Is the Home Office Simply a Lost Cause?

31 May 2006
Evening Standard

You would need a heart of stone not to feel sorry for John Reid, rushing back from holiday to "sort out" the Home Office. At best, the Home Office regards politicians (of whatever party) with amused contempt; at worst, it can destroy their careers. I learned about its infinite capacity to thwart ministers while working there as a young graduate trainee. I came across a file on the efforts by a Conservative minister in the the early 1970s to stop censorship of prisoners' letters, which he had decided served no useful purpose. Elaborate minutes and papers went back and forth and a working party was set up. Years passed. The minister and the Conservative Party left office. Officials then quietly dropped the idea.

The Home Office is a mess, partly because it is a ragbag of responsibilities. The Government has made this lack of focus worse by responding to public anxiety over crime with a blizzard of legislation and "initiatives". But it has failed to engage with the real issue, which is how poorly managed the Home Office is. Part of the problem is structural. For example, until 1963, prisons were run by a separate organisation, the Prison Commission, and the prison service has retained the habit of obdurate autonomy. The solution should not be to break the Home Office up, thereby worsening those tendencies, but ministers do need to get a grip on their fractious empire. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Nationality Department has always been part of the Home Office proper but, because it was based in Croydon, it might as well have been on the Moon as far as snooty mandarins in Whitehall were concerned. "High flyers" did not want to work there. Nobody cared about its key "stakeholders" - immigrants. So it was allowed to become a swamp of administrative inefficiency.

Hackney has one of the largest numbers of immigrants and asylum-seekers in the country, so I know all about Home Office inefficiency. The lost files and general muddle are bad enough. But government targets for asylum-seekers have meant even worse delays for all other aspects of IND's work. The delays create much human misery. And they make it impractical (and inhumane) to deport people who may have settled down and brought up families in the interim. John Reid began as Home Secretary by attacking his department publicly. I suspect disgruntled officials will retaliate by leaking against him. He may live to wish he had stayed on holiday.

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