19 May 2006
Breaking up the Home Office would not necessarily make it more effective, Britain's top civil servant warned this week, rejecting claims that an unreformed civil service is to blame for problems across struggling departments.
However, Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell told MPs that the operation of the Home Office, which faced a 'large number of challenges', was subject to two overlapping internal reviews.
These followed the mistaken release of 1,000 foreign prisoners and revelations this week that the department's Immigration and Nationality Directorate has no idea how many illegal immigrants have entered Britain.
Appearing before the Commons public administration select committee on May 16, O'Donnell said that mistakes were made when the Home Office released foreign prisoners and lost track of them.
But he said it was unlikely that the civil servants involved would be sacked or moved on. 'I'm not clear that there was sufficient direct accountability for that to be appropriate,' he said.
Nor, O'Donnell said, would it be appropriate to restructure the department once again, as has been suggested by backbench MPs and home affairs experts.
The Home Office was recently stripped of its communities responsibilities. But O'Donnell claimed that there were still 'very obvious overlaps' between its remaining functions, such as crime and immigration.
'It is not obvious to me that machinery of government changes to split them would necessarily improve efficiency,' he warned.
Home Office permanent secretary Sir David Normington is co-ordinating an internal investigation into the failures behind the prisoners' release.
O'Donnell said that the results of a simultaneous Departmental Capability Review of Home Office functions would be made public later on this summer.
O'Donnell's Commons appearance followed claims by the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank that Home Office failings and poor NHS finances were the result of a civil service 'accountability deficit' and disjointed past reforms.
The IPPR's full report, Rethinking Whitehall, due out in July, is expected to recommend that civil servants should be accountable for their performance, with ministers accountable for policy and resources.
But the FDA civil service union said people should be 'wary of taking a simplistic approach to issues… at the interface between senior civil servants and ministers.'
PFmay2006
