Birmingham City Council spends £750,000 on anti-terror project

Oct 2 2011 by Jonny Greatrex, Sunday Mercury

A SECURITY expert has branded a £750,000 scheme to combat home-grown terrorism in the Midlands as “a nonsense”.

New figures show Birmingham City Council handed out the cash to 22 projects in the last financial year, as part of the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) scheme.

The Government initiative supports projects which aim to prevent Muslims from becoming radicalised.

The Birmingham cash went on schemes including a group offering counselling to young men with low self-esteem and another providing boxing lessons.

The details came to light just two weeks after seven men were charged over an alleged suicide bomb plot following police raids across the city.

Four were charged with preparing for an act of terrorism, two with failing to disclose information, and a seventh with entering into a funding arrangement for the purposes of terrorism.

Robin Simcox, from security think tank The Henry Jackson Society, questioned the huge spending on anti-terrorism initiatives.

“Prevent has been reviewed by this Government because it was widely acknowledged to be extremely flawed,’’ he said.

“It has handed huge amounts of money to organisations but there were absolutely no checks and balances to see if they were producing anything useful. I don’t think a lot of the money was well used.

“You’d get huge amounts handed out to various obscure knitting circles or boys’ camping trips.

“The fact is these were given on a counter terrorism basis and it was clearly a nonsense.”