My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for not having taken part in the Second Reading of the Bill, but I was out of the country. I wish to speak to this amendment because I was the leader of Sheffield City Council at the time when the Prevent strategy came in. I think that we may be going down the road of repeating past mistakes. When Prevent was brought in, it was not statutory but it was driven by a lot of central guidelines. It became clear to me and many council leaders that these central guidelines were not appropriate to our communities. The community of Sheffield is very different to the community of Bradford just down the road. The complexity of dealing with something like radicalisation requires a deep and thorough understanding of the community and context within which people work. Statutory guidance will mean that flexibility will go and straitjackets will come in because someone at a top-down level will decide that they know, from Whitehall, what is best for every community in this country
The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, made a very strong point. Until we know what actually works, how can anyone write evidence-based statutory guidance? Work has been done on this internationally. Rik Coolsaet, an expert at the University of Ghent, who used to be the adviser to the European Commission on Radicalisation, said very clearly that we do not yet know internationally what does or does not work on a deradicalisation strategy. Exactly what is going to be evidence-based in the statutory guidance? I asked a Written Question, which was responded to on 26 January:
“how many public bodies as defined in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill do not meet the provisions of the Prevent duty guidance consultation document, according to each category of public body”,
but the Minister was not able to answer. The Government do not know. This is a really important point: if we do not know exactly what is happening out there already, if we do not have an evidence base for what works, how can we say to public bodies, which understand the context of their locality far better than anybody else, “You have to do this to prevent people from radicalisation or extremism”?
Furthermore, it is important to understand that where the best international examples exist—noble Lords have already given two examples, particularly that of Hayat—it is not on a statutory basis nor via a statutory body but it is a community, bottom-up approach that is dealing with this, in not just a sensitive but an
effective way. While I do not for one minute doubt the genuine and important reasons why the Government have started on this road, I believe that it will have unintended consequences that will not help the problem but could mean that statutory bodies at local level will have to deal with a greater and more difficult problem. I therefore ask the Minister: what evidence base will go into the statutory guidance which will help, and can he guarantee that it will be contextualised for the different and varied communities around this country?