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The Home Office
Yorkshire Post - 2006
John Reid, ex-alcoholic, ex- smoker, ex-Communist, ex-trades union organiser, ex-almost-every-other-job-in-government, has a war on his hands. He is Home Secretary. His war is against….. the Home Office.
The 59-year-old Scot, son of a postman and a factory worker, combative, trained in the rough school of Scottish politics (and no friend of Gordon Brown), is Tony Blair’s one-man SAS. Whenever there is a crisis Reid is parachuted in to restore order. When Charles Clarke, as ample and elephantine as Reid is spare and lean, was abruptly evicted from being Home Secretary over the “foreign prisoners on the loose” fiasco John Reid was called from the Ministry of Defence to pick up the pieces.
He pronounced his new department “not fit for purpose.” He denounced its Immigration and Nationality Directorate (15,000 staff) for “systemic dysfunction” and promised that heads would roll.
He has even opened a second military front against his own colleagues in Government. His demand for a tougher prison sentence for a paedophile drew an icy response from the Lord Chancellor Charlie Falkener pointing out that political pressure on judges would be seized on with glee by defence lawyers.
Has Home Office incompetence really unleashed a new barbarian age on Britain where asylum-seekers terrorise the countryside, foreign prisoners are released rather than be deported, criminals are cosseted by human rights concerns whilst senior officials admit that they “haven’t a clue” about the numbers involved?
The Home Office (70,000 employees of which 46,000 work in the prison service) used to be seen as a staid, grey, graveyard job. Suddenly it has been literally bombed into the front line of politics- with a huge potential to destroy ministers and wind politicians and the media into apoplectic melt-down.
What has happened? It is worth trying to abstract the hysterics and to identify the forces which have put the Home Office under siege. I reckon there are five big factors at play:
1. The over-running of the department’s immigration services by the great wave of asylum seekers. There was nothing unique to Britain in this – Italy, Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands were all on the asylum trail. There are now estimated to be up to 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK (and presumably doing jobs the economy needs!!) The impact of this was compounded by a manifest lack of joined-up government both across departments (national insurance numbers being issued without reference to immigration status) and within it (the prison service.)
2. The confusion between bad law and bad government. It might be nonsense to knock a third off a criminal’s conviction for pleading guilty but the judges who do so are not being wicked or stupid or incompetence: they are simply following the guidelines which flow from Parliamentary legislation. It is dead easy to lump this together with the general indictment of Home Office idiocy;
3. The changed political agendas. Terrorism has re-written the political terms of trade. The Home Office has seen itself hurled into the political fray over detention of terrorist suspects and identity cards and this debate has not just been about the efficacy of the measures but, much more challengingly, about how secure traditional civil liberties are in this country. The Government stands accused of an over-zealousness to safeguard the citizens’ security at the expense of their liberty. The shooting of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station and the apparently futile raid in Forest Gate in the east end of London coupled with the London underground bombings have created an intense emotion around this debate. This has been heightened by the clumsy attempts to legislate against religious hatred in order to placate Muslim fears of victimisation as terrorism is identified with religious extremism.
4. The incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights (nothing whatsoever to do with the European Union by the way) has brought British judges more into the firing line. Previously human rights judgements were referred to Strasbourg: now the rights are embedded in British law they have inevitably been attacked as loading the dice too much in favour of the criminal.
5. Quite simply too much legislation. Since Labour came to power there have been 44 (yes, forty four) Home Office acts of Parliament. Bills about immigration, violent crime, identity cards, drugs, civil partnerships, sexual offences, electoral rules have fallen upon Parliament in a deluge- demanding huge amounts of ministerial and management time. If that were not enough Charles Clarke has set about a re-organisation of the Police into regional forces – and the Police themselves had been accused of becoming too engaged in political lobbying on the Government’s behalf.
Ministerial panics make for bad decisions. In with this volatile environment ministers constantly demanded “action this day.” As asylum crashed up the political agenda so the Prime Minister demanded that everything be poured into dealing with this issue. This was crisis-by-crisis management. The Home Office was already not very good at communicating with itself (notably between Immigration and the Prison Service) and the constant fire-fighting may actually have inhibited issues being passed up the line to ministers. And perhaps ministers, under intense pressure from No 10 and the Media, did not ask sufficient questions to identify where the next political lava flow might come from.
What should be done? It is easy to cry: “break the Home Office up.” It is difficult to see what would be gained: the important pieces are managed as agencies already. The department needs confidence, effective management, well-marked and constantly tested lines of communication, a culture of looking for problems and alerting ministers to them – and a break from legislation.
John Reid should also jettison all initiatives and projects which do not relate to the core job of sorting out the immigration and prison services and the way they work together. If that means putting Police mergers on hold so much the better. If it means not rushing into yet more legislation on sentencing that is even better.
Reid is tough and he can’t be fired – at least by Tony Blair. So he has probably got about a year to get a grip on the Home Office. He could start by getting it on his side. After all, in politics things can always get worse and if the Home Secretary intends to confront his department he must also show that he can lead it.
© Yorkshire Post
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