Southport Inquiry: Prevent Programme

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord mentions an important point: we are very cognisant of online radicalisation, and the Home Office is looking at what steps we can take to improve the take-down of difficult sites and to look at tracing back those sites. We are continually monitoring the whole issue of counterextremism and how that works, both through my colleague Ministers and through the security services. We will continue to monitor our support and Prevent mechanisms. Prevent has helped around 6,000 people not to go into extremist activity in the last nine years. It is a good programme but, as I have mentioned, we have tweaked it based on the experiences of what happened in Southport in the very early days of this Government.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, in addition to the points that noble Lords around the House have made—about multi-agency co-operation and single-agency lead, and indeed the last comments about the internet, and about violent and misogynistic material in particular—will my noble friend also consider issues around the challenges of parenting a very troubled and potentially violent child, and around support and accountability? Will that be on the Government’s agenda as well?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

One of the recommendations from Sir Adrian was on assessing the parents of the individual who is, I remind the House, now serving 52 years as a minimum sentence in prison for the assault. The failure of the parents to understand, establish and report the behaviour of the individual was a critical factor, so Sir Adrian has made a number of recommendations in that area. We received the recommendations on Monday; it is important to give them due consideration. We will report back to the House by the summer, but those are key areas where we need to look at what interventions can be made where there are difficult young people involved in activity that can escalate to the incident that happened in Southport.