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Home Office

My Lords, I also thank my noble friend Lord Fowler for giving the House this timely opportunity to consider the role of the Home Office, which has been engulfed by a series of crises in recent months. It is a great department of state and it should maintain internal peace and order in ways that secure, as far as is possible, our British freedoms, civil liberties and way of life. The question is how it can do that effectively, when the previous Home Secretary branded his own department as being at times ““seriously dysfunctional””—and for the sake of the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, I direct him to the Financial Times on 27 April for that quote. The current Home Secretary has said that the IND is not fit for purpose. John Reid blamed his predecessors and his officials for the problems. David Blunkett in newspaper articles this year has blamed his officials. The Prime Minister’s desperation to escape from a hole showed when he tried, without success, to blame my honourable friends for what happened over a decade ago. So does the Home Office need new Ministers, new officials, a new focus or all three? Is it unmanageable, or has the management become unfit for purpose? Jonathan Baume, the general secretary of the First Division Association of civil servants, said last week:"““Some recent criticism of the civil service looks like an ill-disguised attempt by some politicians and commentators to make excuses, and shift responsibility for struggling policies from ministers to the staff who serve them””." As the daughter of a civil servant even I must admit that, while they are superb most of the time, they are not perfect. Which of us is? It seems that some recent Home Office blunders contain at least some elements of bureaucratic error. But mistakes are more likely to happen when Ministers relentlessly hurl initiatives, targets and policy changes at an already overburdened department without first checking to see whether it is coping with the existing challenging workload. In the foreign prisoner fiasco, the 1,000 or more convicts who should have been considered for deportation were let out partly because of the poor records kept by prisons, and partly because immigration officers failed to assess their cases before they were due for release. As Prisons Minister, what steps has the noble Baroness taken to ensure that prisons co-ordinate with the IND in the way that everybody thought they did before the scandal broke, and that the appropriate assessments are now made? Stories about the Criminal Records Bureau checks wrongly labelling innocent people as criminals, sex being offered for visas and national insurance numbers being given to illegals all give an impression of a department in crisis. It must be damaging for the morale of public servants who are dedicated professionals. How has bad government policy contributed to those crises? As has already been mentioned, there have been more than 50 different pieces of Home Office legislation and countless pieces of secondary legislation, initiatives and policy launches since 1997. The policy on asylum seekers under Mr Blunkett saw a lurch from the dispersal of asylum seekers to tougher border controls and enforced removals. When the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act went through in 2002, the Government were obsessed with the idea of having four huge accommodation centres. We warned them then of the defects in such a policy; they pressed ahead with it, then effectively dumped it later. Will the Minister tell the House what criteria the Home Office now applies when dispersing asylum seekers across the country? She will no doubt have seen the disturbing story in the Sunday Express this week that the result of Home Office policy, until a change of direction in April this year, had been to create ghettos along ethnic lines. In drugs policy, the reclassification of cannabis caused confusion, not helped by Home Secretaries having public second and, indeed, third thoughts about it. After the announcement of a U-turn yesterday, Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust said:"““The Government has clearly lost its way and is sending out mixed messages””." Then there is the matter of the 1,000 or so prisoners who abscond each year from non-secure open prisons. I do not doubt that trust in an open prison is always a problem. The Home Office line has always been that such prisoners are being readied for release, and present no imminent danger to the public.  But it has now emerged that Tony McNulty, with prison overcrowding reaching critical levels, signed a letter a little while ago sanctioning a change in policy which led to open prisons being asked to take prisoners who might not previously have been allocated there. As Minister for Prisons, has the noble Baroness reviewed that policy and made changes? Is the Home Office too big to be operated effectively? There were very significant contributions on the analysis of the problem by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and, in particular—I hope they will not mind my saying so—my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, who made a forensic examination of the matter. The Home Office is not an easy department of state to administer; nobody would say it was. It covers vast policy areas—anti-terror, drugs, prisons, probation, sentencing, youth justice, immigration, asylum, nationality and citizenship. It is an enormous task for anyone to grapple with. One suggestion has been to break it up into a ministry of justice and a ministry of homeland security. Another is to have two Cabinet Ministers in the department. So far, the Prime Minister has rejected both ideas. I hope that he might look again constructively at the proposal to have a Minister of homeland security. Whatever the size of the Secretary of State’s empire, it is clear that it is the job of Ministers to give leadership and ensure that structures are in place to make it possible for those who work for them to carry out their tasks effectively, so that we do not again see the shambles that came to light this year. Of course, Ministers should not micromanage. They are not there as managers in the first place, although sometimes it seems that they would like to be. For example, in the Police and Justice Bill, which had its Second Reading this week, there is a sign of the Government trying to move more into an operational direction for policing, threatening to undermine the tripartite relationship. Although the noble Baroness, whom I always trust in these matters, gave an assurance on the record that she values that relationship, she is not in control of the policy. There is a danger that the relationship could be unbalanced. I thought the analysis that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, gave on Monday was very valuable. We need leadership to ensure consistent policy, consistently applied. Ministers have simply pressed ahead with too much legislation and taken their eyes off the ball. It is ironic that, at the very time that the Home Office was pushing on with the new penalties for employers of illegals in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act earlier this year, the department itself was employing illegals to act as cleaners in one of its own departments. Of course, John Reid immediately denied that the cleaners had gained access to Home Office buildings, presenting their detention as a security triumph. But the following day the Home Secretary was forced to admit that he had misled the public. He was more interested in chasing headlines than presenting the facts to the public. The cleaners had got in and had been doing the work for some considerable time. That is a key problem. Too often, Ministers have mistaken hyperactivity for effective leadership of the administration. It may seem dull to an ambitious politician to ensure that an administration is effective but it is the stuff of successful government. The maintenance of internal peace and order is a heavy responsibility, and it is one that must be exercised with a duty of care for both the freedom and security of the individual citizen. The noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, has repeatedly said that the Government,"““will continue to put the safety of the people of this country first, second and last””.—[Official Report, 16/5/06; col. 140.]" That is a laudable objective, and of course she has our full support for it. But today’s debate has exposed the failings at the very government department charged with securing that objective. The new Permanent Secretary, Sir David Normington, has said that recent stories have ““inflicted immense damage”” on the Home Office and undermined public confidence in its ability to protect the public. I am afraid he is right. So let us have a break from the hyperactive politics of the headline and TV video clip, with Home Secretaries in protective vests on dawn raids with the police. Let us have more reflection before action—action that makes the Home Office 100 per cent fit for purpose and, as my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth said, that gives the Home Office a clear sense of direction.