Dan Jarvis

I am grateful to the shadow Home Secretary for the points he has raised and for how he has approached the statement. He mentioned—I am pleased that he did—that he had spoken to Lady Amess this morning. Let me take the opportunity to reiterate how courageous the Home Secretary and I think that the Amess family have been in pursuing answers about Sir David’s murder. They, entirely understandably, wanted the Government to publish the Prevent learning review, and we have done that today. As I referenced earlier, the Home Secretary has also asked the independent Prevent commissioner to look carefully at the details of this case, and we will progress that at pace. The Home Secretary, as I referenced earlier, has also written to Essex police about this matter. Let me also say that we continue to want to work very closely with the Amess family. The Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and I stand ready to meet them again in the near future to discuss what more we might be able to do to support them. The shadow Home Secretary specifically asked me about redactions in the Prevent learning review. I am happy to confirm that nothing material has been redacted. The report is now live on gov.uk and contains only minimal redactions to obscure the names of people who worked with the perpetrator, including teachers and police officers, and personal information about the perpetrator’s family as well as some national security sensitivities. Nothing material has been redacted. I say to the shadow Home Secretary that I hope there is much common cause here. I hope he will acknowledge that there are a number of reforms to the Prevent programme, which we have recently referenced, including with regard to the point he rightly made about mental health provision. I will say a bit more about that in a moment. Let me respond to the shadow Home Secretary’s particular point about the threat from Islamist extremism and the referrals to Prevent. He is right that we should never forget the horrendous death toll caused by Islamist extremism over the past 20 years. It is the foremost threat that we face, and we must and will address it head-on. Last year, the number of Islamist referrals to Prevent increased by 17%, but that was from too low a base. Work is already under way to improve ideology training and build awareness of the ideologies that drive radicalisation. We should be clear about the fact that the threat is evolving fast. In October, the director general of MI5 said that 75% of counter-terrorism work was of Islamist extremism in nature and 25% was extreme right wing, and that 13% of those being investigated by MI5 were under the age of 18. He flagged that MI5 was seeing a “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies”. The Southport attack reflects how that particular threat is changing. I come back to the shadow Home Secretary’s point about mental health. As he knows, the Government’s mental health legislation is currently in the other place. The purpose of the Mental Health Act 1983 is to ensure that clinicians have the power to detain and treat mentally unwell people who present a risk to themselves or to others. The new Bill will not change that. It is specifically designed to make it more likely that those detained will seek help, complete their treatment successfully and stay in contact with authorities where needed, reducing the risk to themselves and others. NHS England has asked every mental health trust to review the findings of the Care Quality Commission report published in August and set out action plans for how they treat and engage with people who have serious mental illness, including how they work with other agencies such as the police. The trusts have also been instructed not to discharge people if they do not attend appointments. I hope that goes some way to answering the shadow Home Secretary’s questions, but I am happy to continue the conversation with him.