Is the Home Office ‘fit for purpose’?

The Home Office is “outdated and far too reliant on other departments” for support, a Whitehall figure has claimed amid mounting pressure on Priti Patel to stem deadly Channel migrant crossings.

In comments reported by PoliticsHome, the civil service source described Home Office leadership as “outdated” and the department as “completely incompetent”, adding that their view was so widespread in Whitehall that “it’s not even an open secret”.

Patel, who is “ineffective and unpopular”, is still in place only because of personal support from Boris Johnson, they continued, adding: “Under their watch, so much fails.”

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The blistering attack on the department is not the first of its kind. The Guardian reported in May that the Home Office “strains to be seen as competent and tough”, but repeatedly “struggles to show evidence that its policies are working”.

So is the Home Office really broken – or are its critics getting it wrong?

Troubled history

Despite being one of the four “great offices of state”, the Home Office has a long history of internal criticism. In 2006, the then Labour home secretary John Reid declared that it was “not fit for purpose” following a scandal relating to foreign prisoners.

While Reid later told the BBC that the quote was actually spoken by a senior civil servant, it came as his department was being roundly criticised after it was “revealed that 85 serious foreign offenders, released from prison without being considered for deportation since 1999, were still on the run”, The Guardian reported at the time.

Amid what the paper termed a “tidal wave” of crises, Reid submitted a written answer ahead of an appearance in the House of Commons that read: “Our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope, it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes.”

According to the Daily Mail, Patel has this month privately repeated Reid’s criticism of the department, also describing it “not fit for purpose” while considering writing to Cabinet Secretary Simon Case to “lambast” its “failure to get a grip of the migrant boat crisis”.

In response, one Home Office figure told the paper that “she hates us and we all hate her”. Another added: “What’s become abundantly clear is that she is out for herself and only interested in how this plays out publicly.

“If we actually worked collaboratively, then we could get things done,” they said. “But instead we just have cloud cuckoo land public statements from the home secretary and we all look and think: ‘Well, that won’t work’.”

The current dispute within the department has been triggered by a record number of deaths among migrants attempting to cross the Channel from France to England.

Despite strong rhetoric from both Boris Johnson and his ally Patel, migrants have warned that they will not be dissuaded from attempting the dangerous crossings.

However, the department has repeatedly courted controversy in recent years, most prominently after the Windrush scandal, which claimed the scalp of former home secretary Amber Rudd and was a result of the so-called “hostile environment” overseen by Theresa May.

Allegations of “institutional racism” followed, with the Windrush Lessons Learned Review prompting Patel to tell the Commons: “There is nothing I can say today that will undo the suffering… On behalf of this and successive governments I am truly sorry.”

Writing in The Sun in March 2020, the paper’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh said the department is a “putrid, leaky swamp” that repeatedly lives up to its reputation as “the politicians’ graveyard”.

Listing Labour’s Reid, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, as well as the Conservatives’ Michael Howard and Rudd, as victims of the department’s failures, he added that it is “a sprawling blancmange of bungling inertia” that “stands as a monument to serial Whitehall ineptitude”.

Over 14 years on from Reid’s infamous quote, Kavanagh said: “Nothing has changed.”

‘A blunt instrument’

So what is the problem with the Home Office?

What is going on within the walls of 2 Marsham Street “has become an increasingly urgent question in recent years”, said The Guardian, adding that “it is the department of law and order, yet it is constantly found to have broken the law”.

Citing the Windrush scandal as an example of departmental wrongdoing, the paper continued that “from the perspective of the people at the top, it has a simple purpose: keeping the public safe”.

But instead it has come to resemble “a blunt instrument obsessed with looking tough”, the paper added. “No other department is so defined by its failures and the spectre of blame.”

In The New Statesman, columnist Jonn Elledge argued that the time has come to “abolish” the department, describing it as a byword for “a dystopian combination of cruelty and incompetence”.

Instead, he suggested that the government should “break it up for parts, transfer its functions to a new department or perform them elsewhere; then hold an inquiry into how a major civil service department became quite so in thrall to hard-right politics”.

Elledge’s suggestion may have an unlikely cheerleader in the prime minister’s former right-hand man, Dominic Cummings. In July, the ex-Downing Street adviser tweeted that the Home Office “should be literally closed” and “everybody fired”.

Instead, “a new institution” should be introduced “with a small percentage of old staff re-hired”, he argued, adding: “Ditto for much of Whitehall.”

The Sun’s Kavanagh was less convinced that the department should be shut down, instead arguing that the problem is the “mandarin class” that walk its corridors.

“Like Japanese soldiers still fighting World War Two long after Armistice Day” the department “remains stoutly pro-EU”, he said. Officials “have enormous power to sabotage policies they dislike or kick them into the long grass”.

Patel has fallen foul of her department because she is “driving through the crime and illegal immigration crackdown demanded by voters who handed Boris ­Johnson his landslide victory”, he added. She is being stopped by staff who are “determined to block, humiliate and undermine” her “at every turn”.

Speaking to The Guardian, one former Home Office official said that a major problem with the department is its focus on immigration, describing “a constant battle against the numbers” of people coming in and out of the country each year.

They said that this has led to a “nervousness” among advisers in terms of adjusting policies, adding: “If you relax the rules in one area, you may create a great big loophole through which everybody will rush.

“The fear is that if you relax the rules in London in the morning, they’ll know about it in North Africa or in Afghanistan by lunchtime. It goes around the world.”

With immigration back on the agenda due to the spate of Channel crossings, that does not look likely to change anytime soon.

“New leadership might help. Reform might help,” The New Statesman’s Elledge said.

But as another scandal hangs over the department, “it’s hard” to avoid the conclusion “that anything less than a completely new institutional culture will be enough”.