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Home Office

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He and I have known each other for many years. In his previous guise we overlapped directly in relation to prisons in Northern Ireland, when I was the chairman of the Select Committee for the Province and he appeared as a witness in front of us on that subject. I thank and congratulate my noble friend Lord Fowler. I am dredging my memory, but I think that in the run-up to the London borough elections he may have been intended to be a Conservative candidate in Highgate. He shakes his head, so I will not continue. I was about to thank him. If he was not, I take it back. My late noble kinsman was Home Secretary for two years more than 40 years ago. I remember him saying that 5 per cent of what goes on in the Home Office is extremely high profile and that 95 per cent is buried deep below public consciousness. He was succeeded as Home Secretary but one by the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead who, perhaps because of his own experience in the responsibility, was more measured in his verdict on my father’s time there than the contemporary satirists, but who drew from my late noble kinsman’s experience and that of his successor, Frank Soskice—later Lord Soskice of Stow Hill, who was Lord Jenkins’s predecessor—lessons to make sure he was not overtaken by their problems. By dynastic chance my middle son is now married to Frank Soskice’s granddaughter. I mention that trio of Home Secretaries of 40 years ago in the context of the state of the Home Office because of a particular experience my late noble kinsman had. His experience of previous departments had been to be Financial Secretary at the Treasury, the quality of whose civil servants was then legendary, and to be Minister of Housing and Local Government, which took its style from the equally legendary Dame Evelyn Sharp, the permanent secretary, later to become Baroness Sharp in your Lordships’ House. If my noble kinsman asked for anything to be done within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Dame Evelyn would have made absolutely certain that it was done. When in the Home Office, my late noble kinsman asked for policy work to be done on a particular issue among the 95 per cent of Home Office work that was below the surface, and it was agreed that it would take six months to complete. He was surprised to be told at the end of the six months that no official’s time could be spared during the intervening period to work on it. There was a sense that the mandarins in the office believed in a responsibility to protect the ethos of the department and that the principle of ““not invented here”” was an amulet against reform. I mention these matters from long ago because this debate is, as my noble friend admirably opened it, about the state of the Home Office. Departments are all different and it is unusual for any department to experience disaster on the spur of the moment, but rather as a result of long gestation in the bowels of the department. Like my noble friend, I am not going to dwell on the private anguish implicit in recent developments, but I cannot help smiling at Simon Jenkins’s exotic list of Home Office satrapies on the Guardian last month, which put me in mind not only of Beachcomber’s list of the Hertfordshire or Huntingdonshire cabmen, but also of the Guild of 19 Lubricators, which sounds like a case chapter in Sherlock Holmes but which used to, and perhaps still does, hold an annual service at St Margaret’s Westminster. I never served as a Home Office Minister, nor do I have the benefit of direct experience, such as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has, but I shall make some remarks about my parliamentary experience of the Immigration Service in Lunar House. I appreciate that they may or may not be typical of the Home Office as a whole. For four years I served as a Minister in the Treasury, although never as Chief Secretary, whose first incumbent was my late noble kinsman in 1961. I confess with hindsight that we, as a government, were perhaps insufficiently supportive within the public finances of this particular side of Home Office activities. Perhaps it was because it was not a subject Back-Bench Conservative MPs would have pressed on us, given the nature of their experiences in their own constituencies. But I think we did one thing better than the present Government, and that it may have something to do with their difficulties. We chose more senior members of the Government to take charge of immigration and of Lunar House and to leave them there longer. To illustrate with three names, the previous government owed a great deal to the stamina and good sense of Tim Raison, of my noble friend Lord Waddington and of Peter Lloyd. All three held the immigration responsibility as Privy Counsellors. My most acute experience both relating to illegals and asylum seekers was between 1997 and 2001. The Home Office decision, taken by whomsoever, that it would not answer letters from immigrants and their lawyers meant that I wrote to the Home Office 40 times as often during that Parliament as I had in the previous one. After all, in residential terms, those were my constituents and, in some senses, more in need of parliamentary help than most. As I recall, in January 1998, the Government requested that MPs stopped writing to Home Office Ministers for three or four months on immigration cases, except in an emergency, while the files were computerised. I heard horrific stories from Labour MPs about the state of the files that they had been allowed to see. That underlined the significance of the Government’s action in asking MPs to cease and desist from correspondence. Perhaps the Home Office has few friends in government, but I blame the then government Whips for not preventing new Labour MPs—the word new is deliberately ambiguous—from increasing the correspondence directed to Ministers by a full 25 per cent, instead of desisting during that period when others such as me were obeying the Government’s unusual instruction to write only to civil servants. I shall not rehearse the awfulness of the experience through until the 2001 general election, except for one tiny but revealing experience. I recall that in September 2001, a month before I arrived in your Lordships’ House, I sent to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, then the relevant Minister, a package of 17 cases on which I had heard nothing during the previous year. His inevitably gradual replies serially exposed that the internal handling of the cases was seriously out of control. I shall not dwell on that tiny, revealing experience, save to say that a helpful letter from Lunar House to the Benefits Agency was erroneously—although, I now have to say retrospectively, not so erroneously—sent to me. As MPs are authority’s first line of communication between Ministers and their constituents, any junior Minister worth his salt, especially one mired and beleaguered in an alligator swamp, should have recognised that the information in the letter was worth sharing with all MPs with immigrant constituents, a conclusion with which the Home Secretary agreed when he and I conspired on a planted question by me. That increased the sense of a lack of control: that the train had left the rails and was ploughing the embankment. The Government were left with the wider question of what to do next. My two bits-worth is not worth more than two bits and probably less, but I hope that in the midst of this crisis, no one will try to restructure the department. That would be analogous to changing the thrust of a Bill in midstream, which is a highly unprofessional nightmare. That would suggest that the Home Office has learnt nothing from its legislative experience of piling Pelion upon Ossa and will now try to abstract Ossa and pile it on top of Pelion again. It is much better to seek better to manage what you have already and only thereafter to use that experience to point you towards change, just as the Home Office will be better advised to make more of its 40 or so Bills since 1997 before it starts to promote more. An unnecessary Bill in one department is a legislative opportunity cost in another. I sometimes think that this Government are addicted to government by legislative gesture. I will say a final word about transferring departmental functions from one department to another. Just as my late noble kinsman had the from-the-ground-up responsibility of creating the job of the Chief Secretary, in terms of reference, responsibilities and structures, I had two years trying to forge a new department—what was then the Department of National Heritage—out of bits of six different departments, all different from each other. One of those bits was the media and broadcasting functions of the Home Office. Although it might seem more difficult to marry bits of six departments than to add a single bit to a separate critical mass, I suspect that that is something that everyone can help to shape. My former department has since received responsibility for volunteering, licensing and gambling from the Home Office. Each of those moves may have been very sensitive transplants, especially when they were leaving a department that was more than 200 years old. Perhaps in reply the Minister can tell us whether there is any Cabinet Office guidance about how such transfers should be carried out.