Budgets for the Home Office’s Prevent counter-extremism programme in London are set to be cut by half in two years, contradicting Rishi Sunak’s personal call for a crackdown on radicalisation outside Downing Street less than two weeks ago.
The proposed changes will cut the number of boroughs that receive funding from 22 to seven by April 2025, even though the prime minister promised to “redouble our support for the Prevent programme to stop young minds being poisoned by extremism”.
No borough in south London will receive Home Office funding, despite Sunak’s pledge and heightened concerns from the police and MI5 about the terror threat posed to the UK since the start of the Hamas-Israel war.
The annual Home Office funding for Prevent in London was £6.1m at the time of the general election and £4.5m last year, but is now being slashed to about £2m from April 2025, prompting alarm in the office of the mayor, Sadiq Khan.
“Rishi Sunak says he is cracking down on extremism, but the revelation of these savage cuts to the Prevent programme show that his claims are just a hollow sham,” a source close to Khan said after weeks of private lobbying by the Labour mayor failed to reverse the proposed cuts.
Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor for policing, wrote to the security minister, Tom Tugendhat, in January, arguing: “The conflict in the Middle East has sparked tensions across the world and in the capital. Extremist groups are using this conflict as a rallying call and radicalising force.”
Linden argued that terror threats can emerge several years after the start of controversial international conflict. “We are now clearly accumulating a significant risk of radicalisation that is likely to present in the months or years ahead,” she wrote.
Insiders say that London appears to be suffering the majority of the cuts. The number of priority areas nationally is being reduced from 40 to 20 in two years, with nine London boroughs being defunded from April and a further six in the following financial year.
Although Prevent has been repeatedly criticised for being too zealous and the definitions of potentially dangerous ideologies recently expanded to include socialism and anti-fascism, it remains the government’s flagship early-intervention anti-radicalisation scheme for tackling Islamist and far-right extremism.
Counter-terror police have said that referrals to Prevent were up by 13% between 7 October and 31 December last year compared with the same period in 2022, an increase “directly related to the conflict in the Middle East”, according to assistant commissioner Matt Jukes, head of the UK Counter Terrorism Policing network.
London remains the centre of most terror plots and threats in the UK. Over half of all terror investigations are based in London, policing sources said, and since 2017, there have been two Islamist attacks near London Bridge and one in Westminster and a far-right attack on a mosque in Finsbury Park.
The proposed cuts come against a backdrop of dramatically escalating ministerial rhetoric on extremism, led by the prime minister, while plans for a further high-profile crackdown are expected to be announced later this week.
At the beginning of the month, in his impromptu speech outside Downing Street after the election of George Galloway in Rochdale, Sunak also claimed that there had been “a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality” since the start of the conflict in the Middle East.
Michael Gove, the the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, is to announce a controversial plan this week to ban individuals and groups who “undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy” from participating in public life.
Despite this activity, sources at London’s City Hall say there has been no change to the Home Office plans to cut spending on Prevent. Although the proposed budget for 2025/26 was not yet confirmed, one insider said it understood that it will be around £2m – “a significant reduction from the £4.5m provided in 22/23”.
The Home Office said it was committed to tackling extremism. A spokesperson said that, following a review of Prevent, “we now directly target funding to local authorities of highest threat, which includes seven London boroughs”.
Local authorities can bid for additional funding from a central project fund, they added.
