23 June 2006
The Home Office is in trouble but are its problems due to poor tactics or trying to defend two areas at the same time – justice and law and order? Philip Johnston investigates
There was a time, just a year or so ago, when the Home Office had three permanent secretaries. It was the most heavily managed department in Whitehall. Other departments, such as the Treasury, sometimes have a second permanent secretary. But three? This surfeit of senior officials was less a reflection of the wide range of the Home Office's responsibilities than of apparent ministerial unhappiness with the leadership the civil service was providing.
It is tempting to argue that a department that requires three people of equal rank to run it is too big and should be broken up. When the home secretary calls it 'dysfunctional', as Charles Clarke did before he quit the Cabinet, or part of it is described as 'not fit for purpose', which was John Reid's assessment of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate after just a few days in the post, you wonder why it has been left intact for so long.
In fact, the Home Office's responsibilities have changed substantially since it was established in the eighteenth century. Its earliest duties involved dispensing Crown grants, appointments and preferments as well as criminal business and the incarceration of offenders. Over the years, it took on immigration, charities, gambling, broadcasting, licensing, fire, equal opportunities, community exclusion and animal welfare.
The apogee of these powers was probably the mid-1980s, when Leon Brittan was home secretary and found himself embroiled in a spectacular row with the BBC over the broadcast of a programme about IRA extremists on the 'Real Lives' documentary series.
Since then, the Home Office has gradually been retreating to its core functions. Licensing and broadcasting have gone to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, as have charities and gambling. Fire is a local government matter now, and equality and community cohesion are also in the hands of the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Sir John Gieve, who was permanent secretary until December, says: 'What remains is pretty clearly a ministry of the interior. It has responsibility for all the coercive forces such as police and prisons and there is a coherence to that from a management point of view. I don't think it would be improved by splitting it up.'
Gieve, who is now deputy governor of the Bank of England, points out that the recent crisis in the Home Office stemmed from difficulties within the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. Merely separating it from the rest of the department would make little difference to the internal problems caused by the sudden expansion in its workload in the late 1990s when the government, as Gieve concedes, 'lost control of asylum'.
But while the current organisation of the department might have management coherence, does it work politically or have any rationale from the point of view of good governance? For home secretaries, it is a dangerous business being in charge of policy areas with such potential to cause controversy – even more so now that there is little ideological difference between the two main parties on the issues it deals with.
In the past, Labour incumbents such as Roy Jenkins could use their Home Office tenure to make liberal reforms. But under Tony Blair, the party has repositioned itself on to traditional Tory territory, emphasising the law and order elements of the portfolio.
As a result, the key argument between the parties on this, as on many other issues, is no longer one of ideology but of competence. Who can run the department better? Who will ensure offenders are properly dealt with, prisoners are kept behind bars, illegal immigrants are pursued and deported and sentences are suitably tough?
The political pitfalls here are obvious for home secretaries who are then exposed to the vagaries of managerial mistakes, often beyond their control, which can have serious, even fatal, repercussions. Gieve says: 'The Home Office is not uniquely bad in this respect but the political salience of the issues is what is important. One case mishandled is likely to dominate the front pages and the media in a way that wouldn't happen with other departments. That is what is special about the Home Office, and what gives it special risk.'
After the foreign prisoners fiasco, there have been increasing calls for the functions of the Home Office to be rationalised still further. In other countries with interior ministries, the 'corrections' side – prisons and probation – is in the hands of a ministry of justice. Baroness Stern, a former head of the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders, believes a similar distinction should be made here.
'The Home Office is basically our ministry of the interior. As such, it does what needs to be done,' she says. 'The problem comes when it deals with matters that should not be seen through the perspective of a ministry of the interior.' Essentially, she wants one individual to uphold the values of order and another to uphold the values of justice.
Lord Ramsbotham, who was a distinguished and outspoken chief inspector of prisons, agrees. 'One of the major problems, particularly for the home secretary, is that the job is too big for any one man or woman to encompass,' he says. 'Most of the failures and problems that we see highlighted in the media to do with the Prison Service, the Probation Service and so on are to do with the fact that there has not been adequate supervision of the administration of justice.'
Ramsbotham says too many bits of the justice system are in different departments, such as responsibility for children in the Department for Education and Skills and rehabilitation of offenders in the Department for Work and Pensions.
'Concern about the administration of justice in this country is now so strong that it merits the formation of one ministry responsible for justice and for nothing else,' he says. 'Urgent consideration should be given to the formation of a ministry of justice which takes into one place the administration of justice as a whole, leaving another department to manage home affairs. If you separate the two into manageable proportions, we would not be reading the criticisms that we find so disturbing.' The government, however, already knows there is a co-ordination problem here. This is why it established the Office for Criminal Justice Reform, described as 'a cross-departmental team charged with making sure there is joined-up thinking between the Home Office, Department for Constitutional Affairs (courts and law) and the Attorney General's Office, the government's chief legal adviser'.
But is it enough simply to have this administrative bridge, or should there be a wholly separate justice department with an accountable minister? Robert Hill, a former adviser to the home secretary, argues that this might not be advisable. 'Balkanising the Home Office is not the panacea,' he says. 'It might increase inter-departmental wrangling, which is one of the biggest obstacles to reform.'
There is, of course, another way of relieving pressure on the Home Office and its staff, and that is to call a halt to the almost permanent revolution it has undergone over the past ten years, with reform after reform and pressure from Number 10 to meet targets that often conflict with other priorities set for the department. For instance, managers lost sight of the need to consider deporting foreign prisoners because it was focused on meeting a Downing Street 'tipping point' target, whereby the number of 'unfounded' asylum seeker applications in any one year is less than the number deported. This is a largely meaningless policy objective intended more for inclusion in ministerial speeches than a genuine achievement.
On top of that, the department – while it might be happily installed in its gleaming new open-plan HQ – is in the throes of a major IT programme and a three-year real-terms budget freeze. We also do not need a crystal ball to discern the Home Office's priorities for the future because they were helpfully set out by Tony Blair in a letter to John Reid when he took up his new post.
They included: 'an improved framework for the management of offenders… to enhance public protection and ensure that the law-abiding majority can live without fear'; a major appraisal of current policy and practice for releasing prisoners from indeterminate sentences; the introduction of contestability in prisons and probation; success in meeting the asylum 'tipping point'; delivery of the government's counter-terrorism strategy with 'decisive action against preachers of hate and groups concerned in terrorism or the glorification of terrorism'; crime reduction; police reform; delivery of the 'respect' agenda; a new drugs approach with a special look at 'the highest crime-causing prolific drug-users'; a crackdown on serious and organised crime; and the introduction of identity cards.
Blair has given Reid until the end of this month to come up with a 'preliminary assessment' of the key challenges in the department and to identify the main actions he proposes to meet these challenges. The task of meeting this somewhat ambitious timescale has fallen to Liam Byrne, the high-flying minister of state who entered Parliament less than two years ago after working for Andersen Consulting and NM Rothschild before starting a venture-backed technology company in 2000.
Byrne is a new breed of politician, seemingly more comfortable with management-speak than with more rarified policy matters. He was initially given the Home Office brief in charge of the police but was switched by Reid to immigration and nationality because it was thought that the directorate needed business expertise. Byrne, who appeared recently before the Commons home affairs select committee and caused a stir by refusing to rule out an amnesty for illegal immigrants, does not believe the IND is beyond repair if the right management techniques are brought to bear. He has also been asked to report to Reid on ideas for running the rest of the Home Office as well.
'The more I have seen of the IND the more I have felt it is fixable,' he told the committee. 'There are strengths on which to build. The challenge over the next 12 months is to ensure we don't have a centre that is too soft.'
There is a school of thought that would hive off the IND into a separate homeland security ministry, responsible also for borders and anti-terrorism. But while Byrne would not rule out anything while he is reviewing the objectives of the Home Office, he believes immigration responsibility is best kept within the department to provide strong central control. He is not averse, however, to independent scrutiny of the IND's performance along the lines of local government's Comprehensive Performance Assessment system.
Byrne is also a believer in targets as a way of orchestrating improvements and he talks more like a consultant than a politician. What is needed is 'dynamic management information'; there are no 'single shot solutions'; we must 'get the human resources straight' and 'find out where the bottlenecks are'. Processes must be 'properly defined' and 'additional metrics may be needed'.
He said: 'It is a corporate governance issue. If it's wrong, it is difficult to get the rest of the business right.'
Byrne is approaching his onerous role like a management consultant. Here is a failing organisation: how would you turn it around? This is the new politics. With the ideological differences between the parties reduced almost to nothing, the emphasis now is on competent management, something that has been thin on the ground in the Home Office in recent years.
However, such a technocratic approach risks losing sight of the bigger picture – whether the department should continue to be responsible both for the pursuit of criminals and their punishment. In the review now under way, serious thought should also be given to setting up a ministry of justice responsible for the prisons and probation. At the very least, it would remove some of the elephant traps that always lie in wait for any home secretary.
Philip Johnston is home affairs editor of the Daily Telegraph
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