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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk
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Momentum doesn't appear overnight. It's built, refined, repeated. Puerto Rico has been building it for decades as a U.S. jurisdiction operating under U.S. federal law, regulatory standards and market protections. Here, global companies manufacture life saving medicines, advanced technologies and critical products at scale and with competitive tax incentives designed to support investment and expansion. Companies don't just start here, they grow here. Not culture or business. Culture and business. Puerto Rico. It's not what's next, it's where. Visit investpr.org business Dear Friday, Toyota says let's put good times in gear with the tundra Tacoma and 4Runner. Want some cool available features. We've got power tailgates to power game days and a trailer backup guide that's the champ of the ramp. Heck, we might even cancel Monday. Toyota trucks. Find yours@toyota.com Toyota let's go places, Chris. Should we explain to people the bold experiment we're about to embark on?
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C
We should. So we had a bit of an idea, didn't we, a while ago, I think it was in the autumn actually, wasn't it, when there was a bit of a flare up in the Home Office. And you and I, who are not quite in the veteran category yet journalistically, but certainly have kicked around for what, 20, 25 years, started realizing there was a bit of a bit of a pattern, isn't there really, about things that come up again and again around particular government departments and particularly the Home Office, which made us think maybe rather than just covering the story and then moving on to the next thing, we ought to give ourselves a bit of space to think and to share that thinking with newscasters around whether or not the home, well, how it works, whether it works, could it work better, is it too big? The kind of questions that tend to come up over and over again when things that the Home Office does make news, which is frequently.
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B
So we're making a three part miniseries where we will delve into the Home Office, the policy, the politics, the personalities, the history and what's happening now. So episode one, which you're listening to now, we will talk to some former advisors and people from behind the scenes. Episode two, we will, we will get two former home secretaries to sit down and go head to head about their time in office. And in episode three, we will talk about how we in the media cover this incredibly complex, controversial government department. So that is coming your way in this newscast miniseries.
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D
Newscast newscast from the BBC.
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Our system is not fit for purpose.
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C
The Home Office was a graveyard for politicians.
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It's Not a poison chalice, it's a three course meal with coffee and dessert.
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D
We have been doing something about it. A plane taking off to Rwanda, that's my dream. I wish it were possible to say that there isn't a problem here.
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B
Hello from the newscast studio, where Chris and I have been joined by an August panel of Home Office experts. Hannah Guerin was a Special advisor to Priti Patel when she was Home Secretary. So what years are we talking about?
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D
So we're talking about 19 to 22, which feels like a long time ago now, but I can tell you was incredibly jam packed.
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B
Also joining us is David normington, who spent 37 years in the Civil Service, including as the Permanent Secretary and at the Home Office. And Permanent Secretary is basically you. You're the senior civil servant for the whole department.
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E
That's right, yes. I'm the non political leader of the department.
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B
And does that mean sort of every decision crosses your desk?
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E
I hope not, but I have to take responsibility for everything that happens. Yes.
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B
And I suppose the point about being Permanent Secretary is. Well, the clue's in the name. You're. You're there to represent the Department and the Civil Service, which means you're not. You're not like the best friend of the Home Secretary, are you?
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E
I'm not the best friend, but I am there to make sure that the Home Secretary gets her policies delivered or his policies delivered.
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B
Also joining us, Danny Shaw, friend of newscast, a former BBC Home affairs correspondent, and on the then Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's team in the lead up to the general election in 2024, where he was helping to shape Labour's policies and prepare the party for government. Hello, Danny.
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A
Hi, Adam.
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B
Right, I don't know if you know much about the history of the Home Office. Does, like the previous 200 years, impinge on what it does now? When you walk the building, do you feel like you're part of an institution that's been going for a very, very long time?
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E
Yes. But if you go right back to the beginning 200 years ago, there were two departments of state, basically, plus the Treasury. The Home Office dealt with everything that was to do with the UK internally. And then there was the Foreign Office. The Home Office is much reduced from that. In fact, the story of the Home Office is of it generally losing responsibilities until it gets to the core that it has today. But you have a sense that you're responsible for some of the most important things of the state the borders, security and safety for the citizens, the police and so on.
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C
And I suppose bluntly to all of you, some of the most important functions of the state and then some of the biggest things that can go wrong, I guess. And I guess to get to the crux of what prompted us to think about this series, that recurring sense that we've seen over generations, over different political parties, through different political crises, if you like, of a sense that the Home Office, to use the phrase, is quote, unquote, not fit for purpose. I think, David, you were the inadvertent architect of that phrase, seeing the light of day.
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E
It is my phrase, but it was written in a private memo to the Home Secretary, John Reid, just after it arrived me saying this is what the Home Office is like and so it is my phrase. He admits that, but he's never attached my name to it. He says it's a phrase that he got from a senior civil servant.
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A
I didn't know that.
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E
I've now admitted it publicly to millions of people, exclusive.
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B
Do you know what? I think that's actually quite a good place to start because. So that was 2006. Danny, just take us back to what. What was going on at the Home Office then. Why it was such a. It was in the headlines every single day for very negative reasons.
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A
Well, this was a very difficult period for the Home Office. It's after the 911 attacks. So you had terrorism arrests in the country, heightened state of alert many times, and obviously the sort of the machinery of counterterrorism wasn't that well developed in terms of dealing with the Islamist threat back, you know, 2001 to 2005. Then you had the seven, seven bombings of 2005, which was a complete wake up call for Britain. The Home Secretary at the time was Charles Clark and he was dealing with that. And at the same time he had a plan to merge police forces, which has now been revisited by Shabana Mahmood. And I think those were his two preoccupations. And I think it would be fair to say that he probably took his eye off the immigration ball because what happened was that there was a scandal around the release of foreign prisoners who should have been subject to deportation or at least being considered for deportation. There are over 1,000 of them and it emerged that they hadn't been. They'd just been released without even being assessed for deportation. And it eventually led to Charles Clark being sacked at a reshuffle and being replaced by John Reed, who felt that as a new broom he had to come in and sort of brush away some of the nonsense that had gone on before. And to do that, he came up with this phrase, which we now know was David's invention.
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B
And he was at a select committee, wasn't he, being quizzed by MPs about why do things keep going wrong in the Home Office?
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E
With me sat beside him, yes, trying to rearrange my face as he described all 70,000 civil servants in the Home Office as not fit for purpose.
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A
In the wake of the problems of mass migration that we have been facing, 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, or the system that's been inherited from an age that came before it. And that is an attempt that's been made by both parties. And my predecessors have introduced, I think, very meaningful reforms, technical nature of a legal nature, through legislation of resources. But my own view is that we are in the state of transition from a paper based system that was not designed for the problems we're facing towards a technologically based system that seems to be in a horizon that never gets any nearer.
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E
That was a difficult moment. And the civil servant said to me, well, why don't you stand up and tell him it's not true? The trouble was, it was true because you said it.
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C
Yeah.
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E
I should just add one thing. It was a phrase about the immigration, asylum system and department. It was heard as being about the whole of the Home Office. It was about. And of course, the problems that Danny referred to were. I mean, I'm in a cold sweat already thinking about those times. I'd been in the Home Office two months and here was the example of the Home Office not functioning, the prison service releasing these foreign national prisoners and the Immigration Department not doing anything.
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A
And the Home Office still had responsibility for prisoners at that point.
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E
It did. And these people were lost and we didn't know how many they were and we didn't know where they were.
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C
Hannah, hearing those reflections from 20 years ago, then fast forwarding to your time, sort of 15 years on from that, and that sense of dysfunctionality at various levels or in some parts of the Home Office's sort of pool of responsibilities, how much of it from your experience was because of the nature of how things were set up or just the magnitude of what that department is dealing with all the time.
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D
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm in a cold sweat too. I've got PTSD coming back from my time there. But the complexity of the types of issues we're talking about from immigration, asylum to national security, on any one given day all manner of things are going wrong. And you know, I think it was Jack Straw who said there's a group of officials working somewhere in the department who is about to kill your political career. They don't know who they are and you don't know who they are either. And that is absolutely how I felt when I was in there. And you know, people are working incredibly hard and I think it's important to get, to get that across. But the systems and the structure is not set up to help people succeed and in part that is due to talent and people being in the right places and the way the system is set up. But that's also in part to the legal frameworks that we, that people are working within. It's a results driven business and at the moment the media events, everything going on makes it incredibly hard to actually show the public what we're doing, being what's being delivered.
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B
So what's so bad about the structures then? The way it's set up?
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D
There is so much going on and so many competing priorities, you don't have time to think. There is I think a lack of focus on the long term because if you don't deal with the next 10, 15, 20, 24 hours, you're not going to survive. And that goes I think for as much as politicians as it does civil servants. The amount of risk that people are carrying in there makes it incredibly, incredibly difficult. The types of things I'd like to see would be more of a focus on sorting out the commercial side of it. Better technology, more efficiency. I'm not insistent.
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B
So it's actually quite old fashioned.
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D
I think you'd be, and listeners would be really surprised to learn that yes, in parts of it it is incredibly old fashioned.
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C
In what sense?
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D
Well, you know, some things are still paper based and part tech, part paper based and things don't move as quickly and you know, we're entering an AI revolution now and a new kind of new world and I think it would be great if government and you know, not just the home office could adapt and change and innovate to help become more efficient. But I think, you know, I've said I'm not a fan of moving deck chairs but I think tech talent integration and communication within the home office could be, could be stronger if, could I
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E
just add, if you look at what John Reed said, he Talked about in 2006 about the inadequacy of it, of leadership, of management, of systems and processes which Is in fact what you're saying now, which is rather sad. Now. I thought that I had made some progress in the Home Office trying to put that right. And there are some signs that things got better and then they got worse. And I think it is about the seriousness and sometimes the scale of the issues and the way they come at you and the fragility of the Home Office's systems, processes, legal frameworks, management, leadership. So very often the Home Office is behind the issue rather than ahead of it. And if you go right back to the beginning to about 2,000, 2001, when suddenly asylum seeking took off, the Home Office has been chasing that problem ever since.
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D
I completely agree. And I think, you know, looking at it now, in the kind of business world, you wouldn't expect a CEO, a Home Secretary or Permanent Secretary to be the media spokesperson, the long term strategy thinker, the parliamentary representative and I think the media and the 24hour news cycle and no offense guys, has, has changed that and has made it a different game. And it's incredibly hard for people in that hot seat now to stop focusing on the day to day and to actually think longer term.
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B
I mean, it's interesting. One of the themes that emerges from all of that to me, Danny, is almost it's a bit like an emergency service.
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A
Yeah. When there's a terror attack, when there's civil disorder, it's the Home Office that has to respond in some way or is seen to be the sort of the representative of the government response. So it's dealing with that firefighting. There are probably lots of little fires that we don't even get to hear about that I'm sure would come across David's desk and Hannah's desk on a daily basis. But at the same time it's got these huge transformation projects. For example, the Home Office at the moment that you probably don't even know about, but I had a quick look at the books. They've got three massive billion pounds projects. The Emergency Service network, which is replacing Airwave, which is the way that the emergency services, the police, fire and ambulance communicate. That is ten years behind schedule. Ten years behind schedule. It's billions and billions that's costing. There's a replacement for the police national computer called Leads that is six years out of date. It's meant to be delivered in 2020. The Home Office biometrics program is meant to be delivered in 2019, seven years behind schedule. Those are three projects, probably haven't heard of them or heard much about them. They are being carried by the Home Office at the moment, they're the responsibility. Now, what does it tell you about that department that those programs are so behind schedule and particularly in the emergency service network, massively over budget tells you there's something systemically wrong with that department.
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E
For me, we shouldn't accept such poor performance. It's not inevitable. But what everybody is saying, and I agree with, is that you're always, when you're leading the Home Office, balancing operational things, things that are happening day to day, trying to find time for long term policy and trying to find time for the leadership of very big programmes. And very often it's the very big programs that take low priority because politically, yes, they're less pressing, but they're less pressing. There's always a reason for putting them back.
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C
I know the delay is necessarily a bad thing if you get to the point that when you implement them, they actually work as opposed to it.
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E
They don't, they often don't work. They often don't work very well. Airwave is an example of that which didn't work very well and is being replaced with a project that's very late. So, yeah, things have changed or things
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D
have moved on in a 10 year program.
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E
Yes, exactly.
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D
As David said, behind the curve rather than ahead of it.
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C
Nick Timothy, the now Shadow Justice Secretary, isn't he, but had worked in the Home Office as a special advisor, wrote a report, didn't he, around the functionality or not of the, of the institution and in particular made reference to the relationship between, if you like civil servants behind desks in Whitehall and those who might be running the security operation at Heathrow Airport, for instance, and the extent to which the relationships there are as good as they could be. I wonder if reflections on that, Hannah?
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D
Yeah, I think people tried their best, but traditionally people in the Civil Service are either policy or delivery and in the Home Office you need a happy marriage of both to succeed and particular when it's such results driven business. I think better integration, better communication and more people spending time on the front line would be a good thing.
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A
If you compare it to the police service, by and large, every single police officer in the country has spent two years training on the beat, doing the job of a constable and then risen through the ranks. Now, there are pros and cons to that approach, but certainly one of the advantages is that when they get to be inspector or superintendent or high rank, they know what it's like to do that frontline job and they've got the authority to be able to, you know, give orders and instructions. And lead teams, because they've done it. You know, with all due respect to many civil servants, senior civil servants who are working in Marsham street, where the Home Office is headquartered, they haven't got the experience of being a Border Force officer at the ports or the airports, or working, you know, in the front line, dealing with customers in the visa department or, you know, dealing with complaints about your passport not having arrived on time and so on. And I think Nick Timothy talks about that disconnect and also there's, I think, a kind of a salary disconnect as well.
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E
They are different roles and they're equally important. I think it is true that there aren't enough people in senior positions in the Home Office who have come up through, particularly the Immigration Service. And I think there is a bit of a trend of appointing people like me to the senior levels, to the Home Office, who have never worked in the Home Office before. That's partly because those who work in the Home Office get tarred by the latest problems and therefore people say, oh, no, you couldn't possibly put them in charge. And so they bring people in and then those people have to work really hard. I spent weeks, hours trying to understand the immigration system and actually going and sitting with immigration officers to find out what they did. That's what you have to do if you're coming new to the Home Office, as many senior people do.
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C
How extraordinary, though, that acknowledgement, that experience within the building, because it could come with the impression of previous failure, it stands in the way of someone potentially on the Civil Service side leading it.
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E
It can do. It can do, particularly in the Home Office.
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C
There is, though, I suspect newscasters might think that's completely crackers.
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E
Yes, well, that may be crackers, but that is quite often what happens.
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B
I wonder if we should now zoom in on some of these operational things, just so that we can get a bit more of an understanding of how it looks from inside the Home Office. So maybe we should start with immigration. I think most people, when they consume the news, they think of immigration as the numbers either too high or just right or too low, or they look at small boats. How does the immigration system as a whole look from your point of view, when you're in the Home Secretary's office in Marsham street in Westminster? And I know that's a huge question, but I just want to sort of get it, because it must feel very different when you're actually pulling the levers or not.
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D
It feels like a very big problem and a huge weight on your shoulders and I think it's split out really into two sections, which is legal and illegal. And over time those two things have become inflated as we've seen the numbers
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C
grow on the specific and that division, I guess when you were there in the, in the post Brexit era, where the powers around immigration were being onshored, if you like, were being brought back to the UK outside of the European Union, then the questions around legal migration and the political choices, which wash into the discussion right now, don't they, around the. And it's used as a pejorative, isn't it? The quote unquote Boris wave of the big expansion in net legal migration and the political choice around that and the rows that have followed. And I guess you were at the heart of that.
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D
Very much at the heart of that. And I think you're right about political choices. And I think it comes back to a point I made earlier that is the Home Office actually in control of immigration. And I think it's an interesting point because treasury, for example, believe that migration equals growth under the current structures. Many government departments see their equities as visas for success. And what you end up with is a really unhappy experience in government where you're arguing about the visa situation and who should come to our country. If you layer on top of that, what happens, inevitably, events, both domestic and international, you're then having to respond to huge humanitarian crises which naturally demand British help. And so without anyone making really clear, strong political choices in that mix, you end up with more people coming. Now, I would argue that throughout what you're calling the Boris wave, we wouldn't have made any different choices in what we did to support British nationals coming from Hong Kong or BNOs rather, or people coming from Afghanistan or from Ukraine. But we should have taken action sooner on some of the dependents and rules that we'd created within the system. But the intent was always to pull them at the right moment and to have those levers within the system to be able to do so.
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C
It's a classic reflection though, and a really interesting reflection, I think for newscasters on the trade offs within government.
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E
Yeah, and it's really interesting, this legal migration. There are choices and we've just heard about some of those choices that were made subsequently. Rishi Sunak and then this government have made other choices and net migration has plummeted and could be naught. And many of the problems in the Home Office in my time, in your time, stem from the problems of illegal migration or rather asylum seeking, really. That's when the Numbers get out of control and it's very, very difficult to control them, as we see with boats is a good example of the Home Office really struggling to find a way to solve.
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C
And I guess not least because of that perception from, from a voter's perspective of a government that's not in control. It's not gripping something.
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D
You need public consent. And I feel that's something that we've lost now both on the legal and on the legal side, which is. Which is a shame because it's become conflated. And the sad thing for me being in the department was that actually we were able to help less vulnerable people because of the illegal streams of people coming via small boat. And, you know, the British public's generosity might be limitless, but the state's support
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E
isn't, because illegal migration is a reflection on a government that doesn't seem to have control of something that is fundamental to the state. Controlling your borders ought to be a fundamental matter. And the public rightly say, well, why hasn't the government got control? I think the small boats has really challenged that because it's very difficult to know how to stop them.
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B
But, Danny, as a seasoned observer of the Home Office and the immigration system, how different was the small boats phenomenon from other migration challenges? I mean, I'm thinking about when there was a huge wave of asylum seekers from the Balkans and it was in the headlines every single single day. What's Tony Blair going to do about the huge asylum backlog from the Balkans? I'm just wondering how different is small boats from. From, say that that was it.
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A
That was a difficult crisis for the Blair government. I mean, the numbers, asylum seekers, I think, exceeded a hundred thousand one year and it took, you know, some years before they came down. And even though the numbers, you know, 40,000, 45,000, I think in the worst year are a fraction of the numbers coming in legally when net migration hit 900,000 a few years ago. Even though it's a fraction of those numbers, it's those images that are so emblematic of a system that doesn't have control.
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E
And it's fundamentally different now from 2001 onwards because they were coming in lorries, under trains, they were coming through recognizable points where you could put a barrier. The French allowed us to move our borders to Cocail and to Calais, where lots of equipment was installed so you could find people under lorries. People. One of the reasons they're going into small boats is because people don't come so much under lorries in trains now. And of Course, the border is everywhere with small boats. You can just run down a beach and get in a boat, whereas that wasn't the case in 2001. So the government did get it under control eventually in 2001. One thing that happened was when I went to the home office in 2006, there was a backlog as a result of this problem of 450,000 cases undealt, with which it took five years to deal with, but we did.
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B
And how did you grapple with that? What was the magic solution?
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E
There was no magic solution except to put in place a very large team of people, very well led, working through that backlog year after year to process the claims. To process the claims and to find the people. One thing we haven't talked about, even when there's legal migration, people overstay. There probably are a million or more people in the country who've just overstayed. Nobody knows where they are or what they're doing. A lot of the time, once their people are in, they very often stay, which is another problem for the Home Office trying to find them.
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B
Well, and do we have a version of ice?
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E
Well, sort of, but not like ice.
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B
I mean, deliberately dramatic with my rhetoric.
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E
We have teams of people who go out and try and say that.
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A
But there was huge criticism under John Reed and you were probably the Permanent Secretary when Reid came in, he really toughened up the immigration stance.
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E
They don't have guns.
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A
From Charles Clark. They didn't have guns, but they started detaining people who had been here for years, in some cases whose visas had expired or who didn't have the right to stay. And some of the cases went to court and there was huge uproar around that. So obviously not what we're seeing in America right now. But there was very tough enforcement and actually that was the start of the hostile environment. It actually started under labour pre2010.
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D
But culturally, I think you've got to make sure that your decisions are right. And now the stakes for something going wrong and removing someone that you ought not to have are incredibly difficult. And so I think on the one hand, now post Wendy Williams operating in that context, and now the rise of
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B
you into the windrush.
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D
Exactly. I think we're at a really interesting tipping point. Where does that public consent lie and does the speed of removing people matter most to people?
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C
And then there's the. To rewind to an observation you were making collectively 10, 15 minutes ago, around the extent to which the Department has the capacity to get ahead of problems rather than Purely reacting to them. It gets us into the discussion, doesn't it, of recent years around the Rwanda scheme proposed by the previous government and whether or not the viability or otherwise of anticipate looking at a problem now, anticipating where it might go, I guess in the context of climate change and conflict and the capacity for people to see a richer world on their smartphones. And countries like the UK contemplating radical different solutions to illegal migration, but then encountering issues around consent or issues with the courts. And whether or not what we saw with the last government's attempts around Rwanda, and I'm interested in all your reflections on this, are an example of something that is likely to recur where other governments in the future tie with schemes broadly similar or that have parallels or not. That just being an example of one of those things where a department perhaps attempts, rightly or wrongly, to get ahead of a problem, but then encounters its own problems and it doesn't happen.
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D
Yeah, I would say that was an example where we really did try to get ahead of the problem and to be ahead of the curve, only to be thwarted at the final hour.
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B
Well, every hour, basically.
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D
Well, yes. I remember sitting there, 10:30 at night. Is the plane going to go? Is the plane not going to go?
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C
So was I. I was on a balcony in front of a camera looking at that exact plane.
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D
Exactly that and the Rule 39 JUDG coming down. In fact, I still have to stop myself calling it Country X, because this was going on in secret for 18 months, even before it was announced.
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A
It was really pretty Patel's baby, wasn't it?
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D
Well, yes, it was something that we had come up with really as a result of seeing and being in the department and not seeing a way out of this problem. And I think we saw early on that we needed to try and rebuild public trust and consent around the illegal migration problem. And really, in our mind, having a deterrent was only the way that you were going to really do that. In combination with making changes to our
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C
legal framework at the time, we can make this work. Or did you anticipate at the outset it was quite likely to run into the sand?
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D
We knew that it would be difficult, but it can work. I think the thing you have to remember is that the Overton window on this issue has shifted so far to the right.
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C
In other words, sort of what people are willing to pit.
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D
Exactly what people are willing to accept. And I would say Rwanda has now become the baseline policy. At the time, there was a lot of opposition towards it, and understandably, because it wasn't something that people had really got on their radar as something that needed to happen. And that goes for both the Conservative Party as well as the opposition, as well as the public. And I think it's a shame now, because what you're seeing is a recycle almost of the types of things that were included in the immigration bill back then coming to fruition. Things like visa penalties and military sites. For me, it's going full circle. And if only, you know, it's the job of the opposition to oppose. But I think in some instances where there's clear, you know, a national security imperative to act, it would be great if politicians could come together a bit sooner to find out.
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C
And, Danny, this is where your journalistic career had morphed into prior to the last general election. Working for Yvette Cooper, the then Shadow Home Secretary, preparing and anticipating the prospect that she would become Home Secretary in the event of Labour winning the election. And Labour having a very strong view in opposition about what they saw as the unviability and vast expense of the Rwanda scheme.
- [31:29]
A
Yeah, I don't think I would have gone to work for Yvette if their position had been, well, we're going to accept the Rwanda scheme, or we think it might work. Because my view was that it would never work. I thought it was ridiculous. I also thought it didn't feel right from a sort of moral point of view. It felt like we were sort of.
- [31:48]
C
What was ridiculous about it? I take that people will have different moral views about it, but what was ridiculous in your view about it, because
- [31:53]
A
to operationalise it, to get everything absolutely right so that you're going to remove large numbers of people there, you know, is an incredibly logistically difficult process. You've also got the prospect of legal challenges, which we saw. And when I started working for a vets team and having conversations with people who were in the know about it, their view was you might get a planeload of people off, you might get one, but that'll be it. It would just be so hard to get it at scale. And these are people who really understood the issues. Okay, they're not campaigners. There would be people who really understood the issues. And so I just thought, this is not going to happen. I mean, and our stance was we were fighting every single day in opposition. And, you know, our stance was really not to say, oh, they'll never get a plane off, but to say, well, you might get a few people to go, but it's not going to work. You need to get thousands. And while they're waiting to go, where are you going to put them? Because they're not being processed for asylum. And that was the other flaw. It hadn't really been thought through from that end because basically the government, the then government, was suspending all process of asylum applications. So I just thought the scheme was completely doomed.
- [33:08]
E
I agree with that, actually. I've never been keen on the Rwanda scheme, but I'm sympathetic to the problem that governments face to try to find a deterrent. The missing issue now for the current government is has it got something that is signaling to those people who are over in northern France that they shouldn't come here because they will be quickly
- [33:30]
C
determined and they haven't, have they?
- [33:31]
E
And they haven't. And they've begun to look at things as I understand it. I think the difference between the government's thinking and the Conservative government's thinking is that the Conservative government didn't process the claims, so didn't look at whether people had a genuine claim to refugee status. I think this government would process the claims. But the question is, if you fail to have your asylum claim accepted, what happens to you? And the problem in my time, and still is, you tend to stay rather than get deported.
- [34:07]
B
And also, isn't it the fact that the majority of people get their claims approved?
- [34:10]
E
Well, I think it's come down a bit, but, yes, it's usually more than 50%. It's sometimes up at 70, 75%. Of course, that is partly because a lot of these people have a genuine claim to asylum. And this is the other side.
- [34:24]
B
In other words, you can't have a deterrent because those people are legally, under international law, allowed to claim.
- [34:29]
E
Well, there are. But there are a fair number of people, I don't know what the proportion would be, who are coming across the Channel for economic reasons, not fleeing persecution. They're coming from very poor places where they have miserable lives, but they're not coming because they're being persecuted. And it's to them that there has to be a signal that if they come, they will not be accepted and they will be sent somewhere. Now, that was what the Rwanda scheme was trying to tackle. The question is, what can this government do to find the equivalent without it having something which says everybody who comes across the Channel is going to be illegal? And there's a further problem here, which is we're always looking for a big solution, like let's get out of the ECHR and so on. That's another big solution. If you announce those things and don't follow through on them, you undermine public confidence and public trust in the government's ability even more.
- [35:27]
D
I agree. And I think Rwanda could just quickly
- [35:29]
C
explain something in the European Convention on Human Rights. And that's now a very live political argument, isn't it, with the Conservatives, Andrew form arguing, arguing for withdrawal. Sorry.
- [35:39]
D
And I think it's about doing all of those things in combination having a deterrent to stop people coming. And don't forget, people are paying illegal gangs to come to the UK currently, having legal frameworks that work in the interests of the United Kingdom, having returns agreements with other countries where people, nationals can be returned to their own country.
- [35:57]
B
Yeah, because you can't just put someone on a plane to country Y and say, take this person.
- [36:01]
D
Exactly. And there are lots of nationals now where they can be returned to their country where, where they should be. So Rwanda wasn't seen as the panacea, but it was seen as being part of that contextual solution to move things forward. And I think, you know, if I was Shabana now, I'd be struggling to think actually, what else can I do? And she may actually, I don't know, be thinking about how do I reenact Rwanda?
- [36:22]
A
Well, I think the Rwanda scheme was very damaging for the Home Office because it diverted a huge amount of resource and attention away from other areas. And I think when Labour came in, they saw that, I mean, they immediately redeployed a thousand people into a returns unit, I think, to try and speed up the number of people who returned from the country. You could sense that for the couple of years, while the Rwanda scheme was sort of trying to be operationalized, that so much attention was focused on it. I mean, it must have been so much of your time when Priti Patel was there and then subsequent special advisors for other Home Secretaries. This was the only thing. And of course it was one of a series of measures, but it was seen as the only way to stop the problem. I think what, what labourers try to do is to say there are a number of different measures that we need, a number of different levers that we need to pull to try and address this problem. The missing one obviously is the deterrent. The bit that says if you come here, some not very nice things are going to happen to you, you're going to be removed somewhere, or if your claim fails, you're going to go somewhere you don't want to go. I mean, they're trying to do that with a France one in, one out deal. They're looking at deals with, with the Balkan states where failed Claimants can be sent and so on. But the wider point about the Home Office is I think it's so damaging that so much attention got sucked into that doomed project. And the asylum system kind of processing system collapsed during that period of time and other areas were neglected.
- [37:56]
C
Hannah, do you think it could have worked, or indeed would have worked, had the Conservatives time in government lasted, lasted longer, and therefore it wasn't swept away by an incoming alternative government?
- [38:06]
D
Yeah, I respectfully disagree, Danny. I do think it would have worked, and I don't think you would have had to send inordinate amounts of people to send a deterrent effect to the gangs and to the people coming. I think it would have sent a very strong signal about competence. And I think, as you've touched on as well, the grant rate is so high that, you know, we need to find a way of deterring these people from coming, and Rwanda was part of that solution.
- [38:29]
B
Danny used the phrase to describe an earlier Home Office policy, although I'm not sure if it ever the extent to which it was a policy. But this idea of creating a hostile environment. David, what's your understanding of that phrase, hostile environment, and where did that come from?
- [38:43]
E
Well, it was first used, I think, by Liam Byrne, actually, wasn't it, when he was Immigration Minister?
- [38:48]
B
Yeah.
- [38:49]
E
Labour Minister. Yeah. It's interesting, in my mind, when I was leading the Home Office, that phrase hostile environment is not stuck in my mind. But I suppose that, in a sense, was what we were trying to create. I mean, you know, no one can defend what happened to the Windrush generation. It was totally unacceptable and terrible for them.
- [39:11]
B
Basically, if you didn't have the right documents from the 1950s, 60s or 70s, you got sent back to the Caribbean, even if you'd lived here your whole life.
- [39:18]
E
It is a very interesting reflection, though, on what the Home Office is like. It is dealing with hundreds of thousands of people, and therefore it is very difficult. But it ought to be the case that there is some individual consideration of cases. But when you get to those sorts of numbers, you're very often, in a sense, dealing with them as cohorts of people and applying the same rules to them without individualizing the decision. I think that's why so many decisions that the Home Office takes in various parts of the system get challenged in the courts. And it's certainly the case that some of the Windrush people got caught up in these huge numbers of people that the Home Office was trying to process. I don't defend that, but that is what I think happens And I think it is one of the Home Office's problems that sometimes it has to remember that it is dealing with individual people, with individual concerns and needs. That's when the Home Office's decision making gets across the public. The public are very split here. They have two bits of their brain in one bit of the brain. They don't really want these numbers to continue and they want people to be sent home. When they meet groups of refugees or immigrants, they don't want them to be sent home because they're often people who they like and who they can relate to. And so it's quite possible, and I experienced this myself, to be berate for the Home Office's failings, both to fail to deport people and to deport people you can have, and the same people can do both.
- [40:58]
B
Right. We could spend another hundred hours talking about immigration and I'd happily do that. But let's talk about another operational area, which is the police. Hannah, when you're sat in the Home Office, how responsible do you feel for the police? Because the fact is there are more than 40 police forces in England alone.
- [41:14]
D
Yeah.
- [41:15]
B
The Home Office isn't actually directly in charge of.
- [41:17]
D
Of each one of them, fortunately not directly in charge of each one. I imagine if that was also on the roster of things to do. I think the thing with policing is that police are operationally independent. So actually, from the Home Secretary's Office, you don't feel directly accountable and responsible to them, but certainly you are really interested in terms of what's going on when it comes to big cases that are going on or big things that are happening and on the ground, certain things can suddenly snowball that become then very politically relevant in relation to the police, which that is then when you are sort of eyeballs with the Commissioner to say, what's going on? How can we work together to solve it? But I do think that relationship of independence is really important and one that all Home Secretaries respect.
- [42:00]
B
And actually, Danny, one of the themes of the David Cameron years was giving even more independence to the police, or not so much giving more independence to the police, but giving away responsibility for the police from the Home Office. Because we invented these new police and crime commissioners. For example, there was a whole period
- [42:15]
A
of time between 2010 and, you know, probably 2018, 19 was certainly when Boris Johnson came in, when the Home Office stepped back from policing and a number of sort of centrally imposed targets were reduced and they, you know, said to local police and crime commissioners, which were introduced in 2012 by the conservatives. Right. You've got responsibility for your police forces. When things go wrong, you, you know, you carry the. Can you take the decisions, you set the strategy, the budgets. We're stepping back from that now. You know, there are different views as to whether that's worked or not, but this government has decided to scrap PCCs and is leaning into policing more. And there was no better example of that than very recently when Shobana Mahmood said that she was going to be taking back powers to require the dismissal of chief constables following the West Midlands controversy over the Maccabi Tel Aviv Aston Villa match. And that was, you know, direct demonstration of the Home Office, you know, wanting to lean back into policing. And we've now got a police white paper, you know, with that as well, with more Home Office control and performance targets and so on, and potentially merging
- [43:26]
B
some police forces, which, Chris, as you always say, is the first time you covered the Home Office in the old days.
- [43:31]
C
Yeah. And the sort of recurrence 20 years on, of a debate that was happening, what, back in 2006, when the then Labour government had this idea of. Of merging police forces in England, didn't it? And. And there was a huge hullabaloo and a row and argument, and then in the end, it didn't happen. And here we are, 30 years later,
- [43:48]
E
it was Charles Clark who was very keen on merging them. And then when John Reed took over from him, he decided there was too much happening, it was too controversial. There's enough problems in the Home Office without trying to merge the police as well. I have to say the police were both keen on the idea in 2006, but not keen on actually doing it. So Charles Clark gave them the option of deciding which forces should merge with which, and they were incapable of deciding that. You can see why, but they were. And so individual turkeys weren't prepared. And so my advice is that if you want to do it, you need to tell. You need to draw the map and actually tell them who's going to.
- [44:31]
A
I think that's what they're doing. I think that's what they're going to do.
- [44:34]
D
The.
- [44:34]
E
The other thing about. And I was there again in 2010 when Theresa May began to implement the police and Crime Commissioners. We had some very interesting discussions about that. I mean, it was in the manifesto, so it was going to happen. But I said, you will not be able to escape accountability for things that go wrong. It'll be fine.
- [44:56]
C
You'll still get the blame.
- [44:57]
E
You'll still get the blame. And I think that's why this Government has decided we're not going to carry on with police and crime commissioners. I slightly regret that because I think devolution of responsibility is a good thing generally across government. But I can see why, having been in the Home Office, you get the worst of all worlds with police and crime commissioners.
- [45:14]
C
But to return to our theme about how the department tries to, over time, be ahead of coming problems rather than behind. We read, don't we, about how crime is changing and how much, say, like online fraud, for instance, is so dominant now in the. In the crime statistics. And I guess back to that point we were talking about a few minutes ago about people. I can hold contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time that I'm sure many a newscaster would be delighted to hear about. You know the old phrase bobby on the beat. And yet, if the kind of crime map is moving into a cyber space, is that the right model for.
- [45:50]
E
Well, you need both, because the crime is also moving to shoplifting. That's essentially very local. And I think the government is actually trying to. Shibana Mahmoud is actually trying to redesign the police service so that in addition to reshaping. So there's. Yes, there's neighbourhood policing, you reshape forces, so they're larger, but you also have a national police service.
- [46:10]
B
The right policing happens at the right level.
- [46:12]
E
At the right level.
- [46:13]
D
And I think as well, like policing by consent, people need to touch and be able to see their police officer and they need to have that interaction. And that's really important for them, building community trust and where there are problems, helping to resolve them in that area without them escalating back up to the Home Secretary.
- [46:29]
A
You make a very good point about fraud. Fraud is the most prevalent crime. The figures show that. And yet in the Home Office, it's actually comes under. This is the point made by Nick Timothy in his report. Fraud and cybercrime comes under the Homeland Security group rather than the public safety group, which is where other crimes come under. Now, that says to me that there's something not quite right around priorities in the Home Office and the way that's constructed. I'm sure there are some very good officials working in that group who are overseeing fraud policy and so on, but surely it is core crime, isn't it? And it's the most prevalent crime.
- [47:06]
B
And that might seem like quite a subtle distinction, but actually, in a big organization, those sort of things really matter. One other thing I've never quite understood in all my years of covering this is what is the right number of police officers to have or is it just whatever the Prime Minister at the time wants to announce? Because it sounds good. Is there a way of thinking about just how many police officers we need, David?
- [47:26]
E
No.
- [47:27]
B
Right. So it's a very political thing there.
- [47:30]
E
Yes. I mean, it's obviously related to the operational effectiveness of the police, but it would be invariably the case that the police had a different view of what they needed from the Home Office.
- [47:39]
B
But Hannah, one of the huge things in the pretty Patel Boris Johnson era was they called it the uplift program, didn't they? Recruiting tens of thousands of new officers.
- [47:46]
D
Yeah, I hear 20,000 is a great
- [47:48]
A
number because that's the number of police officers, officers that were cut under the Conservatives austerity years and that the Boris
- [47:54]
B
Johnson voted to replace.
- [47:55]
A
Replaced.
- [47:56]
D
Well, it was a police uplift program that we were putting in place and certainly that was there to again connect people back to their communities and with police officers and to, you know, put Bobby's back on the beat. And, you know, that program was actually very successful and rolled out well.
- [48:12]
B
There's one area of operational work in the Home Office we haven't really talked about and maybe that's because it's quite secret or maybe because actually it sort of works most of the time. Counterterrorism.
- [48:21]
A
I mean, I think it's probably the one area of the Home Office that works really well, the Homeland Security Group. I'm sure Hannah can speak more to this, but.
- [48:29]
B
Or maybe she can.
- [48:31]
E
Yes.
- [48:32]
D
Sorry guys, can't say anything.
- [48:33]
A
But in general terms, I think this was remodeled 2007 under Charles Farle, John Reed really and John Reed, and you've got, you know, a specialist team of officials who are working there closely with MI5 and working Scotland Yard counterterrorism Department. And it's the one area that you don't hear complaints about that is not dysfunctional.
- [49:02]
E
And what happened in 2007 was that the Home Office was clearly in the lead on domestic terrorist threat and under an extremism. And at that time there was the Office of Security and Counterterrorism set up every Thursday morning. We used to have a meeting in the Home Office with everyone involved with counter terrorism across Whitehall. And that was a statement that this was a cross Whitehall issue and that the Home Office was in the lead and it really stepped up the focus on prevention. And I think it was a big turning point that has continued. I think it's been one of the most successful areas. It's a very interesting example of that Home Office doing the right thing and getting it right. So it can happen.
- [49:47]
D
Yeah. And that meeting still happens. So it's a very important meeting that happens usually Thursday morning with the Director General of my five, and I would agree, I think it's the most advanced area and system within the department and it functions really well because it communicates effectively with the system and escalates issues and knowledge and information very well. And it's a real shame when there is a crisis and when there is a terror event. But you have confidence in that system when it does happen, that it will work well and you will get the information you need.
- [50:17]
C
Which then makes me wonder what about the operational structures, the personnel, the setup in that part of the department's responsibilities could be a learning point for the other elements where we've discussed dysfunctionality.
- [50:32]
E
But it's a completely different area in terms of the numbers you need and the focus you have and the Cross Whitehall working. I don't think you can read across many issues from counterterrorism to immigration asylum, except the need to have very good people leading those functions with operational knowledge.
- [50:54]
B
One of the things that whenever you meet somebody who's worked with Home Secretaries, the thing they say that takes up all their time and takes up weird times. Warrantry, just explain what's going on with the warrants.
- [51:09]
D
So that's a process whereby the Home Secretary signs off the warrants that the police or NCA want to.
- [51:16]
C
National Crime Agency.
- [51:17]
D
Exactly, the National Crime Agency. And you're right, that is a huge part of the job and that's where the line of accountability is really key and the transparency of what's going on. So, yeah, I mean, on some days, and sorry to say, there are some bad people in the world, you know, upwards of 50 warrants. And that's another part of the puzzle that the Home Secretary is juggling in any given day to squeeze in the signing of those, to read those, and naturally they're prioritized. But it means that other things shift, meetings shift, long term, priorities shift and you're being buffeted by events consistently, effectively,
- [51:50]
E
there's ones who are giving permission to MI5 to do stuff, eavesdropping, breaking in, probably. And we should be reassured that there is a political person overseeing that function, which wouldn't be the case in many
- [52:05]
C
countries, and therefore there's accountability if things go wrong, etc.
- [52:08]
E
Etc. Yes, yeah. And therefore Home Secretaries have to give priority to them.
- [52:11]
D
I'll give you an example. We're talking about the long term strategy of the immigration asylum system and the meeting is suspended within 10 minutes because the Home Secretary urgently needs to read 10 warrants and of course you resume. But the way the Home Secretary's diary works is that you never quite get that time back.
- [52:28]
A
That strikes me as a really ineffective way of running a department. I have to be honest. I mean, I agree with the accountability and I agree that there should be a Minister signing off these really intrusive techniques that are used by MI5 or by counterterrorism policing, but to suspend really important strategy meetings about immigration and asylum because of that just doesn't seem to.
- [52:50]
E
You could devolve it to a more junior Minister. I don't think you could devolve it beyond the Security Minister.
- [52:55]
D
Yeah, Sometimes, obviously, the meetings go back in and you do them, but I guess I'm trying to get across the buffeting of events that are happening throughout the day. And. And for me, I think that connection between the services and the Home Secretary and the accountability is really important. And certainly the ones that were coming to her when I were, they're not that I saw them, but they were very serious indeed and would have needed a Home Secretary approval.
- [53:18]
A
But it seems to me, as there's so many competing priorities in this humongous department, it's over 50,000 people working in the Home Office now, that I think it needs a radical restructure and I think that's a really good example of how that's not working. Someone, very senior, senior politicians has to sign off these warrants, but they shouldn't be interrupting really important immigration and asylum meetings, which is also massively important to do it.
- [53:44]
E
Maybe. But I think in any government department, perhaps more so in the Home Office, there is this conflict between the urgent and the immediate and the important long term.
- [53:55]
C
And then I guess the bigger picture question, which is that I find myself thinking, given that we've been reflecting on 20 odd years of reporting on the Home Office, what likelihood there would be of a newscast of the mid-2040s asking exactly these same set of questions, and whether that's just inevitable and we should accept that, or it's somehow depressing.
- [54:15]
E
We should counter some of the depressing things we said by saying that there are times when things go right, actually from for about 10 years, between 2006, 2016, asylum seeking got under control, the processing of asylum claims was under control. It wasn't until the boats came along that the whole thing went pear shaped.
- [54:40]
A
And I'd also say the Passport Office works exceptionally well, which was a disaster. Always. There have been times when there have been terrible delays and problems, but it worked exceptionally well.
- [54:49]
B
And, Danny, just a tricky question question for you to end on, the allegation that is leveled at this government is that they didn't do enough to prepare for being in government. You were involved in that process with Yvette Cooper. What's your take on that claim?
- [55:02]
A
I think the focus was winning the election. Win the election, Win the election, Win the election. And that was where most of the energy went. Obviously, there were some preparations for government. There were some good policies that have been developed and I think the immigration policy was one of them. There was a really good immigration white paper last year, because a lot of the work can be done in opposition, but in too many areas, there hadn't been enough time given to thinking. Police reform is one example. You know, when I was there working with Yvette Cooper and her team, we had a few meetings about it. There were a few papers circulating, but no decisions were made. So the government would have had to start from scratch thinking about police reform when it came in. And I think that was replicated in other areas as well, because Labour just wanted to win this bloody election and get past the line. And so the focus was on the campaign, the manifesto retail offers, rather than the deep strategic thinking about preparing for government.
- [56:01]
B
One last question for all of you and I'll give you some time to think about this, because I'm putting you on the spot. What is one thing you would love members of the public, listeners to podcasts, to know about the Home Office that would help them understand it a little bit more, and which is quite underappreciated. Give us a killer fact about the Home Office.
- [56:19]
A
It's three times the size of the Department for Transport. In my view, it's too big and it needs to be broken up.
- [56:26]
C
That's a bit of a curveball in the last conference that I would say.
- [56:31]
D
It's a bit like being trapped in a Candy Crush game where you're trying to stop the tiles getting to the bottom and if you survive the day, then you win the game. I think, yeah, the buffeting in there is quite extreme.
- [56:44]
E
When it's going well, it's protecting the nation against the bad guys out there. And when it's going well, it can control migration and it can control asylum seeking. It can do it if you have the right people, politicians and civil servants in charge. And you also take note of the operational experience that is deep in the Home Office. It can be done. We shouldn't despair over it.
- [57:12]
B
And do you reckon it will end up getting split up into other departments, like people constantly say, well, it might
- [57:17]
E
do, but so tell me when a reorganisation of government actually solved a problem. Very, very rarely. I think you can point to one or two, but very, very rarely. If you want to spend the next two or three years reorganising government, then I'll guarantee that you won't get on top of the asylum problem.
- [57:34]
D
Don't let machinery of government be an excuse for changing the talent and tech and operational functions of the department.
- [57:42]
B
Well, thank you very much to you 3. Hope you agree this podcast has definitely been fit for purpose for understanding how the Home Office works. Danny, thank you.
- [57:49]
A
Oh it's been a pleasure David.
- [57:51]
B
Thanks to you.
- [57:51]
E
Thank you. I won't use that not fit for purpose phrase ever again.
- [57:55]
B
Albatross around your neck. Hannah, thanks to you as well.
- [57:57]
D
Thanks so much.
- [58:07]
B
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and that is all for this first episode of this newscast miniseries about the Home Office.
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C
On episode two, we will hear from two former home secretaries. So people who have actually done the job at the top of this department, which should be fascinating and that episode
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B
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E
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- [60:59]
D
Newscast, newscast from the BBC from one newscaster to another, thank you so much for making it to the end of this episode. You clearly do, in the words of Chris Mason, ooze stamina. Can I also gently encourage you to see subscribe to us on BBC Sounds. Tell everyone you know and don't forget, you can email us anytime@newscastbc.co.uk or if you're that way inclined, send us a WhatsApp on +4403301239480 be assured, I promise we listen to everyone.
- [61:48]
B
Dear Friday, Toyota says let's put good times in gear with the tundra Tacoma and 4Runner. Want some cool available features? We've got power tailgates to power game days and a trailer backup guide that's the champ of the ramp. Heck, we might even cancel money day. Toyota trucks find yours@toyota.com Toyota let's go places.