Preventing the terror threat

Sir John Saunders’s final report into the Manchester Arena bombing has concluded that MI5 missed a “significant” opportunity to prevent the terrorist attack. The public inquiry found that the security service did not act swiftly enough on a piece of information about Salman Abedi, which could have led officers to the car in which he was storing his homemade device. Sir John identified five other failings by MI5 and counter-terrorism police, including that they “underestimated the [terror] risk from Libya in 2017”.

This is obviously deeply regrettable. Families of the victims of the atrocity are justifiably upset that it could potentially have been prevented. MI5 and counter-terror police will doubtless study Sir John’s recommendations and seek to rectify the deficiencies in their approach. The head of MI5 has apologised. But it should not be forgotten that, given the intelligence services by necessity work in secrecy, there will be many successes by MI5 that the public will never hear about. The national threat to the UK from terrorism is currently judged to be substantial, meaning that an attack is considered likely. It is in large part thanks to the work of MI5 and its partners that there have not been more atrocities in the UK.

While Sir John criticised MI5 and counter-terror police for failing twice to refer Abedi to the Prevent deradicalisation programme, it is apparent that more also needs to be done to root out extremism before it becomes a threat. William Shawcross made a series of sensible recommendations in his review of Prevent. It remains important that they are implemented as quickly as possible.