When was the last time the Home Office produced some good news? Even in the middle of a crisis that most will concede the government has handled quite well, the department has managed to generate the usual abysmal headlines. Even the Foreign Office, slow as it was in cracking down on Russian oligarchs, couldn’t steal the limelight.
There may perhaps be a narrow defence to be made over particular policies. Sources in the department point out that the Ukrainian government would prefer refugees to remain in neighbouring countries than come all the way to Britain. But take a step back and such arguments start to look ridiculous. Britain wouldn’t have to take millions of refugees to create an easier pathway for the few fleeing war with family here.
And beyond Ukraine, the list of policy failures is just too long to ignore. Forget immigrants and refugees, the department makes life miserable for people who are already British citizens. As I found in a recent paper for the Adam Smith Institute, the Home Office fleeces ex-servicemen from the Commonwealth through usurious fees and byzantine settlement rules. Priti Patel’s recent announcement that the government will waive these fees was much less generous than it first appeared – all their family members will still need to pay the fees – £2,389 per person. And that’s before we even get on to the Windrush scandal, where those who should rightly have been given British citizenship were denied it to meet petty and ill-thought out targets.
There is a consistent pattern of making the smallest possible concession when civil servants are left to their own devices
The department’s stubborn refusal to roll the four so-called ‘residual’ classes of British nationality (did you know there were so many?) into one pathway to full citizenship has left many overseas Brits in limbo; tens of thousands of people, many from Commonwealth countries, with second-class UK passports but no way to get the full rights of citizenship.
When the government decided to adopt an open-door policy for Hong Kongers with British National (Overseas) passports, that policy already covered the vast majority of so-called ‘residual’ British nationals. It was therefore the perfect opportunity to simply rationalise the whole system, most obviously by offering the same treatment to the ten thousand ‘British Overseas Citizens’. Instead, the system will continue to render people holding a British passport effectively stateless, all for the sake of keeping out a few thousand people. It’s not just cruel, it’s pointless.
Again, the buck ultimately stops with ministers. Doubtless, if Patel directly orders her civil servants to prepare specific policies, they would do so. But there is a consistent pattern of making the smallest possible concession when civil servants are left to their own devices. In a system where ministers are rotated between permanent bureaucracies, institutional cultures are inevitably going to distort political decision-making.
Back in 2019, the government said it wanted major reform of the Home Office – just one front in Dominic Cumming’s crusade against civil service dysfunction. Unfortunately, that, like so much else, fell victim to the chaos in Downing Street and the eventual departure of Boris Johnson’s original team.
It is time to revisit the idea of breaking up the Home Office – or at least splitting parts of it off. Policing, counter-terrorism and drugs policy are quite enough for a full ministerial in-tray; immigration could be well-served by getting its own dedicated department. Clearly, if senior minds in your organisation are confronting terrorism one minute and migration the next, that sense of defensiveness will seep from one into the other. There is a case for peeling off these incredibly thorny policy areas and giving them their own ministers and civil service structures.
Obviously shuffling the Whitehall deck on its own won’t fix the problem. Any reorganisation would need to be conducted with a close eye on the detail (just look at the merger of the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, where many in the former feel they have been colonised by the latter). Any ‘reform’ that simply involves taking the immigration sections and personnel and sticking a new hat on them is not going to achieve very much.
But done right, and with the proper political leadership, it could help move immigration and citizenship policy out of the purely defensive mindset that (understandably enough, in many cases) informs how the Home Office operates. The Prime Minister could usher in a new era of British internationalism by setting up a new immigration department, with a mandate to deliver a bolder, smarter, more generous approach to immigration policy – whether it applies to Ukrainian refugees or second-class British citizens.
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