In April this year, Sir Adrian Fulford and his team published Phase 1 reporting from their inquiry into the attacks on young girls and adults in Southport in July 2024. As Phase 2 of the Inquiry begins, it seems a good moment to reflect on the 800 or more pages which Sir Adrian published.
To some extent, policing might have felt it came away with relatively mild critique compared to say, children’s social care and health services. But there were some significant icebergs sitting under the waterline.
The inquiry team found that there were insufficient online tripwires to signal a course of conduct or pattern of purchases by an individual which should trigger action on the part of the authorities. A vacuum is present, due to unclear responsibilities, real and imagined civil liberties issues and the difficulty of wrangling with big tech companies. Rather than confidently showing leadership, policing has like other agencies appeared to stand hesitantly on the sidelines. The many upcoming changes to policing, not least mergers and the creation of the National Police Service, should not be a reason to delay progress with this issue. Senior people in Counter Terrorism Policing, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the National Crime Agency will presumably still be senior people once all the changes are made, so they have a vested interest in pushing ahead. This issue was explored in detail at the Police Foundation’s recent Oxford Policing Policy Forum – reflections from which will be published soon.
The report indicates once again the yawning chasm between counter-terrorism (CT) and safeguarding in this country. What we would previously have referred to as ‘T66’ protocols, now Op Plato, worked well. The Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles, or JESIP, functioned as intended. In a crisis, the police knew their role and the role of other agencies. This is not an accident – those procedures have been worked through meticulously over years, each word of standard operating procedures scrutinised by participating agencies, and being subjected to a thorough and regular testing programme.
Safeguarding can only dream of this level of pre planning and rigour. Time and again the report references the dilution of information as it is passed around agencies and between agencies. The monotonous ticker of missed opportunities. The absolutely dizzying number of agencies entering or trying to enter the life and home of the perpetrator. The inadequate, confused or conflicting risk assessment processes.
The time is well overdue for policing to demand that this disparity between CT and safeguarding is addressed. I say ‘demand’ because only central Government, working contrary to its own culture, can join together the current fragments and make a coherent whole. The Home Secretary’s recent announcement of a taskforce comes a year after it was recommended and just days before Sir Adrian’s Phase 2 was to begin. This supposedly cross-Government effort is being housed in the Home Office, not the Cabinet Office or No 10. Practitioners – including experienced police officers – should be key members of this taskforce but at the moment there has been no signal that will be the case.
The Prevent part of the UK’s counter terrorism strategy, CONTEST, has been criticised in the context of Southport. Some of those criticisms are legitimate. However, it is currently easier to enter the Prevent system than it is the child safeguarding system. This cannot be right. Prevent, while acting as the early intervention aspect of CT, is an extremely late stage intervention set in the context of child protection and wellbeing more generally. Here, again, the police have a role to influence policy and practice and seek changes to the thresholds for Multi Agency Safeguarding Hubs (and equivalent structures) led by children’s social care. They are uniquely placed to make this case and shouldn’t shy away from it. This is not about sloping shoulders but about putting practical expertise and insight to work.
The Phase 1 report from the inquiry has a lot to say about parental roles and responsibilities. It also clearly and repeatedly states that the perpetrator’s parents were extremely frightened of him and subjected to regular acts of violence from their son. In this country, an increasing but largely disguised number of parents fear their own children. Specialist academics such as Helen Bonnick and Professor Rachel Condry, along with specialist third sector organisations like Respect and PEGS, cite the 21-27% of all cases within youth offending team caseloads which feature the abuse of parents by minors. There is a prominence, in Prevent’s Channel cases, of parents who live in fear of their children. The majority of cases involve boys in late adolescence.
The police have made good strides in responding to domestic abuse between adults over the last 15 or more years, though there is still a significant way to go. However, issues of child to parent abuse when the child is an adolescent, rather than a grown up, remain largely hidden. In part this reflects what Sir Adrian Fulford highlights – that parents love their children even when they are abusive. They will hesitate to report them or even disguise their behaviour. But policing is steadily learning to spot the signs with adult-adult abuse and needs to work with other agencies to develop the same nuanced understanding and judgement about younger offenders.
That brings me to Recommendation 29 of the report. Here, Sir Adrian indicates that in his view, the process to identify and eliminate ‘adultification’ has gone too far and needs correction. This relates in large part to children’s social care, and their need to fundamentally revise their thinking about risks from children, as well as to children. However, he also applies this view to policing, where the term adultification has been adopted widely, not least as a result of extensive academic work by people who also have a practitioner background, such as Jahnine Davis.
Recommendation 29 leaves policing in an invidious but not uncommon position; that for a number of years they have heard that they must do x, but now they are potentially being told to swing the pendulum back the other way. The Government, in its recent response to the Phase 1 reports overall, says it accepts ‘all’ recommendations. I hope that in a process of responding to Recommendation 29, DfE/the Home Office will keep hold of the need for nuance, judgement, experience, intellectual curiosity, and an understanding of the part race plays in adultification. If Sir Adrian’s recommendation is pursued by Government without clarity, it risks significant confusion in policing as to how political leadership and policy is asking them to exercise their judgement when faced with anyone under 18.
The Phase 1 report identifies a range of procedural issues in policing (record keeping, information flows) but overall is tougher on other agencies as individual institutions. Where all agencies are under the spotlight together, they are charged with addressing the longstanding gaps and interruptions between different responses.
Policing must make every effort to reduce gaps between frontline policing and CT policing. It must also throw itself into working with other agencies to close gaps and inconsistencies in their collective, multi-agency working.
There isn’t a single view on whether the Southport case was unique. However, there are sufficient common factors between that case and others in the system to create a sense of urgency in closing the gaps that the report shines a light on.
Sir Jonathan Hall KC, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said that Phase 2 of the Fulford Inquiry may result in calls for one the most fundamental system changes in modern history. I will certainly pay close attention.
The author provided specialist support and input to Lord David Anderson in his review of Prevent aspects of Southport (and the murder of Sir David Amess), resulting in the ‘Lessons for Prevent’ report published in July 2025.