The Southport Inquiry Report: Phase 1, Volume 2

Continuing on from our summary of the first volume of phase one of the report - which can be found on our website here - we summarise the second volume of the Southport Inquiry's report.

The full 509 page volume can be read here. Some may find it a difficult and distressing read.

The recommendations

The inquiry outlined its recommendations in Phase 1, Volume 2 as follows:

• Recommendation 25: Lancashire Constabulary should consider extending Operation Encompass to share automatically relevant information with schools in bordering areas. The Department for Education should consider national implementation. This is because children will not necessarily attend school in the same police force area as they live.
  
  
• Recommendation 26: Lancashire Constabulary, and the College of Policing nationally, should ensure that forms and training emphasise the importance of recording, as precisely as possible, the words and behaviour of individuals who may pose a significant risk to others.
  
  
• Recommendation 27: Lancashire Constabulary and Merseyside Police should review the effectiveness of their information-sharing systems and consider whether a more robust process is required. Findings should be shared with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing for consideration as to whether national level guidance is appropriate.
  
  
• Recommendation 28: Lancashire Constabulary should ensure its training and systems address the risks associated with failing to record case information on police systems so it is readily available to others. The National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing should consider whether further national guidance is required.
  
  
• Recommendation 29: Lancashire Constabulary should ensure its procedures and training sufficiently addresses the risks children and young people may pose to others and the options for addressing that risk. The College of Policing, with national partners, should review legislation and guidance on how police respond to children and young people who present a risk of serious harm to others.
  
  
• Recommendation 30: Lancashire Constabulary should strengthen its autism spectrum disorder-related training for new officers and through continuous development. National policing bodies, with input from the Department of Health and Social Care, should consider whether reforms to guidance or training are required.
  
  
• Recommendation 31: Lancashire Constabulary should ensure response officers have access to effective technology providing clear, essential case information. The National Police Chiefs’ Council, College of Policing and Home Office should review whether current policing information systems, particularly the limitations on cross-force access, are suitable for modern policing needs.
  
  
• Recommendation 32: While training for Counter Terrorism Policing, staff involved in Prevent currently cover the importance of understanding a referred individual’s online activity and the practical steps required to assess it, the Home Office and Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should review and strengthen this training to ensure that officers fully understand both the importance of investigating online activity and that where online behaviour is a factor in a referral, cases should not ordinarily be closed until proportionate steps have been taken to access and assess the individual’s online activity. Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should ensure that this remains a consistent priority across all regions. Counter Terrorism Policing North West should review its own processes in this regard.
  
  
• Recommendation 33: Counter Terrorism Policing’s capability to access and analyse data relating to a referred person’s online activity should be reviewed in the context of Prevent referrals, to determine whether staff have the technical tools required to undertake this assessment. The Home Office and Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should ensure this review is conducted.
  
  
• Recommendation 34: Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should review its neurodiversity training for Prevent practitioners (including, where appropriate, drawing in wider healthcare advice) to ensure that they sufficiently equip practitioners with a proper understanding of how autism may influence risk in the context of a Prevent referral, and the importance of timely referrals to the Clinical Consultancy Service to obtain advice on how neurodiversity, including autism, may affect the risks in any individual case. Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should ensure that this remains a consistent priority across regions. Counter Terrorism Policing North West should review its own processes in this regard.
  
  
• Recommendation 35: Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should review and where necessary strengthen the training that Counter Terrorism Policing officers involved in Prevent already receive to ensure that they understand the importance of balancing concern for an individual’s vulnerability with appropriate professional curiosity and awareness of disguised compliance. The training should address cases involving children or individuals with mental health conditions or neurodivergence, where concern for vulnerability may obscure the potential for dangerousness, and equip officers to test and verify accounts, including probing explanations when necessary and comparing accounts with other available evidence, including that provided by the referrer. Counter Terrorism Policing North West should review its own processes in this regard.
  
  
• Recommendation 36: Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters and the Home Office should assess and issue clear guidance on best practice for sharing appropriate information about closed Prevent referrals. This guidance should ensure that relevant professional agencies outside Counter Terrorism Policing, including local police and referring bodies, are notified of a closure and provided with relevant feedback, unless strong legal or other case specific risk grounds justify non-disclosure.
  
  
• Recommendation 37: Prevent supervisors should receive improved role specific training, including training on supervising decisions to close Prevent referrals and ensuring that all outstanding actions have been completed. This may be achieved by work currently underway but the effectiveness of new training in this area should be audited.
  
  
• Recommendation 38: Building on the Key Principles of Prevent issued on 23 February 2026, the Home Office should ensure that accessible information and appropriate training materials should be made available to organisations which are likely to make Prevent referrals (particularly those subject to the Prevent Duty) to strengthen understanding that a fixed ideology is not required for a referral to be made or accepted. The development of a Prevent practitioner portal should be prioritised.
  
  
• Recommendation 39: The Department for Education should update Working Together to Safeguard Children and the Children’s Social Care National Framework. These documents should highlight that safeguarding and child protection assessments, when considering what support to put in place and planned multi-agency working, must consider the risks posed by children to others.
  
  
• Recommendation 40: Lancashire County Council should ensure that by 13 October 2026 all its frontline staff have received suitable training, or refresher training, on Prevent.
  
  
• Recommendation 41: Lancashire County Council should ensure that its arrangements for social workers provide appropriate support and supervision for family support workers handling level 3 cases on the Continuum of Need.
  
  
• Recommendation 42: Lancashire County Council should review its processes and training to ensure decisions regarding children and families are made on the basis of assessed need rather than inflexible criteria such as duration or ease of arranging services.
  
  
• Recommendation 43: Lancashire County Council should ensure that its policies and training emphasise the significance of multiple referrals when considering the relevant risks relating to a child (including the risk to others).
  
  
• Recommendation 44: Lancashire County Council should ensure that frontline staff are required to familiarise themselves with full case information, with this being embedded through training and performance review. The council should also review its IT systems to ensure that there are adequate mechanisms to bring all relevant information speedily to someone’s attention. The warning markers visible on the front page should include markers relevant to risk of harm to others and use of or access to weapons, as well as factors relating to risk of harm to a child. The council should conduct sampling audits to monitor record-keeping practices.
  
  
• Recommendation 45: Lancashire County Council should ensure frontline staff receive appropriate training on autism spectrum disorder, emphasising that autism does not necessarily explain or excuse behaviour. The Department for Education should ensure this approach is applied nationally.
  
  
• Recommendation 46: Lancashire County Council should consider how to address repeated lack of consent or manipulation of consent within existing legislation.
  
  
• Recommendation 47: Lancashire County Council, in consultation with the Youth Justice Board, should arrange for a comprehensive and independent audit to be undertaken of the Lancashire County Council Child and Youth Justice Service to report by 13 October 2026. This should include assurance that the service is holding young offenders to sufficient standards and boundaries in referral orders, and that interventions are focused and appropriate.
  
  
• Recommendation 48: Lancashire County Council should ensure that staff within Children and Family Wellbeing Service, and Children’s Social Care receive training on the services available through the Child and Youth Justice Service, including prior to any court or out of court disposals such as Prevention and Diversion. The council should offer input on this topic to Lancashire Constabulary, Counter Terrorism Policing North West, and any relevant Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service.
  
  
• Recommendation 49: Lancashire County Council, with the Care Quality Commission, should commission an independent audit of the Young Adults Team to ensure assessments for transition to adult care are timely, properly reasoned and take full account of the individual’s history. This should report by 13 October 2026.
  
  
• Recommendation 50: The Department of Health and Social Care/NHS England should ensure that all healthcare trusts involved in the care of children and young people who are at risk of acts of violence against others have systems that ensure that key information regarding current and historic risk information is readily visible to treating clinicians in a summarised form, where appropriate with suitable warning flags, and that where information comes in from other agencies that is relevant to the risk of violence to others, there are robust systems to ensure that the material is uploaded to or available on their own electronic patient records. Single points of failure leading to risk-relevant communications failing to be scanned need to be designed out.
  
  
• Recommendation 51: At the local level, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust should liaise with all of the relevant community healthcare organisations (including Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and Criminal Justice Liaison Services) to ensure that there is clarity about who is responsible for conducting complex structured risk assessments for children and young people who present a risk of violence to others.
  
  
• Recommendation 52: Nationally, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England should review whether there is a need for further development and guidance including on the thresholds for when complex structured risk assessments (such as the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth) are required for children and young people who present a risk of violence to others. They should also review whether national guidance is required to ensure clarity about who is responsible for conducting complex structured risk assessments (where they are appropriate) for children and young people who present a risk of violence to others. Consideration should also be given to the roles of children and young people’s mental health services and wider children’s services in conducting or referring for appropriate risk assessments.
  
  
• Recommendation 53: At the local level, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust should by no later than 13 October 2026 carry out and report on a joint audit to ensure that for cases involving both trusts, the action points from multi agency meetings, healthcare meetings, discharge plans and management plans after risk assessments are being recorded in a SMART-compliant (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) way.
  
  
• Recommendation 54: Nationally, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England should consider whether nationwide guidance should be issued on the importance of action points from all relevant meetings involving healthcare agencies, discharge plans and management plans after risk assessments being recorded in a SMART-compliant way.
  
  
• Recommendation 55: Phase 2 should consider the ability of community and forensic mental health services to deliver clinical interventions to mitigate the risk from violence fixated children and young people.
  
  
• Recommendation 56: Phase 2 should consider whether further legislative change is required to allow mental health clinicians to assess children and young people who are isolated from professional support and may pose a risk of violence, particularly where powers under the Mental Health Act 1983, as amended by the Mental Health Act 2025, do not permit assessment or detention.
  
  
• Recommendation 57: The Home Office (for police forces nationwide), Counter Terrorism Police Headquarters (for Prevent), Department of Health and Social Care (for all healthcare providers) and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (for all local authorities regarding their social care functions) should issue a nationwide reminder to all agencies considering the risk that children pose to others of the importance of respecting the insight offered by the child’s school if they raise concern about the severity of risk that the child poses to others. Warnings from teachers and/or schools with particular expertise (including but not limited to Pupil Referral Units) should be given particular weight.
  
  
• Recommendation 58: The Department for Education, in finalising the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance 2026, and in any necessary amendments to other policy and guidance, should ensure that:
  
  
  1. In cases where a child leaves a school because of permanent exclusion, there is absolute clarity concerning the relative responsibilities of the excluding school and the local authority over the transfer of the Common Transfer File and safeguarding information to the next school.
  
  2. Better guidance is given of the circumstances in which safeguarding information is to be shared in advance of an offer of a placement and the transfer of a pupil. This should include, in particular, where this would aid arrangements that may be necessary for the safety of other pupils or staff because there is relevant information concerning the child’s risk to others.
  
  3.There is absolute clarity over the extent to which risk to others information is expected to be covered in an Education, Health and Care Plan. There should be consistency (which is currently lacking) about whether risk to others is addressed in an Education, Health and Care Plan. However, it must be made clear that an Education, Health and Care Plan (even if one is in place) is not a substitute for the proper exchange of information between schools on the risk that a student may pose to others.
  
  4. The arrangements for the exchange of safeguarding information are not prone to a single point of failure (such as a Designated Safeguarding Lead who is absent or unwell and does not read an incoming email). While the current guidance refers to obtaining confirmation of receipt, there is a case for strengthening the guidance with a clear mechanism at a fixed time to ensure the exchange of information has been effected. There is also a case for the introduction of a formal "sign off" by the Designated Safeguarding Lead (with appropriate contingencies in place) to confirm that safeguarding information has been received, reviewed and acted upon prior to a pupil being offered a place and prior to the pupil moving to the school.
  
  5. Ensuring that appropriate safeguarding information about a pupil joining a school is shared with relevant staff at the school (e.g. form tutors) before the pupil begins at school.
  
  6. Ensuring that incidents of serious concern, particularly including the use of weapons and intent to seriously harm other pupils, are given appropriate prominence when safeguarding information is shared.
  
  7. Ensuring, where a pupil has a history of possession of a knife or other offensive weapon, that the Designated Safeguarding Lead of the receiving school carries out a risk assessment and implements a safety plan prior to their transfer.
  
  
• Recommendation 59: The Department for Education should carry out an audit to ensure that safeguarding information is reliably being passed between schools and should consider what further role Ofsted may play to strengthen protection in this area.
  
  
• Recommendation 60: The Department for Education should ensure (either by direct guidance or through Ofsted) that all schools are required to record safeguarding information in a system that is fit for purpose.
  
  
• Recommendation 61: Lancashire County Council should, by no later than 13 October 2026, carry out and report on an audit (preferably involving an experienced independent external member) to review:
  
  
  1. The speed of response to cases where a need for alternative education provision is raised including for those over 16 with an Education, Health and Care Plan.
  
  2. The effectiveness of its monitoring of (and action in response to) school attendance with particular attention being given to children who live in Lancashire but attend school in neighbouring counties; the resourcing of home visits in appropriate cases; and whether appropriate action is being taken where parents refuse to allow school attendance workers to see a child who is not attending school.
  
  3. The effectiveness of the Education, Health and Care Plan portal approach which has been put in place.
  
  
• Recommendation 62: The Department for Education and the Home Office should review whether further guidance and/or minimum guidance is required in relation to local education authority and police visits to children not attending their place of education.
  
  
• Recommendation 63: The Department for Education should ensure that its own policy guidance for teachers and schools (outside the Statutory Guidance for which the Home Office is responsible) is strengthened; and schools put in place improved Prevent training (including refresher training). This must ensure that staff are not just aware of when to make a Prevent referral but are also aware of what happens once a Prevent referral is made, and the importance of ongoing dialogue, feedback and assessment between the referrer and the Prevent officer.
  
  
• Recommendation 64: The Department for Education should undertake a targeted review, engaging with a representative sample of local authorities, to check both that the current (improved) guidance is now sufficient and understood and that the system for monitoring school attendance is being followed in practice and meets the need in cross border cases.
  
  
• Recommendation 65: The Department for Education should consider what remedial steps can be put in place to assist in circumstances where, whether through underfunding or underperformance, local education authorities are failing to respond adequately to the need for alternative education provision for children who may pose a risk to others. Reforms currently being developed to Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and alternative provision may be part of the necessary solution.
  
  
• Recommendation 66: The Youth Justice Board should ensure that a form of clear practical written guidance is drafted which relevant professionals (social care, healthcare, police, education) can provide to parents of children who have been found with a knife or offensive weapon, explaining the importance of informing agencies if they become aware that the child has purchased or obtained a weapon.
  
  
• Recommendation 67: The Law Commission should be asked to review the merits of legal reform concerning whether specified categories of persons ought to be under a legal duty to warn about, or a duty to report, the criminality of another.

The observations

The inquiry additionally made a number of observations:

• Observation J: The cross-border policing complexities identified in Chapter 7 may be relevant to the government’s ongoing consideration to reform of the number and organisation of police forces, albeit that issue is beyond the scope of the inquiry.
  
  
• Observation K: Clear guidance and training are essential to ensure that the distinct functions of FIMU officers and Prevent officers are not conflated, and that the independent decision-making role of Counter-Terrorism Coordinators is not undermined by FIMU input.
  
  

Best practice

It would be best practice to attempt to embed the inquiry's recommendations where possible and where relevant to your organisation. More recommendations will likely follow in the inquiry's report following Phase 2. The report is not expected until spring 2027.

How we can help

If you would like assistance with any of the issues featured in this article, please contact us.

The information in this article is correct at the time of writing. It is intended as general guidance and should not be treated as legal advice. Every situation turns on its own facts, and tailored advice should be sought before taking any action.

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