Henry Hill

Is it time to break up the Home Office?

(Getty)

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.

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