THE PREVENT PARADOX
HOW IDEOLOGY TRUMPS PRAGMATISM IN BRITAIN’S MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
*When 56% of counter-terrorism referrals involve no terrorist ideology, the question isn’t whether Prevent is fit for purpose—it’s whether we’re addressing the right problem at all*
The statistics released in November 2025 should have prompted a fundamental rethinking of how Britain approaches vulnerable young people. Instead, they triggered a familiar pattern: terrorism law reform, increased security funding, and public inquiries into counter-terrorism procedures. Yet the numbers tell a story that has almost nothing to do with terrorism.
Of the record 8,778 referrals to the government’s Prevent programme in the year to March 2025—a 27% increase on the previous year—the majority involved individuals with what officials term “no identified ideology.” Not Islamist extremism. Not far-right radicalisation. No coherent political worldview whatsoever. Just 56% of cases—approximately 4,916 young people—displaying what counter-terrorism officials euphemistically describe as “concerns about violent fixation.”
The Southport attack in July 2024 crystallised this uncomfortable reality. Axel Rudakubana murdered three children at a dance class, having been referred to Prevent three times between the ages of 13 and 14. Each referral was closed. The reason? He exhibited no terrorist ideology. Between 2019 and 2022, seven different agencies had contact with him: Prevent, Lancashire police, the multi-agency safeguarding hub, Children’s Social Care, Early Help services, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and the Youth Offending Team. All recognised problems. All attempted to pass the case to more appropriate services. Yet a 13-year-old who admitted bringing a knife to school on ten separate occasions progressed, apparently unimpeded, to mass murder four years later.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s response was to announce that “terrorism has changed” and promise reforms to terrorism legislation. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pledged £140 million additional funding for counter-terror police and nearly £500 million for intelligence services. A public inquiry was commissioned to examine Prevent’s failings.
What neither announced was emergency funding for children’s mental health services.
**THE RECOGNITION WITHOUT RESPONSE**
The failure in the Rudakubana case was not one of recognition. Every agency that encountered him correctly identified that he was not a terrorism case. Prevent assessors—following their procedures precisely—determined he lacked ideological motivation and closed his cases. He was appropriately referred onwards: to mental health services for his psychological distress, to social services for safeguarding concerns, to youth offending for his violence, to specialist education after his exclusion.
The system worked exactly as designed. And it failed catastrophically.
“I don’t believe we have the capacity in the system to deal with the complexities that people are displaying that are coming into our purview,” admitted Laurence Taylor, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing, in November 2025. This extraordinary confession—a counter-terrorism official acknowledging the real problem is mental health capacity—encapsulates the crisis. Agencies are recognising these cases and passing them on. But passing them on to what?
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services currently have waiting lists of 18 to 24 months in many areas. Only the most severe cases—active suicidal ideation or acute psychosis—meet the threshold for intervention. A teenager researching school shootings, displaying violent outbursts, and admitting to repeatedly bringing weapons to school does not, apparently, meet that threshold. Or if he does, the appointment comes in 2026 for a problem identified in 2024.
Social services, meanwhile, operate caseloads of 30 to 40 families per worker when best practice suggests 15 to 20. Their focus is necessarily on immediate safeguarding: children being abused or neglected. A child living with concerned (if overwhelmed) parents, being fed and housed, does not meet the threshold for intervention. That he might be planning violence is concerning, certainly, but not abuse in the technical sense that triggers statutory intervention.
Early Help services—designed precisely for preventative work with troubled families—have been decimated by austerity. What remains offers short-term interventions of six to twelve weeks, with no capacity for the years of sustained support that complex cases require. Schools, having excluded violent students to protect others, lack the specialist mental health resources these children need. Youth offending teams work post-conviction, not preventatively.
So agencies pass cases between themselves in an elaborate dance where everyone correctly identifies the problem and appropriately refers onwards, and nothing adequate happens. It is bureaucratic absolution—“we fulfilled our duty by referring”—while children remain fundamentally unserved.
**THE VOLUNTARY INTERVENTION TRAP**
Even when services accept cases, they confront a structural problem: almost all interventions are voluntary. Channel, Prevent’s intensive intervention programme, cannot compel participation. CAMHS cannot force families to attend appointments or young people to engage. Early Help relies entirely on family cooperation. If parents are overwhelmed or fearful—as Rudakubana’s father admitted he was—and the young person is resistant, services have no mechanism to maintain intervention.
Rudakubana’s father told the Southport inquiry he bore his “share of the responsibility” but explained that fear of his son’s violent outbursts, which occurred sometimes twice daily, prevented him from monitoring internet activity or questioning online purchases. This was not parental neglect in the conventional sense. It was a parent drowning, with no adequate support offered.
What he needed—intensive family therapy, parenting support for managing a violent adolescent, respite care during crisis periods, 24-hour helplines for moments of acute fear—largely does not exist within public provision. What does exist has waiting lists measured in years or requires the family to be in such profound crisis that other children are at immediate risk.
The gap between what complex cases require and what services can offer has become so vast that agencies recognise referral as futile. They do it anyway, to discharge their statutory duty, but without expectation of meaningful response.
**WHY PREVENT KEEPS GETTING NON-TERRORISM CASES**
This explains the paradox at the heart of the statistics. If 56% of Prevent referrals involve no terrorist ideology, why do schools, police, and families keep referring to a counter-terrorism programme?
The answer is stark: Prevent is the only thing that responds promptly.
A teacher concerned about a student researching school shootings faces these options. Refer to CAMHS: 18-month waiting list, may not meet threshold. Refer to social services: assessment might take weeks, unlikely to meet intervention threshold. Refer to Early Help: limited capacity, short-term intervention at best. Or refer to Prevent: multi-agency assessment within days, police involvement if needed, case taken seriously immediately.
The Prevent Duty—the legal obligation on schools, healthcare, and other public bodies to identify and refer individuals at risk of radicalisation—created a clear referral pathway with prompt response. Every other pathway leads into a void. So teachers refer to Prevent, knowing full well these are not terrorism cases, because it is the only mechanism that acknowledges urgency.
Prevent has become, by default, Britain’s emergency mental health service for troubled young people. This is not because Prevent has expanded its remit beyond recognition. It is because everything else has contracted to the point of invisibility.
**THE THRESHOLD TRAP**
The most damning aspect of the current system is how it creates simultaneous exclusion from all services. Cases like Rudakubana fall below multiple thresholds at once.
Not sick enough for mental health services: he is not currently suicidal (or not admitting it), not experiencing psychosis, not diagnosed with a treatable condition. His issues are classified as “behavioural problems” rather than “mental illness.” CAMHS, overwhelmed with acute cases, cannot justify long-term resource allocation for behaviour management.
Not criminal enough for youth justice: he has committed one violent assault, which has been dealt with through school disciplinary processes and a youth offending referral. Researching violence is not illegal. Carrying a knife at school is a school matter unless police press charges. Without ongoing offences to prosecute, youth justice services have no basis for intervention.
Not abused enough for child protection: he lives with his parents, is fed and housed, attends school (until excluded). His parents are concerned about him, even if ineffectively so. There is no evidence of parental abuse or neglect. Child protection teams, triaging hundreds of referrals involving actual abuse, cannot justify intervention in a case where the child is the potential perpetrator rather than victim.
Not ideological enough for Prevent: he has no affiliation with terrorist groups, no coherent extremist ideology, no political motivation. His violence fixation, however disturbing, does not constitute radicalisation in the counter-terrorism sense.
Thus he is simultaneously too troubled for every service’s threshold and not troubled enough for any service’s intervention. He exists in the gaps between all the definitions, falling through every net that might have caught him.
**THE REFORM THAT MISSED THE POINT**
The bitter irony is that the Shawcross Review—the 2023 Independent Review of Prevent that prompted wholesale programme reform—diagnosed precisely the wrong problem.
Sir William Shawcross noted that while 75% of MI5’s caseload involved Islamist terrorism and 80% of counter-terrorism police investigations focused on Islamist threats, only 16% of Prevent referrals in 2021-22 were Islamist-related. He concluded that Prevent had shown “cultural timidity and institutional hesitancy to tackle Islamism” and recommended refocusing the programme on ideological threats.
The government accepted all 34 recommendations. Implementation began in 2023-24, emphasising ideological assessment, security threat alignment, and a renewed focus on tackling “terrorist ideologies at its core.” Training was updated. Regional delivery models were introduced. The mission was clarified: Prevent exists to counter radicalisation to terrorist ideology.
This reform happened precisely as non-ideological referrals exploded from 37% of cases to 56%. The programme was reoriented toward ideology just as ideology ceased to be the primary concern in its caseload.
The Shawcross reforms were not wrong on their own terms. There are legitimate questions about whether Prevent was appropriately focused on the most serious terrorist threats. But the reforms addressed Prevent’s counter-terrorism function while ignoring what Prevent had become: the last-resort receptacle for every troubled young person the mental health system could not help.
**THE PRIVATE SECTOR SOLUTION NOBODY WANTS TO DISCUSS**
Britain has a substantial, sophisticated private mental health sector with immediate excess capacity. The Priory Group operates over 300 sites. Cygnet Health Care, Elysium Healthcare, and Acorn Healthcare run specialist adolescent facilities. Thousands of qualified therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists work in private practice. Corporate healthcare providers like BUPA and AXA PPP maintain extensive networks. Online therapy platforms have scalable infrastructure.
This sector can offer what the NHS cannot: appointments within weeks rather than years, specialist expertise in violence risk and complex trauma, residential treatment capacity for cases requiring intensive support, and proven outcomes for those able to pay.
The government could, tomorrow, contract with private providers to accept all Prevent referrals categorised as “no identified ideology.” An initial assessment within two weeks, minimum six months of sustained engagement including family therapy and risk monitoring, for approximately £5,000 to £10,000 per case. For the 4,916 such referrals in 2024-25, the total cost would be £50 million—less than half the £140 million announced for additional counter-terror police funding.
For high-risk cases where home environments are failing and violence risk is escalating—cases like Rudakubana—private residential facilities could provide secure therapeutic environments (not prison, not hospital) with intensive daily therapy, continued education, and family work. These programmes cost £100,000 to £200,000 per year per young person. The direct costs of the Southport case—investigation, trial, imprisonment for 52 years, public inquiry—will exceed £10 million. One prevented Southport-scale attack would fund 50 to 100 residential interventions.
The private sector could establish rapid response violence intervention teams providing 48-hour response to high-risk Prevent referrals, trained specifically in violence de-escalation rather than general therapy, conducting home visits and school liaison, maintaining 12-month minimum engagement, and providing the bridge between Prevent referral and NHS capacity that currently does not exist.
This is not a novel idea. Local authorities already purchase 90% of residential care home places and 70% of domiciliary care from private providers. The commissioning of looked-after children placements extensively involves the private sector. Nobody complains this represents “privatisation” of social care—it is understood as public funding with private delivery where capacity demands it.
The model could work identically for high-risk mental health cases. But it requires treating these cases as social care (which councils routinely commission from private providers) rather than health (which must remain NHS provision for ideological reasons), creating different political optics despite identical practical considerations.
**WHY IT WILL NOT HAPPEN**
The barrier is not practical but ideological. Using private sector capacity would require the Prime Minister to announce that the NHS cannot currently provide adequate mental health intervention for high-risk young people and that, as an emergency measure, the government will purchase private capacity while building NHS capability. It would be an admission that saving children’s lives matters more than maintaining ideological purity about public provision.
This is politically unacceptable. Labour’s position on private healthcare involvement is clear: any private sector delivery, even when publicly funded, represents a step toward privatisation. The party’s donor base—including health unions—would revolt. Media headlines would scream about “NHS privatisation by the back door.” Opposition parties would demand to know why the NHS is being “starved” while private providers profit.
It is easier politically to blame the previous government for NHS underfunding, promise long-term investment in NHS capacity, commission reviews and inquiries, and propose terrorism law reforms that look decisive without requiring admission of healthcare system failure.
The Treasury, meanwhile, resists outcome-based commissioning models. Paying private providers based on results—sustained engagement, absence of violent incidents, positive life outcomes—creates uncertain costs that cannot be precisely budgeted and requires multi-year commitments that constrain future spending flexibility. Treasury prefers fixed NHS budgets with predictable costs and annual allocations that can be adjusted, even if this means ineffective provision.
Professional bodies and NHS unions oppose private sector involvement as threatening jobs, pay, and conditions, viewing it as the thin end of a privatisation wedge. Their lobbying power ensures government avoids confrontation even when children die preventably.
**THE TRAGIC ARITHMETIC**
The current government response to record Prevent referrals dominated by mental health cases rather than terrorism includes: £140 million for counter-terror police, £500 million for intelligence services, unspecified millions for public inquiries and reviews, and Prevent programme expansion focused on ideological assessment.
An alternative approach purchasing private sector capacity might allocate: £50 million for 5,000 high-risk cases receiving comprehensive intervention at £10,000 each, £20 million for 200 residential places at £100,000 annually, £10 million for rapid response teams nationwide, and £5 million for digital therapeutic platform development. Total: £85 million, less than currently being spent on security responses and aftermath management.
The return on investment is overwhelming. Preventing one Southport-scale attack saves ten or more lives, over £10 million in direct costs, and incalculable social value. Preventing 50 lower-level violent incidents reduces knife crime and gang recruitment. Stabilising 1,000 troubled young people reduces the prison population, increases employment, and breaks cycles of multi-generational trauma.
Yet this investment will not be made. Not because it would not work—the evidence suggests it would. Not because it is too expensive—it is cheaper than current approaches. But because it requires admitting that NHS capacity is inadequate, that private sector provision can be effective, and that ideology must occasionally yield to pragmatism.
**THE CHILDREN FALLING THROUGH THE GAPS**
Behind the statistics are individual children. A 13-year-old researching school shootings in IT class. A 14-year-old uploading images of dictators to Instagram. A boy who told Childline he had brought a knife to school ten times, desperately seeking someone to stop him. A teenager whose father was too frightened to monitor his internet use or question his online purchases. A young man who progressed, apparently invisibly despite contact with seven different agencies, from troubled child to mass murderer.
The agencies involved did not fail through negligence. They failed because they were asked to do the impossible: provide adequate intervention without adequate resources, maintain long-term engagement through voluntary programmes, coordinate across siloed services without information sharing mechanisms, and hold accountability for outcomes without authority to direct responses.
Teachers who referred Rudakubana to Prevent did exactly what they should have done. Prevent assessors who closed his cases as non-terrorism followed their procedures correctly. CAMHS practitioners who could not offer immediate intensive support were triaging rationally given overwhelming demand. Social workers who determined he did not meet child protection thresholds were applying their criteria appropriately. His school, which excluded him to protect other students, made an understandable decision given lack of specialist resources.
Everyone did their job. The system failed anyway.
**THE QUESTION NOBODY IS ASKING**
The current debate focuses on whether terrorism laws should be expanded to cover non-ideological violence, whether Prevent should have broader remit, whether online platforms should be more heavily regulated, and whether the definition of extremism needs updating.
These are not the right questions. The right question is why Britain is processing thousands of mentally unwell, traumatised, isolated young people through counter-terrorism infrastructure when the problem is not terrorism but the absence of adequate mental health provision.
The 56% statistic is not evidence that terrorism has evolved. It is evidence that the children’s mental health system has collapsed so completely that disturbed adolescents end up in counter-terrorism channels because those are the only channels that remain open.
The government’s response—reform Prevent, change terrorism laws, increase security funding—treats the symptom while ignoring the disease. It is the equivalent of improving accident and emergency procedures while refusing to fix the dangerous road junction where crashes keep occurring. Eventually, one must acknowledge that better ambulances are not the solution.
Until there is massive investment in the actual services these children need—mental health provision, family support, specialist education, sustained intervention over years rather than weeks—the recognition and referral will continue to be meaningless theatre. Agencies will continue doing their jobs. Cases will continue being passed between services. Children will continue falling through the gaps. And periodically, one of those children will commit an atrocity that prompts another review, another inquiry, another round of proposed terrorism law reforms.
The private sector capacity to address this exists, immediately available and evidence-based. Using it requires only political will and acknowledgment that children’s lives matter more than ideological positions about healthcare provision. That acknowledgment is not forthcoming. So the preventable tragedies will continue, the statistics will worsen, and the counter-terrorism system will remain clogged with cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.
The question is not whether this approach will eventually change. It must, because it is unsustainable. The question is how many more Southports Britain will endure before pragmatism finally overcomes ideology.