The British Home Office has released the CONTEST Annual report for 2012. The announcement, posted on the British government’s website, describes the report as one that “assesses the terrorist threat to the UK [United Kingdom] and its interests overseas. It summarises key achievements since the publication of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, in July 2011. It also sets out what we will need to do as part of the strategy’s work streams (Pursue, Prevent, Protect, and Prepare) in order to stay ahead of the threat.”

In the foreword to the report, the Home Secretary Theresa May wrote, “There have been no successful terrorist attacks in Great Britain during this period and serious attempted attacks have been foiled. We are taking the necessary steps to ensure that we can continue to detect, investigate, prosecute, and otherwise disrupt terrorist threats. We are not only maintaining but enhancing counter-terrorism policing capabilities against the background of the most ambitious reform of policing for a generation. We have strengthened protective security arrangements at the border. And we have significantly improved the capability of the emergency services to work together to deal with a terrorist incident.

“But there is no room for complacency. As the Director General of the Security Service said last year, the UK has faced the prospect of a terrorist attack on the scale of 7/7 on average once a year since 9/11. The threat from terrorism is changing but remains substantial. This is reflected in the number of people arrested and convicted for terrorism-related offences. Furthermore, as the Prime Minister has said, we face a generational battle to defeat our adversaries and their ideologies.”