Southport Inquiry

Phase 2 should consider what single agency or structure should be appointed or established to record, monitor and co-ordinate interventions for children and young people who present a high risk of serious harm. This must be matched with cultural change so that agencies are prepared to own and manage risk appropriately not just refer it on to others.

The Department for Transport should require local authorities to ensure that all licensed taxi drivers have a clear duty promptly to report any significant criminal activity they witness while working. This duty should form part of mandatory training, and a failure to report such activity, subject to individual circumstances, should place the driver’s licence at risk. Local authorities should implement practical measures to ensure that drivers have read, understood and acknowledged this requirement.

The Department for Transport should ensure that local authorities establish effective arrangements between licensed taxi companies and schools. These should enable school safeguarding teams to access taxi booking information where relevant to a legitimate safeguarding or risk concern relating to a child who should be at school.

All police forces should ensure that their policies, guidance and training address taking on a calculated degree of risk in recognition of the immediate need to protect the public from an obvious risk to life. This may involve the decision to deploy unarmed officers with caution.

All police forces that have not implemented a model providing immediate and direct support to Force Incident Managers, ideally through a second Force Incident Manager, should consider adopting such arrangements to strengthen decision‑making during critical incidents.

Merseyside Police and North West Ambulance Service should review the terminology used in their systems and procedures to ensure shared understanding and interoperability. The College of Policing and the National Ambulance Resilience Unit should undertake a national review to ensure that police and ambulance services across the country operate with consistent terminology and mutual understanding.

The Department for Education should update the out‑of‑school settings guidance by reviewing the health and safety section to ensure terminology is clear and consistent, particularly regarding emergency plans and fire/evacuation plans for smaller providers. The guidance should also be updated to include a non‑binding cross‑reference to school entrance security guidance, emphasising that while out-of-school settings may differ from schools in terms of what is necessary, appropriate or proportionate, providers should still consider appropriate entrance and exit security measures.

Phase 2 should consider systems to detect and report concerning online behaviour and suspicious combinations of purchases. This should include consideration of:
1. Concerning patterns of online browsing and purchasing (e.g. change of names and addresses, use of Virtual Private Networks).
2. Concerning purchases of dangerous but legal items (e.g. sledgehammers, bow and arrows and smoke grenades).
3. Concerning combinations of purchases (e.g. castor beans, alcohol and laboratory equipment).

Phase 2 should consider whether conventional archery bows should be subject to age‑verification prior to sale, delivery restrictions including ID checks, mandatory labelling for deliveries, and industry or trading standards to prevent the use of military‑style imagery in marketing.

Phase 2 should consider, in parallel with the government’s consultation where possible, a prohibition on the sale of crossbows, a licensing scheme similar to firearms, tighter controls on purchasing such as restricting sales to age‑verified in‑store transactions, and Trading Standards measures to prevent military‑style marketing.

The Home Office should provide clear guidance to all UK retailers of archery bows and crossbows on identifying and reporting suspicious behaviour, including underage purchasers or those who appear to be interested in criminal use of the equipment, and should consider placing retailers under defined obligations to report material suspicions.

The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis should consider an investigation, with input from the Crown Prosecution Service if appropriate, as to whether Ageo Wholesale UK Ltd committed criminal offences in relation to how it marketed knives/machetes or sold them without required age verification or labelling.

Amazon should:
1. Improve its measures to prevent children from making purchases, including making the conditions of use and sale more prominent.
2. Improve the labelling on packaging of bladed articles so that the warning is more prominent.
3. Ensure drivers inform recipients whenever deliveries contain a bladed article (I recognise the closing statement on behalf of Amazon that this is in train).
4. Review its systems for recording details of the recipient to ensure that an accurate record of the recipient is obtained.
5. Audit its training of age verified deliveries for drivers, in particular for Amazon Flex drivers. This should include training on the labelling of packaging so that, where appropriate, delivery drivers know what they are delivering.

Phase 2 should consider further measures relating to knives/bladed items sales, including:
1. Restrictions on sharp‑tipped knives.
2. Prohibiting some online sales (such as machetes).
3. Strengthening online age‑verification and age verified delivery standards.
4. Mandatory reporting and information‑sharing about suspicious behaviour.
5. The risks surrounding importation of bladed items.
6. The risks surrounding multiple sub-contractors in a supply chain delivering bladed articles.

The Department for Education should review and strengthen its guidance to schools on monitoring and filtering systems, including ensuring that the systems used are appropriate and adequate from a technical perspective. The department should ensure schools understand these requirements and consider whether inspections by Ofsted should play a greater role in monitoring compliance.

Lancashire County Council should undertake a comprehensive review of how its children’s services and Early Help teams (i.e. Children and Family Wellbeing Service) assess and manage risk and online harms to children. This review should ensure that all frontline staff have a consistent and up-to-date understanding of online risks, and that they have access to effective tools and guidance to identify and respond to these risks. It should specifically include consideration of the risks associated with the use of Virtual Private Networks, which can enable children to bypass the safeguards established under the Online Safety Act 2023. The Department of Health and Social Care should consider whether reforms to national guidance, policy or training are required.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology should consider extending the powers under the Online Safety Act 2023 to enable Senior Coroners to make a notification to Ofcom to obtain access to social media accounts of perpetrators (not just of a child who has died), and for statutory Inquiries to be able to make a notification to Ofcom to obtain access to the social media accounts of both a child who has died and also a perpetrator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Lancashire Constabulary should strengthen its autism spectrum disorder‑related training for new officers and through continuous development.
2. National policing bodies, with input from the Department of Health and Social Care, should consider whether reforms to guidance or training are required.

1. Lancashire Constabulary should ensure response officers have access to effective technology providing clear, essential case information.
2. 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.

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.

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.

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:
1. How autism may influence risk in the context of a Prevent referral.
2. 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.

Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters should review and where necessary strengthen the training that Counter Terrorism 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:
1. Address cases involving children or individuals with mental health conditions or neurodivergence, where concern for vulnerability may obscure the potential for dangerousness;
2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. Lancashire County Council should 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.
3. Lancashire County Council should conduct sampling audits to monitor record‑keeping practices.

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.

1. Lancashire County Council should consider how to address repeated lack of consent or manipulation of consent within existing legislation.
2. Phase 2 should consider whether legal reforms are needed to permit agencies, when considering children and young people who pose a risk of violence to others, to override parental consent to share information, access a child or young person, or obtain information about their online activity.

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 focussed and appropriate.

1. 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.
2. Lancashire County Council should offer input on this topic to Lancashire Constabulary, Counter Terrorism Policing North West, and any relevant Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service.

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.

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:
1. Key information regarding current and historic risk information is readily visible to treating clinicians in a summarised form, where appropriate with suitable warning flags.
2. 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.

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.

Nationally, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England should review:
1. 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. A balance may need to be struck between sufficient provision of guidance to assist as to when the more complex type of structured risk assessment may be justified and retaining the case-specific judgements by professionals that are inevitably required.
2. 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.

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.

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 (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) way.

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.

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. As was the case with AR at The Acorns School, teachers will often spend more time observing the child (and their interaction with peers) than is available to other professionals. Warnings from teachers and/or schools with particular expertise (including but not limited to Pupil Referral Units) should be given particular weight.

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 (i) the Common Transfer File and (ii) 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: (i) an offer of a placement; and (ii) 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.

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 (i) children who live in Lancashire but attend school in neighbouring counties; (ii) the resourcing of home visits in appropriate cases; (iii) 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.

The Department for Education should ensure that (i) its own policy guidance for teachers and schools (outside the Statutory Guidance for which the Home Office is responsible) is strengthened; and (ii) 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 (i) what happens once a Prevent referral is made; and (ii) the importance of ongoing dialogue, feedback and assessment between the referrer and the Prevent officer.

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.

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.

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.