As crises pile up, can the Home Office be fixed?
The government is facing a series of disasters on small boat crossings, arguably the most visible state failure and the issue it is trying to tackle.
The number of migrants arriving on small boats is huge, and the secondary consequences of these arrivals are greater: costs, hotels, public suffering.
The accidental release of one of the most high-profile prisoners jailed this year has caused consternation in Westminster, as well as across the country.
Hadush Kebatu was convicted last month of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in July in Epping, Essex, where he had been living in an asylum hotel since arriving in the UK on a small boat.
His arrest led to this a series of protests in the region This situation spread to other hotels housing refugees across the country.
In other words, he embodied the scale of the issue and the depth and breadth of the anger it sparked – and yet he accidentally got out of prison.
How did this happen? Listen to my conversation with Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, in which I ask him exactly this: On the BBC News Programme.
And beyond that, Report prepared by MPs He concluded that the Home Office had “wasted” billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on shelters.
There’s a recurring theme here.
I’ve been reporting from Westminster for over 20 years. Shortly after I first arrived, the then Home Secretary, John Reid of the Labor Party, I repeated a line He had heard from one of his then senior officials that parts of the Home Office were “not fit for purpose”.
One of the solutions at the time was to remove some of the responsibilities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and I created a new department – Ministry of Justice.
The point is that of the two issues we are talking about here, one is at the door of the Home Office (asylum housing regulations) and the other is at the Ministry of Justice (accidental release of prisoners).
And criticism of the Ministry of Internal Affairs continued.
A report compiled by Nick Timothy, the current Conservative MP who worked as a special adviser to the Home Office during the last government, shows: It’s a deeply disturbing picture.
To be fair, the nature and responsibilities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice are among the most thorny domestic policy issues.
But when I spoke to political figures in the Home Office, I was surprised to hear them say that not only was Timothy aware of something, but they privately acknowledged that many of his observations from a few years ago were still visible to them today.
They hope for new leadership – new Permanent Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo and new Home Affairs Minister Shabana Mahmood could help change that.
However, in the last two decades, many new leading civil servants and new interior ministers have joined this ministry.
The reason all of this is so important right now is because it all represents an overlap of failures in small boats, which is the most important problem.
No wonder, at the weekend, Health Secretary Wes Streeting publicly expressed concern that there was “deep disappointment… and a growing sense of despair about whether anyone is capable of turning this country around”.
And this is an analysis from one of the people responsible for doing this.
