EXTREME RIGHT-WING TERRORISM ACTION (MI5 AND CTP)
The case for change
197. The change in responsibility from MI5 to Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) was significant, and we questioned where the impetus for the change had come from. The Director General of MI5 told us that it had been a natural move for MI5 and the police, and that:
MI5 hadn't in 2015 or 2016 been sort of pushing, because we weren't seeing deficiencies in what the police were doing, but as the threat increasingly crossed the line into national security, we felt there was a worthwhile question to ask there and indeed our police colleagues were not saying "We have got this taped, leave it to us", they were saying "We think we should have a conversation about our division of responsibilities here, it is different to what we are doing on Islamist extremism and, as this threat grows, that feels wrong to us". Then other voices, including Home Office colleagues and, for that matter, David Anderson, who was independently overseeing the Operational Improvement Review process, also had the same view that this was a conversation worth having to look at whether we should change our division of labour.[1]
198. In March 2018, MI5 told the Committee that "one of the shifts we are making is more of a shift for MI5, is to step into that Extreme Right-Wing work a bit more".[2] MI5 opened its first Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism (ERWT) investigation in March 2018. Following a pilot phase, MI5 adopted a 'split primacy' model in November 2018. At this point, MI5 took operational primacy for the highest threat ERWT and left-wing, anarchist, single-issue terrorism (LASIT) investigations, with CTP retaining primacy for lower priority investigations, and Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) leading on providing assessments on the national threat picture. The MI5 Executive Board made the decision to move MI5 to full primacy in September 2019. This was enacted in phases across investigative sections and completed by 1 April 2020. MI5 began establishing which *** and the accesses required to facilitate the lawful acquisition of data, as well as transferring existing information on ERWT Subjects of Interest (SOIs) from police systems on to MI5 management systems to enable ***. MI5 also worked with CTP to review and further develop ***.[3]
199. MI5 subsequently wrote to the Committee on 31 January 2019, confirming that steps had been taken to implement new arrangements in countering what was still at that time being referred to as 'Domestic Extremism Terrorism' (DET):
JTAC, MIS and CTPolice currently have amodel for collaborative working on Islamist terrorism that works exceptionally well by harnessing the strengths of each organisation along with other partners. The overarching principle for the new arrangements is that, as far as possible, that same approach is applied to threats emanating from Domestic Extremism Terrorism (DET).
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