Two years ago this month, Axel Rudakubana burst into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, murdered Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe, and injured 10 other people. Now the public inquiry into the attack has exposed a catalogue of failures that allowed him to keep slipping through the net – even after he was found on a bus with a knife in 2022, when police simply sent him home.
The inquiry’s chair, Sir Adrian Fulford, said his most important finding was the failure by any organisation to “take ownership of the risk” posed by Rudakubana. The government has pledged to implement all 67 recommendations from the report, a move the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said should ensure that police confronted by a young man with a knife and a similar track record will behave differently in future.
“Axel Rudakubana murdered three girls in Southport; inquiry found he was sent home after being found with a knife in 2022.”
A key part of the problem, Sir Adrian found, was what different officials did and did not know about Rudakubana. Information did not flow smoothly between police forces, schools, or health services. Rudakubana’s previous referrals to the anti-terror Prevent programme were not shared, meaning later concerns were not assessed for “cumulative risk”. Out-of-date IT systems compounded the gaps, and health records were involved in ways that made data-sharing technically and ethically fraught.
Some changes are already under way. Scrutiny of weapons sales is being tightened. New rules banning social media companies from offering services to children have been announced. The Department for Education is reviewing security guidance for out-of-school settings such as leisure centres, and the tools schools use to filter and monitor pupils’ online activity. The Law Commission is examining parental responsibilities, after the inquiry highlighted the failure of Rudakubana’s family to warn authorities about his behaviour. There may also be a new obligation on taxi drivers to report criminal activity.
But the deeper challenge remains: closing the gaps between public services that Rudakubana repeatedly slipped through. As Sir Adrian made clear, no single agency took ownership of the risk – and that, the inquiry concluded, is a failure the system cannot afford to repeat.