Southport Inquiry

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 13th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I would be happy to hear the hon. Lady’s personal experiences of the quality of that training. I think this is the first time that she and I have had an interaction on this matter, so I would be very happy to pick those issues up with her offline.

On the substance of the hon. Lady’s point, we must follow the findings of the inquiry’s chair, who said that there were five major failures in this case, including that no single agency took ownership of the risk that the perpetrator posed, that there was poor information recording and management, and that the behaviour was sometimes excused on the basis of the perpetrator’s perceived or diagnosed autism spectrum disorder. There were a range of factors in place, and we should follow the evidence and the findings of the inquiry’s chair. We will respond based on the failures that have been found.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

All of our thoughts today are with the families of Alice, Bebe and Elsie. They have already suffered the most horrific loss, and to have confirmation today from Sir Adrian Fulford that their loss was preventable is utterly unbearable. Sir Adrian’s report highlights the failure of the multi-agency safeguarding hub, which was exactly the place where joint responsibility between different agencies should have been held, and he also said that children’s services were not well equipped to manage a risk presented by a young person, as distinct from risks to a young person. Can I therefore ask the Home Secretary what plans she has to work with the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that, as a matter of urgency, every professional working with high-risk young people knows exactly what to do when they are fearful that a young person is a risk to others, and is accountable for taking that action?

[Shabana Mahmood]

My hon. Friend notes one of the key failures, which related to the question of who the risk was to. In this case, too many of the internal assessments were of the risk to the perpetrator himself, not the risk that he posed to others. That must change, and Sir Adrian Fulford will make practical recommendations for the individual agencies, but his report speaks to the need for a cultural shift in the way in which these cases are looked at and managed. That will be a cultural shift for colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education, as well as those in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Where a Prevent referral is made because there is a vulnerability to terrorism, there are already systems in place that would enable those risk assessments to be made on the basis of risk posed to others. Of course, in this case, the onward referral to Channel should have been made, but it was not. However, we have to make sure that even where an onward referral to Channel does not take place and somebody does not quite meet the threshold for Prevent, they are still picked up, and that that cultural shift for dealing with risk—for its management and assessment—takes into account all of the findings that Sir Adrian Fulford has made.