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Home Office

My Lords, we owe a debt of gratitude to my noble friend Lord Fowler for giving us this opportunity to consider some of the disastrous failures by the Home Office in recent weeks. They have cost the Home Secretary his job, which he had been in for only 16 months. But the problems went back much further. I can understand entirely why Charles Clarke would have liked to stay on to sort out the mess, but I wish that he had resigned. Ultimately, it is Ministers who must carry the can for the failures of their departments. For a Minister to resign when the Civil Service machine has failed is to strengthen his successor, who can then insist that the Civil Service falls into line. Going way back, I believe that, after a man broke into the Queen’s bedroom in July 1982, Willie Whitelaw should have resigned as Home Secretary after first sacking the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir David McNee. Instead, he sent his Permanent Secretary to tell McNee to resign. McNee refused. The only person who lost his job was the sergeant of the Palace police guard, which was not a very satisfactory outcome. The tasks of the Home Office are not easy, either on policy or administration of policy. On policy, the Home Office has always been too defensive and too resistant to outside suggestions. As a noble Lord said earlier, NIH—““not invested here””—has tended to be its proud motto. Many years ago, before 1970, I was enthusiastic about computers. I suggested to senior officials that computers could be used to improve the administration of the Prison Service. After all, prisons are really only a form of hotel, and hotels were busy using computers. One comment made was, ““Mark, we can’t spend public money on computers until we are sure they are going to stay””. So nothing happened for a while. On administration, there has been systemic failure from a catastrophic combination of incompetence, negligence and, I am afraid, corruption. I do not think this debate should pass without one person being named and shamed, and that is Sir John Gieve, who for five years until the beginning of this year was the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office. It was his responsibility to see that his department was fit for purpose. He failed; his reward was to be appointed Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. As a former Treasury mandarin, he clearly has qualifications for the post. However, as his shortcomings as a manager have been revealed, he should perhaps take a sabbatical and go to business school. My own journalistic background has led me to persist in hypothecating on possible muddles and then checking whether they exist. I have done this mainly by Written Questions, and of course one question leads to another. Many of them are very simple and straightforward, but the Home Office has clearly had great difficulty in answering them, as it frequently exceeds by a considerable margin the two weeks in which questions are supposed to be answered. I have at the moment two Home Office Questions dating back to 26 April. Sadly, the Answers are frequently less than frank and seem to seek to conceal the truth. I do not have time to give further details, but they are on the record, strikingly in a series of Questions tabled in March, well before the tabloid balloon went up, when I asked about deportations of foreign criminals. I would only suggest that when they do draft replies to us, Home Office officials do not assume we were born yesterday. Ministerial responsibilities and the allocation of policy areas between departments have been very confused, and nowhere more than in the sensitive area of immigration. Tony McNulty, moved sideways from immigration to policing, has been replaced by Liam Byrne as Minister of State for Nationality, Citizenship and Immigration in the Home Office, yet Bridget Prentice appears to have responsibilities for immigration and asylum in the Department for Constitutional Affairs. These facts come from the departmental websites as of yesterday. Two Ministers in different departments with the same responsibility—surely some mistake. I know it is asking a lot of Ministers to expect them to do more than scan the answers to Written Questions before they sign them, but they could give Ministers a clue about the problems to come. If they do not have the time to interrogate officials, I suggest that they at least get themselves a special adviser to do it for them. This week the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee took evidence from Miss Lin Homer, head of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, which has failed so spectacularly. What I found really chilling was that in 2005, 15 members of her staff had been dismissed or prosecuted over allegations of professional misconduct. That is an enormous number and I suspect it may merely be the tip of an iceberg. After all, there can be few areas of government where criminal elements find it so useful to gain entry. Only last month it was revealed that a chief immigration officer, James Dawute, had been suspended following allegations that he offered to help a rape victim with her application for asylum in return for sex. I have always believed that, however great its occasional failures may be, the Whitehall machine is clean. It was one of the prides of Britain. The Home Office is now casting doubt on that. The Minister would expect me to refer to the 10-year saga of the failure of the Home Office to implement the will of Parliament that there should be a national firearms register, as required by Section 39 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997. The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, also referred to this. It is another charge in the ““not fit for purpose”” indictment. But there is another lesson on the inability of the Home Office to advance the operational efficiency of the police. When, on 14 February this year, I went with my noble friend Lady Anelay and the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, to investigate the delay at the offices of the Police and Information Technology Organisation, we were told that one of PITO’s problems was that it had no powers to require individual police forces to co-operate with such national schemes. I very much hope that the establishment of the National Policing Improvement Agency under the Police and Justice Bill will remedy this situation. Much will depend on the leadership of that organisation. So what is my advice to the new Home Secretary? First, his bold and wholly justified condemnation of his department will not have made him many friends among the inadequates who populate parts of the Home Office, so he may not be able to count fully on their loyalty. The present Permanent Secretary, Sir David Normington, has not been there long enough to have any blame, and I am sure that he can be relied on fully to support Dr Reid. However, the Home Secretary should, I believe, make several changes. First, he must appoint an outside investigator for every Home Office agency to probe the effectiveness of their performance. It will not be a hard task. The investigator could start by asking the sort of questions that I have been putting down for Written Answer—which, incidentally, I shall continue to table—and they should quickly reveal weak spots. Secondly, the Home Secretary should order an investigation into the integrity of the entire staff of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and into the methods by which they have been, and are being, recruited and vetted. Thirdly, Dr Reid should consider bringing in some of our best recently retired military staff officers to run these agencies. We all remember that, during the total shambles of the foot and mouth outbreak in 1999–2000, the Government only belatedly called in the Army. It was a brigadier in the north of England who was the hero of the hour and who solved the problems. Fourthly, the Home Secretary should encourage the Home Affairs Select Committee to continue to monitor, with vigour, the performance of his department. Fifthly, he should see that each of his departmental Ministers has a special adviser—there is only one in the department at the moment, and that is the Home Secretary’s—one of whose tasks would be to monitor and, when necessary, challenge the briefing given to Ministers when they reply to parliamentary debates or Questions. Sixthly, he should welcome many of the amendments which we will seek to make to the Police and Justice Bill, most especially the removal of the proposal to amalgamate the five inspectorates, which is clearly aimed at reducing the scope for public criticism of the Home Office by the inspectors. Seventhly, he should discuss with the Prime Minister a possible redistribution—I am not talking about wholesale reorganisation—of Home Office functions, especially as between the Home Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs. It is only by radical change that the Home Office can once again justify being regarded as one of the great departments of state.