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Home Office

rose to call attention to the role of the Home Office; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, there could hardly be a more relevant time to debate the role of the Home Office, given the events of the past few months. I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, will be replying to this debate. I have thought for a long time that if I ever landed up in court guilty as charged I would certainly ask for the noble Baroness to defend me. Not only would I stand a good chance of being acquitted but, having listened to her, I would actually believe myself to be innocent. However, what has taken place in the Home Office in the past few weeks may test even the noble Baroness’s skills. I shall give but a brief selection of misadventure and policy failure. In April, the Government admitted that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners were released into the community without being considered for deportation, including, it was stated at the time, 79 serious criminals. At the beginning of May, the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, was sacked and a couple of days later his successor, John Reid, corrected the figure to 150 serious criminals having been released into the community. In the middle of May, it was revealed that five illegal immigrants had been working as cleaners. That is perhaps not the most surprising piece of news, except that they were working not just in the Home Office but in the immigration and nationality department. At the end of May, we had the extraordinary sight of several hundred prison officers and police in riot gear placed on guard around an open prison whose essential function is to prepare prisoners for release. And at the beginning of June, it was revealed that illegal immigrants could be issued with national insurance numbers even though government officials might suspect that their immigration documents were not genuine. That is all bad enough, but the most damning comment of all was made by the new Home Secretary, Dr Reid, who wrote off the efforts of his three predecessors and nine years of government by describing the system operated by his own immigration department as ““not fit for purpose””. So I think that we can agree that there is some cause for debate. I used to be chairman of the Conservative Party, and even at our most imaginative we could not have made up that particular list. However, in spite of the temptation, I do not intend to follow a remorselessly party-political path in this debate. I have one piece of experience that is relevant to this debate. Apart from in the 1980s, when I was in the Cabinet of my noble friend Lady Thatcher, doing other things, I followed the Home Office policy of three Labour Governments. In the 1960s, I was home affairs correspondent of the Times—I claim to have been the first home affairs correspondent on Fleet Street—and covered both Roy Jenkins and Jim Callaghan. In the 1970s, I was shadow Home Office spokesman under Ted Heath, when Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary again and was succeeded by the much missed Merlyn Rees. In the late 1990s, I became shadow Home Secretary and sought to follow the policies of the current Government. Frankly, in this comparison of Labour Governments, the current Government do not shine. I do not claim for a moment that problems in the Home Office area have arisen only in the last few years. The Home Secretary has the difficult task of holding the balance between liberty and security—it is not just a job in which shouting is enough—and, inevitably, crises arise. I remember the prison security crisis of the 1960s, for example. The convicted spy, George Blake, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs and one of the train robbers escaped. Also, I remember on a visit to Dartmoor, which was not exactly an open prison, coming quite by accident on an enormous giant of a man working entirely unsupervised in a field. He proved to be a prisoner called Frank Mitchell, who had a long history of violence and who later escaped—or, to be more accurate, was simply driven away, thanks to the Krays, and tragically was later murdered. So, yes, there have always been problems. But the difference between then and now is that a Home Secretary such as Roy Jenkins acted to put them right. So, on prison security, we had the Mountbatten commission, and a new regime was successfully introduced. What is disturbing about today is the failure of the Government and the Home Office to act even when there have been specific outside warnings. Let us take the example of national insurance. It is an extraordinary story that national insurance numbers and certificates should be issued as they have been. The noble Lord, Lord Grabiner, carried out a report into the system six years ago and told the Times that the situation was a scandal. He said:"““One of my key concerns was that if you got hold of an NI number then it gave you access to all kinds of benefits—everything that was going. It was a fundamental part of the story””." That warning was ignored. Let us take the example of foreign prisoners. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who is present today, wrote a piece in the Guardian on 26 May, saying:"““Somehow the Home Office in general, and individual parts, such as the prison service, simply will not listen. John Reid has found—I suspect to his total disbelief, coming from the Ministry of Defence—that, for example, no one was in charge of foreign-national prisoners. That I had recommended such an appointment in my annual report of 2001 appears, like many such recommendations to do with management, to have been ignored””." Even worse, the Government have sometimes detected a problem themselves, said that action is needed, and then failed to take the action. On immigration policy, for example, the Government published in 1998 a White Paper with what has proved to be the rather ironic title, Fairer, Faster and Firmer, which was strong on alliteration but weak on follow-through. Among the defects noted by the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was a lack of ““investment in technology””. Eight years later, the new Home Secretary, Dr Reid, arrives to find that,"““our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope; it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management, systems and processes; and we have tried to cope with this new age, if you like, with a system that has been inherited from an age that came before it””." That warning and policy was ignored. Sometimes errors have resulted from deliberate government policy. In the case of the guards around the Ford open prison, we find that potentially dangerous prisoners had been transferred to open prisons as a deliberate Home Office policy. In the words of Mr McNulty, the Home Office Minister, now transferred to other duties, overcrowding in secure prisons meant,"““open prisons being asked to take prisoners who would perhaps have not previously been allocated there””." Who is to blame for this position? I do not think that responsibility can be fairly shifted to the Civil Service. Too often, that is the last resort of Ministers whose policies have failed. As it happens, I do not subscribe to the view that the Civil Service is entirely and absolutely beyond reproach, but I do say that the inefficient are the exception. In the main, Ministers in any government get an excellent service from their civil servants, as I know from my 11 years’ experience in government. Much nearer to the mark, I suspect, is a comment made by the former director general of prisons, Martin Narey, that officials in the Home Office soon learnt,"““never to pray in aid the view of the previous secretary of state””." In other words, forget the previous regime and the stance of the previous Home Secretary; we are under new management and we will start again. Nor do I accept the theory that the Home Office is intrinsically ungovernable and that the only solution is instantly to divide it. There may be a case for division, but this would have to be very carefully planned. It is not an instant solution and it risks dividing responsibility when one of the priorities must be better liaison. For six years, I ran another big department—in fact, a bigger one than the Home Office—the DHSS, which dealt with health and social security together. I was constantly told that the public position would be transformed if only the department was divided, and after I left it was divided. But to judge from the headlines today, and over the past months, I doubt that Patricia Hewitt would say that health policy has become any less controversial as a result, and it is highly dubious that the department is in any way better run. The truth is that the responsibility for what has gone wrong at the Home Office is the responsibility of the Government and successive Home Secretaries. They have been in power for nine years, and it now rings very hollow to blame the last Conservative Government for their failures. But what makes the position so serious is that the issues that the Home Office deals with go to the very heart of life in this country. Let me set out some of the challenges. On immigration, we need a system that is well and effectively managed and which is demonstrably fit for purpose. Successive Governments have recognised the importance of immigration control, and it is right that the public should expect that every sensible step is taken to prevent and defeat illegal immigration. At the same time, we should also remember the importance of good community relations, particularly perhaps in our big cities, and we should not be complacent. Relations in some areas are jagged. Both from the point of view of justice and national well-being, we cannot afford to see young people grow up feeling that they are second-class citizens. On prisons, we need to recognise that overcrowding is defeating many of our aspirations for rehabilitation. When I was first elected to the House of Commons, I wrote a series of articles called The Prisons Crisis, because the prison population had risen to over 40,000. It is now almost 80,000. We need new prisons; the case is unanswerable. We also need to ensure that prison is not used as a social dumping ground for those with drug problems and the mentally ill when the nation can think of nothing else to do. Nor should prison be used to contain people for just a few weeks. There is no prospect of rehabilitation in that period. We would do far better to concentrate on devising effective community programmes. It is absolutely crucial that there should continue to be a fiercely independent inspector of prisons. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—I am glad to see him in his place—did sterling work in establishing this position, and it is vital in the prison context. There is a natural tendency for those working in the Prison Service to look inwards, perhaps even becoming introverted. An independent light from outside is a total necessity. On the priority of the police, we need a return to the police recruitment levels of the1980s. I make a direct plea to the Government about police force amalgamation. By any standards, amalgamations are a difficult and sensitive issue inside the police service. Previous Governments have thought long and hard before starting on such a programme. That caution is underlined in thick black ink when government Ministers rightly talk of the ““war against crime”” and the ““war against terrorism””. In this, the police are crucial. Frankly, it almost beggars belief that, at such a time, police authorities are going to court to prevent the amalgamation steamroller. That is self-evidently not what police efforts should currently be going into. I hope that the Government will think again on this, and not push through a police amalgamation programme against the wishes of so many forces and local communities. Lastly, the real trouble is that the Government and Home Office Ministers have been successful in things that do not matter, and unsuccessful in things that do. They have been successful in inventing slogans—““Fairer, faster, firmer””, ““Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime””—although they are now coming back to haunt them. They have also been successful in gaining headlines, but those have all too often been the result of White Paper pledges and the promise of new laws. There have been something like 50 Home Office Acts since this Government came to power. New laws will not solve the problem of the failing immigration service, overcrowded prisons, or the problems of crime and terrorism. Above all, what is needed is a consistent policy consistently applied, with less reliance on the announcement of new laws and more emphasis on working with the extensive range of powers that already exist, and with less effort on blaming others and more concentration on maintaining the morale of all those working in the Home Office. That is not what we have had over the last nine years, and the public have been the loser as a result. I beg to move for Papers.