This report examines ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’, also known as the Vulnerability Support Service, a secretive mental health-related project run by UK counter-terrorism police.
▪ Thousands of individuals suspected of potential ‘extremism’ – a vague and racialised term which the government itself has tried and failed to legally define – have been assessed through these hubs.
▪ Vulnerability Support Hubs blur the boundaries between security and care in ethically problematic ways and, in effect, deploy medicine
as a security device, illuminating a disturbing trend in counter- terrorism’s ‘turn to mental health’.
▪ The three hubs – South, Central and North – are unique because they embed NHS mental health professionals (who must first undergo police vetting) within counter-terrorism police operations and are based within regional counter-terrorism police units.
The hubs were piloted by UK counter- terrorism police in 2016-2017. This report analyses the pilot programme evaluations, based on documents which counter-terrorism police strenuously resisted disclosing.
▪ The scheme is currently being rolled out nationwide by the police via ‘Project Cicero’, despite lack of independent evaluation and public scrutiny, making the multiple ethical concerns raised by their activities all the more pressing.
▪ The main aim of the hubs during the pilot scheme was unclear, even to practitioners. Police premised their establishment on dubious associations between mental health and terrorism and claimed they
would divert people away from the criminal justice system.
▪ Their real function appears to be in helping police to mitigate perceived risk by facilitating police to access health information and providing counter-terrorism officials with
a channel to contact and ‘advise’ mainstream mental health services.
Racism is highly significant to both mental health and policing, especially ‘pre-crime’ areas such as Prevent, and the hubs stand at the intersection of these two fields.
▪ A racialised Muslim is at least 23 times more likely to be referred to a mental health hub for ‘Islamism’ than a white British individual is for ‘Far Right extremism’, yet they adopt a ‘colourblind’ approach which masks this racial disparity and serves to perpetuate racism.
▪ Racism is an overarching concern in this report – all the other issues discussed should be understood as heavily racialised phenomena.
▪ Many of those referred to the hubs are children and young people.
