When the Law Is Quietly Rewritten: Sussex, Prevent, and the Expanding Reach of Institutional Power
A technical correction at the University of Sussex exposes a deeper constitutional problem: the steady habit of public institutions enlarging statutory duties beyond what Parliament enacted—and the consequences this carries for academic freedom, lawful speech, and public trust.
Laws are rarely overthrown in modern Britain; they are more often diluted—stretched gently, interpreted generously, and quietly made to mean more than Parliament ever said. The change does not arrive with repeal, nor even with amendment, but with interpretation: a phrase broadened here, a duty reframed there, until what was once fixed becomes pliable, and what was once limited begins to expand.
It is in such small alterations that the character of governance reveals itself.
At the University of Sussex, a recent intervention by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has brought precisely such an alteration into view. The matter concerned the university’s public description of its obligations under the Prevent duty—a description which, until challenged, stated that the institution must have “due regard to the need to prevent terrorism.” That formulation is not what the law requires. Section 26(1) of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 provides, in terms both deliberate and precise, that specified authorities must have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.”¹
The difference is not incidental. It marks the boundary between a defined statutory obligation and an open-ended administrative ambition.
A duty concerned with people being drawn into terrorism is, by its nature, circumscribed. It directs attention to vulnerability, to process, to identifiable pathways by which individuals may be radicalised. It is, in substance, a safeguarding duty. A duty expressed more broadly as preventing terrorism admits of no such inherent limitation. It invites interpretation at scale. It risks transforming a targeted obligation into a generalised mandate—one capable, in practice, of extending into the regulation of speech, association, and intellectual life itself.
The statutory scheme does not support such expansion. Government guidance on Prevent, including that applicable to higher education, repeatedly affirms that the duty must be exercised in a manner consistent with existing obligations to secure freedom of speech and academic freedom.² Universities are required not merely to avoid suppressing lawful expression, but actively to secure it. That obligation, set out in the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, requires institutions to take “reasonably practicable” steps to ensure that speech within the law is protected for students, staff, and visiting speakers alike.³ The more recent Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 has strengthened this framework, reflecting Parliament’s growing concern that universities have, in practice, too often failed to discharge that duty with sufficient clarity or conviction.⁴
The legal position, in other words, is not ambiguous. It is carefully balanced. Safeguarding is required; so too is freedom. What alters that balance is not legislation, but interpretation.
CAF’s description of Sussex’s amendment as “small but significant” is therefore exact.⁵ For the significance lies not in the correction alone, but in the instinct that made correction necessary. It reveals a tendency—now increasingly familiar across public administration—to treat statutory language not as a limit, but as a starting point; not as a boundary, but as a basis for expansion.
This tendency may be understood as a form of soft-law accretion. Duties defined in statute acquire broader meaning through guidance, policy frameworks, internal training materials, and risk-management processes. Each stage of interpretation appears reasonable in isolation. Together, they produce a quiet but decisive shift: from governance by clearly delimited rules to governance by elastic standards shaped in practice by administrative judgment.
In such a system, the question is no longer simply what the law says, but what institutions believe the law requires of them. And those beliefs, formed under conditions of regulatory pressure and reputational risk, tend predictably toward expansion.
The dynamics are structural. Compliance regimes reward caution. Ambiguity invites precaution. The consequences of under-enforcement are visible and immediate; the consequences of overreach are diffuse and rarely sanctioned. Under such conditions, the rational administrative response is to interpret duties broadly, to intervene early, and to extend oversight wherever uncertainty permits.
What emerges is not an abuse of power in the classical sense, but something subtler: a gradual redefinition of the scope of authority.
The recent history of Sussex illustrates how such dynamics operate in practice. The controversy surrounding Kathleen Stock did not turn on formal prohibitions—her views were not unlawful—but on the environment within which those views were expressed.⁶ The distinction is critical. Formal rights remained intact; the conditions for exercising them became contested. Critics argued that the cumulative effect of institutional culture, policy, and pressure rendered certain lines of inquiry professionally untenable, even where legally permissible.
That concern found regulatory expression in 2026, when the Office for Students imposed a £585,000 fine on Sussex—the largest in its history—following findings that the university had failed adequately to uphold its obligations concerning freedom of speech and academic freedom.⁷ The decision noted deficiencies not only in isolated actions but in the underlying governance framework, suggesting a systemic misalignment between statutory duty and institutional practice.
It is within this context that the Prevent wording assumes its full significance. It is not an isolated misstatement. It is symptomatic of a broader pattern in which the language of obligation is quietly expanded, and with it the scope of institutional intervention.
One need not oppose Prevent to recognise the risk. Nor need one defend every controversial speaker to see the principle at stake. The question is not whether universities should take radicalisation seriously—they must—but whether, in doing so, they remain bound by the limits of the law that defines their authority.
For those limits are the condition of legitimacy.
In a constitutional system, public bodies do not possess inherent authority; they exercise delegated power. That power is defined by statute, constrained by law, and justified by fidelity to both. When institutions begin to extend the meaning of their duties beyond what has been enacted, they do not merely interpret the law—they begin, in effect, to remake it.
Such remaking is rarely acknowledged. It proceeds not through declaration, but through practice. Policies are drafted. Guidance is issued. Training is delivered. Over time, the expanded interpretation becomes the operative reality, and the original statutory boundary recedes from view.
The danger is not that this process produces immediate injustice. It is that it alters expectations.
Citizens come to experience governance not as the application of known rules, but as the exercise of discretionary judgment. The predictability of law gives way to the flexibility of administration. And with that shift comes a subtle but profound change in the relationship between the governed and those who govern.
Trust, once grounded in the clarity of legal limits, becomes contingent upon the perceived reasonableness of institutional behaviour. That is a weaker foundation. It is also a more fragile one.
Universities, as institutions devoted to the disciplined use of language, ought to be among the first to resist such drift. Precision is not a technicality; it is the condition of truth. A concept expanded beyond its proper limits ceases to illuminate and begins to obscure. The same is true of legal duties.
To recast a safeguarding obligation as a general mandate to “prevent terrorism” is to move from definition to abstraction, from limit to latitude. And once such latitude is accepted, its extension becomes difficult to resist.
The intervention by CAF has, for the moment, checked that extension. It has restored the statutory language to its proper form. But the deeper question remains unresolved: whether institutions will continue to treat the law as a boundary to be observed, or as a framework to be developed.
For the distinction matters more than it may appear.
A law that can be quietly enlarged can just as quietly be replaced. And a public that ceases to recognise the limits of power will not long recognise its legitimacy.
¹ Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, c.6, §26(1): “A specified authority must… have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.”
² HM Government, Prevent Duty Guidance: for England and Wales (Home Office, 2023), §§11–14: institutions must balance Prevent duties with freedom of speech and academic freedom obligations.
³ Education (No. 2) Act 1986, s.43(1): duty to secure “freedom of speech within the law.”
⁴ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, strengthening statutory protections and enforcement mechanisms.
⁵ Committee for Academic Freedom, “Sussex University Prevent Guidance CAF Intervention,” 11 May 2026.
⁶ Public controversy and parliamentary discussion concerning Kathleen Stock and academic freedom (2021–2022).
⁷ Office for Students, Regulatory Case Report: University of Sussex (2026), imposing a £585,000 fine for failures in freedom of speech governance.
⁸ Joint Committee on Human Rights, Counter-Extremism (2016), warning against disproportionate impacts of Prevent on lawful expression.
⁹ Universities UK, Freedom of Speech on Campus: Rights and Responsibilities (2011; reaffirmed), outlining institutional duties to uphold lawful speech.
¹⁰ Home Office, Prevent Strategy (2011, updated guidance), defining Prevent as safeguarding against radicalisation rather than general ideological regulation.
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- Today’s Mass: June 13 S. Anthony of Padua
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