| | The Intelligence and Security Committee (chaired by Dr Kim Howells MP, pictured) has released its annual report 2008 -2009 and it contains an interesting and valid critique of the Government’s Prevent programme.
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The report states:
‘One of the key, and yet most difficult, strands in CONTEST is PREVENT: it is this strand (which aims to “stop people becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremists”) that is essential to the success of reducing the long-term terrorist threat to the UK. In recognition of this, the Government has dedicated significant resources to PREVENT – £140 million for 2008/09.
‘Given the importance of this work, and the considerable funding it is receiving, it is essential that clear and transparent targets are in place against which progress can be measured. Last year we were told that it was still too early to measure real success or outcomes of PREVENT. This year, we have been told that progress on PREVENT is now being measured using outcomes and indicators set within a new International Counter- Terrorism Public Service Agreement (PSA) covering 2008 to 2011.
‘The PREVENT PSA contains three key outcomes:
i. Resilience in domestic communities: An improvement in the extent to which domestic Muslim communities reject and condemn violent extremism.
ii. Resilience in sectors and services: A reduction in the risk of individuals who come into contact with key sectors/services [including prisons and higher education] becoming or remaining violent extremists.
iii. Resilience in overseas priority countries: A positive UK contribution to the resilience of priority countries to violent extremism.
‘The PREVENT strand of CONTEST is crucial if we are to counter the long term terrorist threat. While the results of this work may take time to be seen, it has now been two years and we would have hoped that progress could by now be evaluated against more quantifiable outcomes. We therefore recommend that more effective measures are developed against which to assess progress. ‘
And on the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), whose budget and staff seems to have grown exponentially in the last couple of years, the ISC levels similar criticism:
‘Given our concerns about the difficulty of measuring the success of work on PREVENT as a whole, we asked RICU how it was measuring its contribution. We were told that there were four key strands: “measuring changes in audience attitudes; analysis of public discourse on counter-terrorism; stakeholder views; and evaluation of RICU campaigns and intervention”.
'Asked about RICU’s tangible successes so far, we were told that:
‘During the Gaza conflict RICU ensured that the Government’s position was communicated… a major counter-narrative campaign has been initiated… a network of community organisations established… local partners in priority areas have been briefed and provided with communications advice… relationships have been built with key media channels… research into audience segmentation… has been completed… [and] guidance on communicating with Somali and Pakistani [communities] in the UK has been circulated. ‘RICU has now been in existence for over two years; however, the same concerns apply here as to the wider PREVENT strand (under which RICU falls): this is a difficult area of work where progress takes time, and is hard to see and measure. We hope that the results will be visible in the future, but note that RICU itself has said that “communications can only take us so far”.’
With the report due from the Communities and Local Government committee’s inquiry into Prevent, what measurable difference this costly programme has yielded is something Muslims will be most interested to learn. With targets a feature of so much of public expenditure in other areas, it seems rather strange that the Government’s Prevent programme should be so devoid of quantifiable outcomes against which to assess its effectiveness.
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