My Lords, I thank both the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for explaining the amendments at length. I say at the outset that I am happy to meet with both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord in due course.
Both at Second Reading and today, the noble Baroness mentioned a number of guidance documents and strategies which she suggested had informed the decisions made by local authorities about the referral of individuals to a Channel panel. Among them, she referred to the Prevent Duty Guidance. However, this guidance is not the relevant document which will guide local authorities through this process. The Prevent Duty Guidance concerns a separate duty, the wider Prevent duty, containing Section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. The proposal in Clause 19 instead talks of the duty of local authorities to maintain a panel to assess and provide support to people who are vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism; this is commonly known as the Channel panel. The statutory basis for these Channel panels is found in Sections 36 to 41 of the 2015 Act. This is accompanied by its own statutory guidance, issued under the power in Section 36(7), known as Channel duty guidance.
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The Channel duty guidance is quite clear that,
“preventing terrorism will mean challenging extremist (and non-violent) ideas that are also part of a terrorist ideology”,
as the noble Lord and the noble Baroness pointed out. The guidance also states that the way in which vulnerability to being drawn into terrorism is to be assessed is through a “vulnerability assessment framework”, containing 22 factors that can contribute to such vulnerability. The guidance goes on to say:
“Association with organisations that are not proscribed and that espouse extremist ideology as defined in the Prevent strategy is not, on its own, reason enough to justify a referral to the Channel process”.
Given this, I am not persuaded that the provisions in Clause 19 which, as I say, relate to Channel panels and not the wider Prevent duty, call for a wholesale revision of the Channel guidance and certainly not in respect of the issues raised by the noble Baroness.
We keep the Channel guidance under review and from time to time it will need updating. But it would be quite wrong to make the revision of this guidance, or the separate Prevent guidance, a precondition of the commencement of the much-needed provisions in the Bill. As I said, I am very happy to meet the two noble Lords and, in the meantime, I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.