Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the answer of 14 November 2025, to Question 86767, on Counter-terrorism: expenditure, what was the policy reason for the number of local authorities receiving Prevent funding being reduced from 30 to 28.

The number of local authorities (LAs) that receive Home Office funding has varied over the years from 20 in 2012 to 44 areas at its peak in 2021, which was just under 25% of all single-tier and upper tier LAs in England and Wales. Irrespective of funding, the Prevent duty places a statutory responsibility on all LAs in England, Scotland and Wales to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.

Evidence suggests that the threat from radicalisation is no longer contained to a relatively small number of LAs and that it is increasingly diffuse with more complex cases. Factors such as an increase in online radicalisation has led to risk and threat no longer being contained within administrative boundaries and an LA does not need to be high threat to be high risk.

In recognition of the evolving threat and risk, Prevent has evolved its delivery model to a regional model providing increased support to all local authorities. We now have a team of region based expert Home Office Prevent Advisers; this network of Prevent Advisers (PAs) work hand-in-hand with partners across England, Scotland and Wales to offer support and raise Prevent delivery standards within local areas.

The funding model does acknowledge that there are some areas with increased threat and risk, and so We currently provide dedicated Prevent funding to 28 LAs that are assessed as managing a higher level of threat and risk, relative to other LAs, to help them go above and beyond the requirements of the Prevent duty. Determining the number of LAs that receive dedicated funding takes account of internal funding allocations for the local delivery of Prevent, and other operational considerations.

The regional model also takes into account, the recommendations of the Independent Review of Prevent (IRP), The IRP also noted that the number of funded areas should be reduced to between 15-20 local authorities.

In line with this, outside of London, we now fund 20 local authorities. However, in London it is more challenging to assess the threat and risk relative to other parts of the country because the high number of LAs - i.e 32 London Boroughs and the City of London - disaggregates the threat and risk. Our current model therefore considers Greater London as a whole and we fund eight London Boroughs on the basis that they are managing a higher threat and risk, they are performing well and are geographically placed to give us cross-Greater London coverage.