The prime minister says he is under no illusion that until the wider state shows it can change, "then this attitude of mistrust" will remain.

Starmer says he wants to make it "crystal clear" that his government will "leave no stone unturned".

If there is anything hindering the ability of the country to keep its citizens and children safe, the PM says: "I will find them and I will root them out."

Starmer says there are also questions about accountability of the "Westminster system".

He criticises it for being slow to react and says that people are right to be angry about it.

"I'm angry about it," he says. "Nothing will be off the table in this inquiry."

Starmer says that yesterday's guilty verdict, though, only happened because of the service of those who worked doggedly on the case.

He says there is a "growing sense" that "the set of unwritten rules that hold a nation together have in recent years been ripped apart".

"Children who have stopped going to school since the pandemic, young people who opted out of work or education, more and more people retreating into parallel lives - whether through failures of integration or just a country slowly turning away from itself - wounds that politics, for all that it may have contributed, must try to heal."

Starmer continues to say that the government will review its counter-terrorism system, and adds that this work is already underway.

But, he says there are also bigger questions, such as how we protect our children from violence freely available online.

In this case, he says, the material Rudakubana viewed should not be accessible on mainstream platforms "with just a few clicks".

He says if the law needs to change, "we will change it and quickly".

"The blunt truth here is that this case is a sign Britain now faces a new threat," he says.

"Terrorism has changed. In the past the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent, groups like Al Qaeda.

"That threat of course remains, but now alongside that we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake."

Starmer moves on to acknowledge the failure of the government's counter-extremism programme, Prevent.

The PM emphasises that up to now, the government had only been focused on securing justice, for fear of the trial collapsing.

"It is now time for those questions," he says.

"The perpetrator was referred to the Prevent programme on three separate occasions - in 2019 once and in 2021 twice," Starmer adds.

"Yet on each of these occasions, a judgment was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention, a judgment that was clearly wrong and which failed those families. And I acknowledge that here today."

The PM says the killings must be a "line in the sand", with a change in how Britain protects its citizens and children.

He says this will require difficult questions to be asked.

Responsibility lies with the "vile individual who carried it out", Starmer says, but he "won't let any institution of the state deflect from their failure".

In this case, he says, that failure "leaps off the page", mentioning Rudakubana's three referrals to the Prevent programme.

"We must make sure the names of those three young girls are not associated with the vile perpetrator but instead with a fundamental change in how Britain protects its citizens and its children.

"In pursuit of that, we must, of course, ask and answer difficult questions, questions that should be far-reaching, unburdened by cultural or institutional sensitivities and driven only by the pursuit of justice.

"That is what we owe the families."

The prime minister pays tribute to the three young victims: Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice da Silva Aguiar.

Starmer says that back in August, he said, "there would be time for questions but that first, justice had to be done, and that, above all, we must not interfere with the work of the police, the prosecutors and the delivery of that justice".

Yesterday, after their killer Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty, "a measure of justice was done", he says, "but it won't bring those girls back to their families".

Keir Starmer begins by condemning the "senseless" and "barbaric" murders of the three young girls in Southport.

He says that every parent in Britain will have had the same thought - "that it could have been their children" - but it was Southport where the tragedy took place.

Sir Keir Starmer is about to make a statement from Downing Street, to give more details about a public inquiry into the Southport stabbings.

We'll bring you live updates here, and you can also follow along by pressing watch live at the top of the page.

Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent

As I wrote earlier, a big part of Starmer's speech will be dedicated to taking on the claims of a cover-up.

He will argue that if he, or anyone else, had revealed crucial details about Axel Rudakubana before the trial, then he could have walked away from court a free man.

I expect the PM to say that this would have meant “the prospect of justice destroyed for the victims and their families. I would never do that and nobody would ever forgive me if I had".

More generally, the prime minister will argue the state must ask - and answer - difficult questions, unburdened by cultural or institutional sensitivities.

Starmer will promise not to allow any institution of the state to deflect from their failure, failure which he will say “frankly leaps off the page".

Image source, Reuters

As we’ve been reporting, Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all 16 charges against him, including the murder of the three girls, 10 attempted murders, producing ricin, and possession of a terrorist document.

The killing at the Taylor Swift dance class took place on 29 July last year. Rudakubana was arrested at the scene, and subsequently charged with murder and attempted murder in August.

Then, after police had initially insisted that the incident was not being treated as terror-related, the 18-year-old was also charged with two terrorism offences two months later on 29 October.

After the violent events in Southport, riots erupted across the country, with some social media posts wrongly claiming that Rudakubana - who was born in Cardiff - was actually an asylum seeker.

As a result, the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service brought the terrorism-related charges at a later date, once the riots had subsided, has led Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to accuse the government of a “cover-up”.

And Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch responded to news of Rudakubana’s guilty plea, saying: “There are many important questions the authorities will need to answer about the handling of this case and the flow of information."

At the time of the riots, the police advised caution on drawing links with terrorism, and Keir Starmer blamed the violence on far-right thuggery.

We expect to hear more on this from Starmer when he speaks from Downing Street shortly.

Image source, PA Media

Axel Rudakubana surprised the judge, prosecutors and police yesterday when he unexpectedly pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls in Southport.

As well as entering guilty pleas for the three killings at the Taylor Swift-themed dance class, the 18-year-old pleaded guilty to all the other offences he was charged with:

• 10 counts of attempted murder - including eight children and two adults
• Producing the biological toxin ricin
• Possession of a knife in a public place on the day of the murders
• Possessing a terrorist organisation training manual - a PDF file titled Military Studies in the Jihad against Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual

Image source, PA Media

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp has just spoken to our colleagues on BBC Breakfast.

He says the Conservatives support the public inquiry, and that he wants it to establish "whether or not opportunities were missed to make an intervention that might have prevented these tragedies".

He also says there are questions about the counter-extremism scheme, Prevent - as we've reported, Rudakubana was referred to it three times between December 2019 and April 2021 over his obsession with violence.

And Philp says the government and the Crown Prosecution Service "should have put more information into the public domain" in order to avoid "an information void - because social media speculation takes over and I'm not sure that's a good thing".

The government's Prevent counter-extremism programme "needs to change because of the internet", the government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation says.

The programme - which Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was referred to three times - was picked out by the home secretary when she announced an inquiry into the Southport attacks.

Jonathan Hall KC says coming out of the inquiry, a review of the programme is needed, "and the mechanisms that exist for dealing with people who are obsessed by violence but not necessarily obsessed by ideology".

He tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "we're living in a different world now" that Prevent "was not really designed for".

"People don't go to individuals, they're not part of groups" anymore, he says. "They go to the computer, and they sometimes get a whole mix of stuff, and sometimes, I'm afraid, they just become obsessed by violence."

Starmer's speech to tackle argument of government 'cover-up'published at 07:41 Greenwich Mean Time 21 January

07:41 GMT 21 January

Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent

Not every court case, however horrific, prompts a prime ministerial statement from Downing Street.

Why this one? Partly because of the brutality of the murderer's crimes. Partly because of the riots that were prompted by the murders in the summer.

And above all, because of what we have now learnt about how the murderer was known to so many public authorities.

The argument this morning from parts of the political right is that, had the public known more of that background, then the riots might have been curtailed.

This argument, and the connected one of a government “cover-up”, is one that I am told Keir Starmer will directly take on in his speech in less than an hour’s time.

Image source, Julia Quenzler / BBC

After Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, a long history of violent behaviour was revealed.

He was referred to the government's counter-terrorism Prevent programme three times between December 2019 and April 2021, over his general obsession with violence, and had been visited by police several times in the months before murdering the girls.

His problems with violence intensified in Year 9. Fellow pupils at the Range High School remember him having an obsession with despotic figures - including Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler.

Rudakubana was excluded from the school in October 2019, aged 13. One of the incidents that lead to that exclusion was a call to Childline in which he said he was going to take a knife to school because of racial bullying.

He returned that December with a hockey stick and assaulted a pupil, breaking their wrist, and had to be restrained by a teacher.

Rudakubana's sixth form - Presfield High School & Specialist College - would sometimes ask for police to attend when they visited him for home visits.

Between October 2019 and May 2022 police responded to five calls from his home address relating to concerns about his behaviour, the Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership said.

A week before the Southport attacks, the BBC understands Radakubana's father prevented him from taking a taxi back to his former school - the Range High School in Formby.

The trial was due to last four weeks, but after Rudakubana changed his pleas to guilty on Monday, he will now be sentenced on Thursday at 11am.

Speaking during the trial yesterday, Judge Justice Goose said it is "inevitable" Rudakubana will be given a "life sentence equivalent".

Nick Price, director of legal services at the Crown Prosecution Service, said: "The next stage of the process is for the prosecution to present our full case to the court on Thursday - including relevant details of the defendant's past - so the judge can consider all of the evidence when passing sentence."

Image source, PA Media

Speaking after Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty, Sir Keir Starmer described his actions as "vile and sick" and said there were "grave questions to answer" about how the state "failed in its ultimate duty" to protect the girls.

The prime minister, who is due to speak from Downing Street at 08:30 GMT, said "Britain will rightly demand answers, and we will leave no stone unturned in that pursuit".

"At the centre of this horrific event, there is still a family and community grief that is raw, a pain that not even justice can ever truly heal.

"Although no words today can ever truly convey the depths of that pain, I want the families to know that our thoughts are with them and everyone in Southport affected by this barbaric crime."

Image source, PA Media

After Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the murder of three young girls on Monday, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a public inquiry into how the young man “came to be so dangerous”.

The home secretary confirmed that the 18-year-old had “contact with a range of different state agencies throughout his teenage years” including the police, social services and mental health services.

She also picked out the Prevent anti-extremism scheme, which she said Rudakubana had been referred to three times between December 2019 and April 2021.

"Yet between them, those agencies failed to identify the terrible risk and danger to others that he posed,” she said.

Cooper said this is an issue on the rise, and “growing numbers of teenagers have been referred to Prevent, investigated by counter-terror police, or referred to other agencies amid concerns around serious violence and extremism".

"We need to face up to why this has been happening and what needs to change,” she said.

We don’t yet know a timeline for when the public inquiry will take place, but we expect to hear more detail from Starmer when he speaks at 08:30.

Adam Goldsmith
Live reporter

Image source, PA Media

We're restarting our live coverage this morning ahead of expected remarks from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at 08:30 GMT about the public inquiry into the Southport attack where three young girls were stabbed to death.

Yesterday afternoon, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a public inquiry into the attacks at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year.

On Monday, Axel Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty to killing Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, as well as admitting 13 other charges yesterday.

Announcing the inquiry, Cooper said it was "essential that the families and the people of Southport can get answers about how this terrible attack could take place and about why this happened to their children".

Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said "many questions remain unanswered" and the public needed to know "who in government knew what and when".

Much focus is expected on the government's counter-terrorism Prevent programme, after Cooper revealed yesterday that Rudakubana had been referred to the scheme three times when he was aged 13 and 14.

We’ll have live coverage from Downing Street this morning, so stick with us and we'll bring you up to date before the prime minister appears.

The Southport attacker, Axel Rudakubana, unexpectedly changed his pleas today - admitting all the charges he was accused of. Here's a look at what happened:

• The 18-year-old pleaded guilty at Liverpool Crown Court to murdering three girls, to the attempted murder of eight other children, and to the attempted murder of Leanne Lucas and Jonathan Hayes
• He also pleaded guilty to having a kitchen knife in a public place, and admitted to the production of a biological toxin, ricin, and possession of an al-Qaeda training manual
• Not guilty pleas had previously been entered on Rudakubana's behalf - and a four-week trial was due to start this week. As our correspondent Judith Moritz reports, today's pleas shocked the courtroom
• Rudakubana stabbed to death Bebe King, six, Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, who were all attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on 29 July last year
• The judge, Justice Goose, apologised to families who weren't in court to hear the pleas, and told Rudakubana that "it's inevitable you'll get a life sentence equivalent"
• In a statement shortly afterwards, CPS prosecutor Ursula Doyle said Rudakubana had "meticulously planned" the attack and had a "sickening interest in death and violence"

• It can now be reported that Rudakubana had a long history of violence, and was expelled from his school aged 13. He broke another student's wrist with a hockey stick, and was visited by police "several" times in the months before murdering the girls
• He also tried to return to the school that expelled him a week before the Southport killings, but his dad stopped him
• Prime Minister Keir Starmer says there are "grave" questions to answer about how the state "failed in its ultimate duty" to protect the girls - "Britain will rightly demand answers, and we will leave no stone unturned in that pursuit," he says

We'll be closing this page shortly, but you can read more about the case in our news story, and listen to our episode of Newscast here. We'll be back on Thursday for live coverage of Rudakubana's sentencing.