The most striking number in the counter-terrorism provisions of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 is not new, but it frames everything around it. In October 2024 the Director General of MI5 stated that 13 per cent of those being investigated by the Security Service for involvement in UK terrorism were children, a threefold increase since January 2021. The state's answer, now on the statute book, is the Youth Diversion Order.
The order is a civil measure aimed at people aged 21 or under who are drawn into terrorism-related activity. Rather than routing every young person into prosecution, it lets police apply to a court for an order that combines restrictions with rehabilitative requirements, an off-ramp for cases where a criminal conviction would do more harm than good. It sits alongside a wider set of measures in the same Act: broader powers to seize terrorist-linked articles from public places without a criminal case, an expanded definition of prohibited weapons under the TPIM and STPIM regimes that now reaches bladed and other articles, and extended polygraph testing for serious terrorism offenders on licence.
For the security sector the reading is twofold. The threat picture increasingly includes very young people, radicalised fast and often online, which changes what frontline staff should be alert to at venues, events and transport hubs. And the legal toolkit around terrorism is broadening, so the compliance and reporting environment that protective-security firms operate in is shifting with it. Both point the same way: the ground is moving, and briefings written a year ago are already dated.
