Thank you very much for the question. I am pleased to attend today's meeting.
The Channel program is a very important program in the U.K. counterterrorism strategy. It is an intervention program, which means that if the police or other actors identify cases of high-risk people who are on the verge of engaging in violent extremism, those cases are then being referred to the Channel program, which brings together all the relevant stakeholders—the police, it could be welfare officers, it could be the school, it could be psychologists, it could be theological consultants—to figure out exactly what has gone wrong in that particular case and to work out a systematic intervention to prevent that person from going further and engaging in violent extremism.
It is, if you want, the last stop before counterterrorism kicks in and someone gets arrested. It offers a last opportunity to a person to disengage from the path that they are on and to prevent people from becoming terrorists. That Channel program has been used, I think, in 2,000 or 3,000 cases over the past decade, and the government in the U.K. says it has been very successful. I do think it has been very successful, although my criticism is that the U.K. government has been quite secretive about it. We do not know exact numbers on how many of those people have reoffended, how many have stayed out of trouble. But from my conversations with people who are involved in that program, it is a very useful tool.
Just as a last sentence on this, I've been told by people in the United States of America that had they had a program like the Channel program, perhaps the Boston bombers, instead of being let loose after being interviewed by the FBI, would have been referred into that program, because it was clear to a lot of people that those people were on the verge of joining terrorist organizations, but there wasn't quite enough yet to charge them. It is a useful tool, I believe.