Terrorism in BritainFact Check: are only one in eight counter-terrorism referrals to Prevent made by Muslims?

By Sameera M. Khalfey

Published 7 June 2017

Paul Nuttall, leader of the populist UKIP, claimed that only one in eight referrals to Prevent, Britain’s counterterrorism program, comes from the Muslim community. There are at least four problems with this claim. First, suspicious extremist activities are reported to many different organizations – the police, MI5, the Channel program, anti-extremism websites, etc. – not only to Prevent; second, it is not clear how accurate these figures are: Channel notes that between 2012 and 2014, 56 percent of reports of suspicious extremist activity were likely recorded by Muslims; third, since the religion, age, gender, or ethnicity of the often-anonymous tipper are not published by the Home Office (and are often not available to the Home Office), it is difficult make a determination about the percentage of Muslims among the tippers; fourth, the number of referrals made to the Prevent program is not indicative of the success or failure of the counter-extremism strategy: The Manchester suicide bomber, and one of the terrorists in the Saturday London attack, were reported to Prevent and known to the authorities – and they still managed to carry out their deadly attacks.

We need to get the Muslim community itself to sign up to the Prevent program. Only one out of eight referrals to Prevent come from within the Muslim community.
Paul Nuttall, leader of UKIP, speaking during the BBC Election Debate on 31 May

Paul Nuttall’s comment about the number of referrals under the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent, used a statistic that was incorrectly quoted and dropped into the debate without context. The only publicly available statistic – quoted in the Times and the Guardian in December 2015 – stated that out of 3,288 referrals to the Prevent program in the first half of 2015, only 280 or 8.6 percent came from within the Muslim “community, family, friends and faith leaders.” Using Nuttall’s comparison, this would make it one in twelve referrals.

The figures were provided by the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) in response to a freedom of information request and refer to the first half of 2015. They are not official published government data. Other information is held by the Home Office on the gender, age, ethnicity and religion of people arrested under counter-terrorism legislation, but it does not publish data on those who make the referrals.

When I asked the NPCC, its press office stated that: “Those figures were given out under freedom of information requests” – but the information provided cannot be found on the relevant part of its website.

It should also be noted that referrals are made in line with Prevent legislation to the police, MI5, and on the online anti-extremism website, and not to what Nuttall calls the “Prevent program”. If an individual is deemed vulnerable to all types of extremism and terrorism, they may be referred to what’s called the Channel program. Between 2007 and 2014, other data published by the NPCC indicates there have been a total of 3,934 referrals to Channel and that 56 percent of those referred between April 2012 and March 2014 were recorded as Muslims.

UKIP were contacted twice for comment by The Conversation about Nuttall’s claim, but didn’t respond.