The University’s Professor Hilary Pilkington is among 14 experts who compiled the final report of the Independent Commission on Counter-Terrorism Law, Policy and Practice, which was published today by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law.
The report is based on extensive research and evidence from over 200 experts, practitioners, policymakers, academics and community representatives.
Professor Pilkington’s remit was to scrutinise the evidence around the Government’s Prevent programme – which aims to identify and rehabilitate people at risk of radicalisation – drawing on her research expertise in youth engagement and the societal drivers of extremism.
Referrals to Prevent increased markedly after 2015, when it became a legal duty for teachers, social workers, nurses and other frontline professionals to report people they believed to be at risk of being drawn into terrorism or extremism. Referrals jumped from a few hundred a year before 2015, to an average of 6,458 per year since 2015 and to a record number of 8,517 in 2024-25.
More than two thirds of these referrals were for concerns that had no – or no clear – ideological dimension, meaning that a counter-terrorism intervention was not an appropriate response. Almost half of referrals were for children aged 11-17, and a third had at least one mental health or neurodivergence condition.
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