Southport Inquiry: Prevent Programme

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, we touched on a number of issues yesterday during the Government’s Statement on the dreadful events at Southport, including the Mental Health Act. This was of course expressly designed for the purpose of limiting the extent to which autistic people can be detained and treated. Given that one of the contributing factors to both Rudakubana’s behaviour and the authorities’ failure to intervene was his autism diagnosis, will the new national autism strategy now look to change this approach? Can the Minister outline when we can expect to see that strategy?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

One of the recommendations said the issue of autism was a potential contributing factor but not the sole contributing factor. As I mentioned on the Statement last night, it is anticipated that a revised autism strategy being produced by other parts of government will be done in relatively short order. I cannot give the noble Lord a timescale from the Dispatch Box because it is not my direct departmental responsibility, but I will look into that and report back to him by letter.