Prevent review 'a waste of time' says daughter of murdered MP Sir David Amess - after killer labelled ‘great person’
The daughter of Sir David Amess has told LBC News the government's Prevent Review is a 'waste of time' and 'a slap in the face'.
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A report looking into Prevent, the Government’s counter-terror programme, was published on Wednesday, making recommendations to improve the service based on the lessons learned from the cases of Sir David Amess’s murderer Ali Harbi Ali and Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Katie Amess, the daughter of Sir David Amess, told LBC News' Vanessa Baffoe that none of the family's questions have been answered by the review and it has been a waste of time.
"It's absolutely useless," she said.
"None of the questions that we have were answered in this review. If anything, it's just brought up more questions. And Yvette Cooper is now saying that they're going to do a review of the review of the review, but you're just wasting our time.
"We don't know why this guy was released from Prevent.
"It's a slap in the face. And the fact that we now know that they had enough money to meet him seven times, that was what was budgeted, and they took him for one coffee, said he was a great person and let him go is just beyond belief.
"This Prevent scheme isn't foiling anything. It should be called Allow because they're allowing people to go on."
Read more: Prevent programme should continue referrals for no ideology, report recommends
The Amess family has had very little communication with the Home Office since meeting with the government in March.
They only found out that the report was coming out when a journalist contacted them, and after pressuring the Home Office, they eventually received a letter from Yvette Cooper 24 hours before it was published.
Katie has since spoken with lawyers who have combed through the report, and she is now calling for an inquiry.
She said: "I want to know who made the decisions not to meet (Amess' killer) again, who released him from the scheme, what rationale they made for releasing him from the scheme.
"They keep saying lessons will be learned, but lessons weren't learned because three years later it happened in Southport.
"When Southport happened and their Prevent learning review was released, the government said 'OK, we know that there was a string of failings. Let's do an inquiry so we can investigate why those failings happened'.
But in my father's case, they say 'OK, we know there were failings, that's the end of it'. You don't get to find out why these were made. And it's just not acceptable."
The report follows Prevent Learning Reviews published looking into the two cases.
A review assessing Rudakubana’s closed referrals to the programme years before he went on to murder three girls, and attempted to kill eight others and two adults, found that too much focus was placed on the absence of a distinct ideology.
Harbi Ali’s case was also deemed to be closed too early after “problematic” assessments, before he went on to kill veteran MP Sir David seven years later.