It’s a mess, but the Home Office can be made fit for purpose

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Policy is important but the political risk for a government lies mostly in how the department is operating. Past generations of ministers have found themselves accountable, and sometimes sacked, for operational decision-making over which they had little direct control. So the big question is who, if anybody, truly has control? And who, therefore, is truly accountable for what the department does?

Nearly three years ago, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, then prime minister and home secretary, asked me to conduct a review of the performance of the Home Office. Having worked there as an adviser between 2010 and 2015, I was familiar with the challenges of the department. But when I returned it seemed like a completely different place.

As I made my way to the home secretary’s office, directions on the walls pointed to gender-neutral toilets. Pictures in the lifts showed a giant letter “I” surrounded by the word “inclusion” translated into countless languages. Walls were adorned with artistic photography depicting African women holding strange props in mystifying poses.

A pull-up banner read, “every day, One Home Office Heroes like you carry out vital work to keep the UK safe, fair and prosperous. Cutting crime. Reducing national security risks. Supporting economic prosperity. Tackling illegal migration. Protecting the vulnerable.” Nowhere did it say, I noted, “reducing immigration”, which at that point was one of the main political objectives of the government.

This was emblematic of a deeply serious problem. As I wrote in my report, “While there are many brilliant officials at work in the Home Office, the corporate culture is insufficiently focused on the delivery of the department’s mission.”

If anything, this was an understatement. Office attendance was poor and some officials complained that this had undermined the sense of team-working. On Fridays, the building was almost empty. “Even teams working on the hottest of Home Office crises,” I wrote, “have continued to work from home, causing frustration among ministers.” The department knew this was a problem — an unambitious internal target said employees should attend their workplace at least 40 per cent of the time — but it seemed incapable of changing. My repeat requests to see data comparing attendance rates and trends in productivity were ignored.

It is important to emphasise that many officials thought things should be done differently. Some complained about the time wasted by the fashion for what was called “bringing your whole self to work”. There were “listening circles”, in which civil servants met to discuss their feelings about social and political issues. This included the implementation of government policies for which they were responsible, including the Rwanda scheme.

The number of staff representative bodies based on various sexual, racial or religious identities, the hours of staff time given to such work, and examples of training sessions about subjects such as “genderqueer” identities, also showed a lack of focus. Since I wrote my report, The Times has uncovered the role of the Civil Service Muslim Network, in whose meetings ministers were called “vile”, and officials were advised to “resist” agendas with which they disagreed.

I was given examples of how some civil servants sought to police and dictate the actions of senior officials by complaining about a failure to mark certain moments, news stories or commemorative events. There was conflict in the department, for example, over the lack of activity to mark the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

In my report, I said, “This culture is counterproductive, contrary to the spirit of impartiality in the civil service, and divisive for those officials who feel unable to challenge the opinions of more strident colleagues. It risks undermining the authority of senior officials and distracts from the vital mission of the department. It should end.” But there is little evidence it has.

If the cultural problems within the Home Office were serious, the structural problems were greater. While some believe the department should be broken up, usually arguing that responsibility for immigration and borders should be removed from the Home Office, this would undermine the ability of ministers and officials to join up the response to the often-overlapping issues of immigration, crime and security from terrorism and hostile states. A Whitehall reorganisation would take time, distract from operational delivery and create awkward new frictions between departments. So I advised against it.

But if the Home Office is to remain in one piece, there needs to be vast improvement in making sure its different teams cohere and work well together. For what I found was appallingly disjointed and, in the case of the immigration system in particular, an unaccountable mess, with no single official in charge, and the various organisations working to contradictory ends.

The Public Safety Group, for example, is responsible for crime and policing. But fraud and cybercrime, which account for approximately half of all crime, was the responsibility of the Homeland Security Group, which mainly concentrates on the fight against terrorism and state-based threats. The rest of the criminal justice system sits in the Ministry of Justice, which was mostly spun out of the Home Office in 2007 — soon after the home secretary declared parts of the department “not fit for purpose”.

The Homeland Security Group is the most prestigious part of the department and attracts high-quality officials from the rest of Whitehall and the security and intelligence agencies. But I found that the structures of government had not kept up with changing nature of the security threats we face. MI5, responsible for domestic security, is accountable to the home secretary while MI6, responsible for security and intelligence operations overseas, and GCHQ, responsible for security against cyber and tech threats, report to the foreign secretary. The emergence of the National Security secretariat in the Cabinet Office further complicates the picture. My report identified a gap between the work of the National Security Council — “carried out at 40,000 feet” as one senior official put it — and the work carried out in the departments that oversee the security and intelligence agencies. There is a need for better accountability and greater co-ordination of this important work.

The immigration system, however, was where the worst of the problems lay. The Migration and Borders Group had no one official in charge of the system overall, and while visas and passports were run efficiently I found confused lines of accountability for the asylum system and tackling illegal immigration.

There were many good civil servants who wanted the immigration system to work well and were desperate for clearer leadership. Nobody knew where the buck stopped. No individual civil servant was responsible for the system overall. Often, nobody knew who was ultimately responsible for delivering a particular policy or project. This ambiguity meant there was strategic confusion, systemic contradiction, a lack of accountability and a failure to deliver.

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The immigration system is obviously highly complex. It operates in a legal environment created in ad hoc fashion by the courts and through changes to legislation and immigration rules over decades. It often deals with individuals who choose not to be compliant and require tough enforcement procedures to be used against them. It works in a context in which organised criminal gangs exploit weaknesses in our border security and asylum system, and in which the governments of other countries can be uncooperative.

None of this means immigration control and border security are impossible to achieve. Yet at the time of my report, net migration was at a record level — 906,000 in the year ending June 2023 — and the system was struggling to cope with the Channel crossings. Today, neither legal nor illegal immigration is under control.

Where there should have been one coherent system of control and security, I found several confused and conflicting systems. Officials working on different teams would sometimes perform the same task two and even three times. Local councils received calls from three different parts of the Home Office about the same issue. Home Office civil servants made bids for accommodation at the same sites as contractors operating on behalf of the department. Officials working on the Channel crossings complained outside organisations like the Maritime and Coastguard Agency were more cooperative than the Home Office’s own Asylum and Protection Group (APG).

Bizarrely, the APG had been transferred to a part of the department called “Customer Services”, responsible for overseeing visa and passport applications. Because the performance in processing high-volume and often routine casework was seen to be strong, responsibility for asylum had simply been added to the responsibilities of the director-general. Not only is the language and culture of “customer services” wholly inappropriate for asylum case-working, the command was just too large, and of course the asylum system continued to fail.

Those working to return illegal immigrants complained that the flow of cases to them was too slow; those following up cases complained the returns never happen. Enforcement teams said the visa service was too focused on customer service and not enough on curtailing visas for those who were not compliant. They complained that even when illegal immigrants were arrested there was too little follow-up.

Structures were not the only problem. Data systems were often blamed for friction between different organisations in the immigration system. And poor access to data was cited as a reason for difficulties in making strategic decisions. “Ask what is going on,” said one official, “and you get multiple different spreadsheets from multiple people.” Another told me, “It takes a team of people weeks to answer a straightforward question.” Ministers asked what the asylum and enforcement systems might do better if they had more resources, yet the department was unable to provide reliable models in answer.

Another problem was the sheer complexity of the processes, and the many obstacles officials face when seeking to make asylum decisions. There was, for example, little scope for case-working to be usefully divided between simple and complex tracks — an obvious approach for managing high-volume work — because applicants can make often unfounded modern slavery or rights-based claims at any stage in the process, making simple cases suddenly complex.

One clear problem was the disconnect between leaders and their organisations. Officials on the operational side complained about a lack of understanding of reality on the ground from policy officials. And the operational side of Home Office business was undervalued and neglected. In Border Force, for example, an official at Grade 6 in the civil service hierarchy and pay scales was responsible for all passenger operations at Heathrow airport. Back in Whitehall, policy officials of the same grade led small teams working on policies that were neither a ministerial priority nor subject to significant change.

There is much more to say, but confronted with such lengthy and serious problems, it would be easy for the reader to despair. But the performance of the Home Office can — and given the importance of its work — must be better. As past periods of success suggest, with the right leadership, it is not impossible to turn it around. Elementary organisational changes, better management and career structures, and improvements in data management systems can all make a difference. Strong and confident leadership can turn around the culture of pessimism and defeatism.

But of course, management is not enough. Many of the obstacles faced by the Home Office have been caused by politicians who often will the ends but not the means. Controlling the border, reducing immigration and getting people out of the country require a toughness that has proved beyond many prime ministers. The same can be said of the problems with the police and criminal justice system, the failure to confront organised crime, and the abject response to public disorder. The same, too, of standing up to the very real threat posed by China and, at home as much as from abroad, Islamist extremists.

The question I ask myself, two and a half years after I sent my report to the prime minister and home secretary, is whether my recommendations were enough. Is the very idea of a permanent civil service redundant in the 21st century? Has the once rigorous system established by Victorians in 1854 mutated to become the opposite of its founding vision?

The Northcote-Trevelyan report of that year promised a professional, meritocratic and politically neutral civil service. But what we have today is a closed shop, with talent and ideas from beyond Whitehall turned away, experience on the front line disrespected in favour of slick but vacuous presentation skills, and expertise in specific subjects not only discounted but disparaged by generalists who still believe in the myth of the talented amateur.

Whatever the shape of the Home Office in future, or of Whitehall more widely, all these things must be turned on their head. We elect governments to get things done. Undoubtedly the failure to control immigration over the past quarter of a century, like other failures of policy, can be partly explained by political leadership. But that is only part of the story. If we want our leaders to have the chance to succeed, we will need a completely different model of government.

Nick Timothy is a Conservative MP