Keith Vaz
Main Page: Keith Vaz (Labour - Leicester East)Department Debates - View all Keith Vaz's debates with the Home Office
(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman has worked hard to get that issue into a statement about extremism in our schools. The Education Secretary and I talk about those issues, and our Departments work together on them. We are constantly looking to ensure that what we do in our schools provides the right education for our children, and one that helps them to tackle a range of issues that might make them feel pressurised, including the important one—extremism—we are talking about today.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
The Home Secretary is right to remind the House that she alone has overall responsibility for counter-terrorism in the Cabinet. In the past three years, the Home Affairs Committee has conducted two major inquiries into extremism, but no Minister from any Department has given us written or oral evidence to suggest that there was a problem with Birmingham schools. She was correct in writing to the Education Secretary, and she raised four important, indeed critical questions. Has she received a reply to the questions in the letter she sent last Tuesday, and does she agree that the Prevent strategy is always capable of improvement? We do not need just to prevent; we need to engage with communities to rid ourselves of extremism.
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman is right, in that, of course, there is a spectrum of activity that we need to be involved in. At one end, some of that is about actively working to prevent people who want to undertake or plan terrorist acts against us from doing so. But at the other end there is obviously the wider integration work with communities, and in many cases helping to support communities to address issues of extremism and radicalisation, should they see them in their streets and local institutions. On the first point, the right hon. Gentleman knows full well that my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary will make a statement at the end of this urgent question on what has been happening in schools in Birmingham, and I suggest he waits for that.