged with in a process. If we took the view that we should not talk to people like that are we not in danger of letting them go off in their own way?
Mr Denham: If people or individuals are in that position there are parts of Prevent, and the Channel programme indeed, that are designed for them as individuals, but I think probably to bring in an organisation that was actually flirting with promoting al-Qaeda-type violence here in the hope of winning some converts out of the debate, there is a point at which you cannot go across that path, so parts of the Prevent programme are undoubtedly designed to help those types of individuals but we have been very clear that organisations that would promote al-Qaeda-type terrorism cannot be part of the Prevent programme.
Q345 Mr Betts: There is a distinction there between giving organisations which are advocating violence money as part of the Prevent programme and a programme trying to deal with disaffected young people who may have extremist views as individuals and trying to actually engage with them and stop them getting into violence itself?
Mr Denham: If we went to a different area, because there is a crucial issue here, Mr Betts, about funding, when I was in my previous job at Innovation, Universities and Skills we produced the guidance on Prevent issues and higher education. There we did say that a proper role for universities is to provide a forum in which difficult and uncomfortable ideas are properly analysed, debated and discussed, so there would be circumstances where that might provide a forum for discussion of some of these issues. We drew a very clear distinction between people who would abuse the space that is offered by universities to promote illegal activities behind the scenes. There is, though, still a crucial issue about funding of organisations that would be beyond the pale as far as we are concerned and we are absolutely clear that cannot be one of the things that is funded by Prevent.
Q346 Mr Betts: What do you do then with the Youth Parliament's evidence that we had earlier where they were saying that because they were perceived not to be part of a framework where any views that were expressed as part of their strategy of having a number of meetings up and down the country with young people, that they were not part of an organisation which could pass any concerns directly on to the police, that young people felt the freedom to come forward and express their views and have a genuine dialogue. They thought they got far more out of that and young people who might not have engaged with any sort of process before were confident to come forward into that sort of environment?
Mr Denham: No-one is trying to prevent people doing particular types of activity or provide forums for properly structured debate. The original question, as I interpreted it, was who would Prevent actually fund and under what circumstance and we have to have some lines there. I would be fairly cautious about some of the extremist organisations that are out there obviously such as Islam4UK, which is now being prescribed, and having a conscious strategy of drawing them into a polite Prevent debate. There are many people who are out there who can discuss these issues in a way without involving those people.
Q347 Mr Betts: I am still trying to get at whether it is not funding organisations that promote violence or allowing an organisation to have a strategy of trying to engage with individuals who might be on the point of getting into violent activity that might be drawn back from them by allowing that space and opportunity to be influenced and to have a discussion.
Mr Denham: Perhaps I have not made myself clear. A part of Prevent is about being able to engage with those young people who may be flirting with these ideas. There is a range of activities, including the Channel programme, which is aimed at working with those young people and giving them an alternative view of the world, so it is not about a refusal to engage with young people who might be putting those views forward. There is a distinction between that and engaging with organisations whose rationale is to provide the ideological basis even if they are not actually organising themselves on an ideological basis for terrorism.
Q348 Chair: Can we just get on the record, Secretary of State, what the current understanding in your Department is about the risk factors for radicalisation and, in particular, the mix of religious factors, socio-economic factors and anything else?
Mr Denham: Yes, I will probably refer you, if I may, Chairman, to the formal evidence that we put in which we listed those risk factors. I am fairly certain it is there and if not I will follow that up with a letter. In round terms, although one does tend to have a combination, it is individuals who may be vulnerable for some reason, a group of people who are actively propagating the ideas, an apparently attractive narrative about why this is the solution to a particular problem, and an environment in which those ideas are not actively challenged. I hope that is a reasonably accurate summary of what we put in our evidence to you.
Q349 Chair: You have talked briefly about university campuses but prisons are the other place where there seems to be very ample evidence that many young people are recruited to extremism. Is work there entirely within the purview of the Home Office or is that partly CLG as well?
Mr Denham: The Home Office leads on the work within prisons and the Prevent part of the strategy there.
Mr Malik: As a former Prisons Minister-type bloke I am perhaps best-placed to respond to that. The MoJ has an Extremism Unit. Every single one of our prisons has at least one Muslim chaplain, if not two. In terms of the quantum of the challenge in prisons, I am not sure whether we have actually got an accurate picture of that. It is sometimes exaggerated in the media, it has to be said, but we are very conscious and the MoJ is obviously very conscious that it is a challenge. We have prison officers who are trained and imams who are trained. I spoke to many of them who have actually got engaged in de-radicalisation, if you will, not of people who became extremists within prison but were convicted under terror legislation. It is an area of concern. I would tend to say that sometimes perhaps it is exaggerated in the media. I do not think anybody underestimates the challenge that exists but there is training in place. There are Muslim chaplains in every one of these prisons. The MoJ has an Extremism Unit that works very closely with the Home Office, so it is something that is being addressed.
Mr Denham: The Department does have a broader responsibility in a variety of situations for work with chaplains which will include imams working in public institutions including in prison, so that is an area of responsibility for us. It is an area on which we are actively working to ensure that we can support the highest possible standards of work. I am not in a position to say too much more about that because the work is not completed at the moment, but we will certainly let you know if there are any further developments.
Q350 Chair: Just finally on the contribution of socio-economic factors to radicalisation, would you accept that they do contribute?
Mr Denham: My understanding of the evidence is that there has been little evidence per se of socio-economic factors having a direct contribution to radicalisation. To the extent that either in this country or around the world Muslims are perceived as being economically disadvantaged, that may be something that is exploited in the story that is told by those who wish to push the most radical and violent ideologies, but my understanding, and again I will come back to you Chairman if I get this wrong, is that the linear link that had been assumed perhaps in the early days of this exercise between individual poverty and radicalisation has not been backed up by the evidence.
Q351 Chair: From the evidence that we have been given I would agree with you. It is not necessarily individual deprivation but a perception that the community to which they belong is deprived and excluded. I want to press you when you talk about community cohesion and its contribution towards Prevent, are you talking, effectively, about tackling exclusion and disadvantage or are you talking about getting different communities talking to each other and feeling nicer about each other?
Mr Denham: I think we
have to be talking about tackling that whole set of issues that was identified
in the Cantle Report after the riots in 2001.
It is worth making the point that even if there had been no al-Qaeda, no
9/11, no
Q352 Chair: Thank you very much.
Mr Denham: Thank you very much indeed.