The ‘Not Fit For Purpose’ Department - Part 2

Summary

---

Newscast: The ‘Not Fit For Purpose’ Department - Part 2

Date: April 4, 2026
Hosts: Adam Fleming, Chris Mason
Guests: Charles Clarke (Home Secretary, 2004–2006, Labour), Amber Rudd (Home Secretary, 2016–2018, Conservative)

---

Overview

In the second installment of Newscast's mini-series on the Home Office, hosts Adam Fleming and Chris Mason invite two former Home Secretaries—Charles Clarke (Labour) and Amber Rudd (Conservative)—to reflect on the challenges of leading one of Britain’s most complex and scrutinized departments. Through candid discussion, they offer personal insights into immigration policy, the weight of the Home Secretary’s office, policing, and the unending label of being a "former" Home Secretary. This episode digs behind the headlines to reveal the realities, dilemmas, and unintended consequences that underpin UK Home Office policy and administration.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Lasting Identity of a Home Secretary

• Both Rudd and Clarke reflect on how the label "former Home Secretary" sticks with them, even years after leaving office.
  • "Of all the jobs I’ve done of various kinds, it dominates people’s thinking. The Home Office is almost a mythical role..." – Charles Clarke [03:17]
  • Amber Rudd notes she is still regularly introduced by her former title despite the many changes of personnel since her tenure. [03:06]

The Home Office’s Role and Perception

• Clarke argues the Home Secretary embodies society’s desire for order, explaining the enduring public focus.
  • "Everybody who believes in order in society... sees the Home Office role as central to achieving that order." – Charles Clarke [04:04]
• The phrase "great office of state" is often used by the public, though many don’t fully grasp the specifics.
  • "The Home Office is the big one at home, which sometimes feels more relevant than foreign." – Amber Rudd [04:37]

Personal Impact: Security and Responsibility

• Both guests describe the jarring transition to constant security and the immense responsibilities unique to the Home Office versus other departments.
  • "You have full-time protection officers wherever you go. It takes some adjusting." – Amber Rudd [05:15]
  • Clarke shares the gravity of decisions like potentially ordering a fighter jet to shoot down a plane in a terrorist crisis:
    • "That decision has to be taken by an elected politician and the Home Secretary ends up being the person who does it." – Charles Clarke [05:51]
  • Rudd recounts her training on these dire scenarios, joking about party differences:
    • "I find the Lib Dems surprisingly quick on the trigger, ma’am." – Amber Rudd quoting her trainer [06:17]

Immigration: Reality and Reckonings

• EU Expansion and Transitional Controls

  • Clarke reflects on Labour's decision not to implement transitional controls for new EU states, maintaining that the real issue is control rather than numbers.
    • "People’s concern about how you govern immigration. It’s not actually the numbers, I believe; it’s control." – Charles Clarke [08:45]
  • Rudd disagrees about the consequences, arguing the lack of controls contributed to Brexit-related anxiety:
    • "The feedback I got for many years on opposition to staying in the EU was based on that original large number that came over." – Amber Rudd [09:24]
  • Both discuss Labour's underestimation of numbers and missed opportunities in community integration and public spending.
    • "We've had high levels of immigration, overall good for the economy. But the benefit, the extra money, has not gone to the public services that have felt squeezed as a result." – Amber Rudd [11:59]

• Complexity of the Immigration System

  • Clarke describes the labyrinthine, legalistic procedures, and the problem of backlogged asylum cases:
    • "Rooms... full of cases which had not been looked at for five years. A massive system of people just in limbo." – Charles Clarke [14:02]
  • Rudd details responding to humanitarian pressures (e.g., Calais Child Refugee Crisis) and the critical importance of cross-channel cooperation with France.
  • The challenge: legal versus illegal immigration, ensuring legitimacy, and responding to both humanitarian and community concerns. [16:18]
    • "If you're going to have any sort of conviction as a Home Secretary, you have to hold the borders secure." – Amber Rudd [17:17]

• Cross-Departmental & International Dynamics

  • Clarke and Rudd highlight tension within government: economic needs (NHS, agriculture, etc.) vs. public concern about numbers/“control.”
    • "You have to say, we want a growing economy in this field. What is the trade-off between getting migrants in..." – Charles Clarke [19:25]
  • Rudd observes the unpredictability of migration outcomes, especially with family members and skilled-worker visas. [21:04]
  • Both stress that UK migration policy cannot function in isolation from European and international agreements and relationships.
    • "You can only govern immigration in alliance with your neighbouring countries... You have to work with the others." – Charles Clarke [17:23]

The Home Office as “Emergency Service”

• Clarke recounts advice from the permanent secretary and Tony Blair that the Home Office is “the most difficult department in government” because crises are frequent and unpredictable.
  • "You can't operate on that basis. We've got to say we can predict all of these things happening..." – Charles Clarke [22:18]
• Rudd describes the "under siege" feeling during the 2017 terror attacks. [23:18]

Policing: Powers and Limitations

• Rudd emphasizes the principle that Home Secretaries cannot interfere operationally with police actions.
  • "You don’t have control because the whole principle is that a politician should not have any operational control." – Amber Rudd [23:59]
  • Instead, the Home Secretary’s influence is exerted through agenda-setting, funding, and support.
• Clarke criticizes the move to Police and Crime Commissioners as undermining operational independence, welcoming current moves to reverse this.
  • "I think the key principle is the operational independence of the police. I think that was massively badly damaged by the establishment of Police and Crime Commissioners..." – Charles Clarke [25:27]

Accountability, “Not Fit For Purpose”, and Departmental Culture

• The cliché that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose” is rejected by both:
  • "I think it has no value to say... a generic, dismissive phrase ‘not fit for purpose’ I think teaches you nothing." – Charles Clarke [30:26]
  • "Some of the people I worked with in the Home Office were some of the best I have ever worked with." – Amber Rudd [30:58]
• Both call for greater honesty from politicians about what’s possible—and impossible—in immigration and Home Office work.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Home Office label
  • "The Home Office is almost a mythical role in terms of the development of the British society and the British state. Misunderstood, actually." – Charles Clarke [03:17]
• On rapid, high-stake decisions
  • "That decision has to be taken, and our democracy insists... that decision has to be taken by an elected politician." – Charles Clarke [05:51]
  • "I find the Lib Dems surprisingly quick on the trigger, ma’am." – Amber Rudd recounting an anecdote from counterterror training [06:17]
• On the emotional burden of the office
  • "You do constantly, I find, look at what’s going on in certain areas that you covered." – Amber Rudd [06:57]
• On policy complexity and political reality
  • "People aren’t very easy to put into a spreadsheet and behave as you would like them to do." – Amber Rudd [20:56]
• On immigration system as viewed from the top
  • "You’d go mad if you were having to then analyze every permutation…" – Adam Fleming [21:16]
  • "In an ideal world, like many things in government, you would say, let’s tear it all up and start again and have the policy... but it is a very complicated system." – Amber Rudd [16:23]
• On Home Office staff
  • "Some of the people I worked with in the Home Office were some of the best I have ever worked with." – Amber Rudd [31:02]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• The identity and gravitas of Home Secretary—[02:44–05:06]
• Security and impossible decisions (counter-terror)—[05:15–06:41]
• How ex-Home Secretaries carry the experience—[06:47–07:06]
• Immigration: EU accession & public anxiety—[07:14–11:45]
• Community and public service strain—[11:45–12:21]
• Inside the complexity of the immigration system—[12:21–16:23]
• International cooperation & setting migration policy—[17:23–18:56]
• Governmental tension and migration economics—[18:56–20:38]
• Home Office as crisis management—[22:14–23:18]
• Policing: operational independence and role limits—[23:35–26:31]
• Reflections on “not fit for purpose” critique—[30:26–31:30]

---

Conclusion

This episode provides a rare window into the realities of being Home Secretary: the responsibility of maintaining public order, the ongoing struggle to balance immigration policy with economic needs and public anxieties, the impossibility of “controlling” everything, and the hard limits of power in areas like policing. Both Rudd and Clarke push back firmly against simplistic, critical narratives of Home Office failure; instead, they call for realistic, transparent conversations about what government can—and cannot—do.

---

Next episode teaser:
Dominic Casciani, the BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent, will delve deeper into how the Home Office works (or doesn’t), and the recurring challenges facing the department.

[34:23] Charles Clarke: "Bye."

---

Transcript

[Adam Fleming]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

[Invest Puerto Rico Advertiser]

Puerto Rico is having a moment of global attention as companies reshore and rethink supply chains. They're choosing a U.S. jurisdiction operating under federal law with competitive tax incentives designed for long term growth, not culture or business. Culture and business. Puerto Rico. It's not what's next, it's where. Visit investpr.org business Spring is calling weddings,

[RK Zero Proof Advertiser]

patio sessions, barbecues and you want that drink vibe without sacrificing tomorrow. That's RK zero proof. As the world's first zero proof spirits brand, RK created the warm molecule, giving you the smooth kick of whiskey or tequila with zero alcohol, zero calories, zero sugar and all the peace of mind you need to enjoy every moment. Step into the Zero Proof season at rk0proof.com

[Adam Fleming]

hello Chris. Should we explain the concept of episode two in our miniseries about the Home Office?

[Chris Mason]

Why not?

[Adam Fleming]

We have invited two former Home Secretaries from different political perspectives to talk about some of the challenges that they faced in their time in office in the hope that that will illuminate what it's a bit like being Home Secretary now.

[Chris Mason]

And there are only Home Secretaries who have or former Home Secretaries who have been either at the point that they were serving Labour politicians or Conservative politicians. But such as the competitive and fluid nature of politics these days, newscasters may spot that there are some former Home Secretaries who are no longer in either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. We did invite Suella Braverman, a former Conservative Home Secretary now in Reform uk onto this episode and the fast forwarded version is that she first said yes and then said no because of some diary issues. So she was invited but couldn't make it.

[Adam Fleming]

But you can hear which former Home Secretaries did turn up in this episode

[RK Zero Proof Advertiser]

of Newscast Newscast, Newscast from the BBC.

[Amber Rudd]

Our system is not fit for purpose.

[Chris Mason]

The Home Office was a graveyard for politicians.

[Invest Puerto Rico Advertiser]

It's not a poisoned chalice, it's a

[Amber Rudd]

three course meal with coffee and dessert. 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.

[Adam Fleming]

Hello from the Newscast studio where Chris and I have been joined by a duo of former Home Secretaries. With us is Charles Clark, who is a Labour home secretary in 2004-2006. Hello, Charles. Hi. And Amber Rudd was home secretary between 2016 and 2018. Hello, Amber.

[Amber Rudd]

Hello, Adam.

[Chris Mason]

I wonder how frequently for both of you, given that it's a while since both of you were Home Secretary, how permanent that label former Home Secretary is. Do you find that people use that frequently when you're being introduced, doing things in your new lives, since that so big a part of your cv, it is that that that kind of former label becomes a permanent one?

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah, I. I get it. I get it referred to quite a lot. But of course, there have been quite a few Home Secretaries since I stepped

[Adam Fleming]

down, let alone since you're a former. Former. Former, exactly.

[Charles Clarke]

The. The label former Conservative Home Secretary can be used by very many people for very short periods of time. People do use it a lot. Of all the jobs I've done of various kinds, it dominates people's thinking. The Home Office is almost a mythical role in terms of the development of the British society and the British state. Misunderstood, actually. And I hope this program will help to get more understanding of it. But so the fact that I held that role, like, exactly like Amber's saying, is something that does get brought up all the time.

[Chris Mason]

And what's under the skin of that? I mean, clearly it's a hugely significant part of what government does, but what is it that gives it that. Well, either the mythical element that you talk about or that sense of. That sense of scale that means that two decades on, it's still a label. You know, that job you did for two years is still a big label. Public biography.

[Charles Clarke]

Everybody who believes in order in society believes that society should be ordered. It should not be anarchic. Seems that it sees the Home Office role as central to achieving that order. So when the Home Office falls over, for whatever reason and there's a disorder, in some sense, people feel very concerned. And I don't know how Amber approached it, but my approach certainly was to try and reestablish that sense of order, because I think people in the society want to have a sense that they live in a society where people know where they stand and so on, which is fair and just. And I think that's the reason why it has such an important role.

[Amber Rudd]

It's interesting, the phrase a great office of state is sort of thrown at me by people who have no idea what that means or how many there are or anything like that. But I think they're vaguely aware that there's the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Prime Minister, and then there's the others. So.

[Adam Fleming]

Chancellor.

[Amber Rudd]

Chancellor, yes, mustn't forget the Chancellor. But I generally. I think they're that interested in that. I think that the public have an awareness of these levers of government. And, you know, the Home Office is the big one at home, which let's face it, sometimes feels more relevant than foreign.

[Adam Fleming]

And also just on a personal level when you're actually in the job. I mean, you have ever present security that you wouldn't have if you were the Secretary of State at DEFRA or Transport?

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah, that's absolutely right. It's an extraordinary transition you make from being a Secretary of State, in my case in energy and Climate change into Home Office and suddenly you have full time protection officers wherever you go. And it takes some adjusting.

[Charles Clarke]

My experience was the same in my case coming from education and I think is understandably so. I mean there are also specific responsibilities I dramatically remember shortly after I was appointed being trained in how to shoot down a plane. Because of the seven, the 911 experience, there has to be somebody who takes

[Adam Fleming]

in the processes you would have to go through to approve that.

[Charles Clarke]

Well, normally it would be the Prime Minister, but the Home Secretary stood in our time. I don't know if it was the same in Amber's time in the event that the Prime Minister for any reason couldn't do it. So an immediate decision had to be taken to shoot down a plane heading for Westminster along the lines of 9 11. That decision has to be taken and our democracy insists, quite rightly, in my opinion, that that decision has to be taken by an elected politician and the Home Secretary ends up being the person who does it.

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah, I did that training and I said to the gentleman who was training us and I was trying not to look shocked at the maps, the instructions and everything else, I said, is there any differ in terms of who shoots first between political parties? And he said, I find the Lib Dems surprisingly quick on the trigger, marm.

[Charles Clarke]

Not surprising. They've never been the Home Office.

[Adam Fleming]

That shows you do need a degree of black humor sometimes because of some of the issues that you're dealing with.

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Adam Fleming]

And also, is it as former Home Secretaries or former former Home Secretaries, can you completely shut the door on the job or is there still a bit of that you carry around with you for the rest of your lives?

[Amber Rudd]

Not to be too pretentious, awkwardly smiling at policemen when I walk past them, which can make them look slightly alarmed but have such sort of sympathy for what they're doing and support for what they're doing that I can't help myself doing that. Yes, you do. Constantly, I find. Look at what's going on in certain areas that you covered.

[Chris Mason]

Let's talk about immigration, which is obviously such a big topic both societally and then for the Home Office to wrestle with and Charles, around the time that you were Home Secretary was the time when the. The then Labour governments of which you were a part at the time of the expansion of the European Union, didn't have any transitional controls for those countries that were joining, which in time had quite profound impacts on society at large, and I guess began the conversation where the salience of immigration shot up.

[Charles Clarke]

I agree and disagree. The actual decision was taken shortly before I became Home Secretary, but I supported the decision. I thought it was the right decision, we should expand and we shouldn't have transitional controls. What we believed was that that was going to be done by other countries as well, notably Germany. That didn't happen and in fact only the UK and Ireland, I think, did it. With not having the transitional controls, my belief was that our economy was relatively strong at that time and that there's no merit in delay. Simply saying you delay it for seven years, I think it would have been. Wouldn't have helped the situation at all. And I thought there was every case for dealing with it immediately. I think it did increase the salience of immigration, but I also think that's seriously overstated, by which I mean, I think many politicians, including on my own side, Ed Milibander's leader of the party, as it then was, Yvette Cooper, as Shadow Home Secretary, tended to attribute the immigration concern in the country to that decision about the EU citizens coming into

[Chris Mason]

the why are they wrong?

[Charles Clarke]

I simply don't think it's correct. As a discussion of what happened, I think there were a whole series of issues about immigration, issues we didn't deal with as we needed to have done, in my opinion, and I take responsibility for my share of that. But to put it down to one decision of that kind, I simply think is not correct. I think the biggest issue has always been people's concern about how you govern immigration. It's not actually the numbers. I believe it's control. And I think that's the issue which Shabana is trying to deal with at the moment, on the boats and on the hostels and so on and so forth, because they're visible symptoms of a lack of control of the numbers, even though immigration numbers are going down now at the moment.

[Amber Rudd]

I mean, I disagree, Charles, with the consequence of the early absence of transition arrangements that meant the UK became a home for a lot of Eastern Europeans before other European countries did, and was the first. Therefore, so many came here because the feedback I got for many years on opposition to staying in the EU was based on that original large number that came over that Were a lot of them very professional, brushed plumbers, builders. And so, as we know, a lot of UK businesses went out. Well, were found. They weren't competitive, shall we say. And the consequence for that was this kind of unsettling feeling in communities all over the country. Obviously, it's not the only thing. Obviously not the only thing, but it's one of the things which I think laid the groundwork there. But it's also a reminder that laid the groundwork for the anxiety about the amount of EU citizens coming to the UK and therefore the groundwork for Brexit.

[Chris Mason]

Right.

[Adam Fleming]

But I suppose, though, that the Home Secretary of whatever party is probably not going to be sitting there wondering, what's the effect on the domestic plumber market of an immigration decision.

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah. The Home Secretary should be saying, what is the effect on communities, though? You know, if we get. I mean, didn't labor estimate there were going to be something like 15,000 from the lack of transition? It was a tiny number and we got something like, I mean, hundreds of thousands. But, I mean, I do think it's

[Charles Clarke]

interesting what Adam asks about the labour market, because I think the labour market's a key aspect of all this. I set up the Migration Advisory Committee, which was designed to weigh up the labor market demands versus the migration issues. And everybody could agree, everybody would agree that if you wanted, for the sake of argument, more dentists, the way to get there was to train more dentists. And in the interim, while they were being trained and get the numbers up, you could allow people to migrate into the country to be dentists. But getting that balance right was extremely important. I didn't think that was a political judgment judgment. I thought that should be a professional judgment based on looking at the Labour markets. I do think that Labour market issues, important, your community point, I agree up to an extent, and I would criticize myself, but not, and certainly our government, Labour government at that time, for not doing enough to see what could be done in communities where migrants were arriving in those communities to see what could be done to mitigate the effects of that. I think your point is correct, but I think it's less important than the labour market.

[Amber Rudd]

So I do remember that debate and I remember Gordon Brown, for instance, saying that with their should be more money put into communities that were having difficulty absorbing the amount of people and all that should have been part of the planning, but it wasn't. And this is, you know, I mean,

[Charles Clarke]

it should have done. Should have been done before Gordon became Prime Minister.

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah. When I think of the fundamental problems that all politicians need to own is that the fact that we've had high levels of immigration has overall been good for the economy. But the benefit, the extra money, has not gone to the public services that have felt squeezed as a result. I mean, when you think about it in those terms, it is. It is no wonder it's become problematic in communities.

[Adam Fleming]

But I'm just wondering what the immigration system looks like when you're sat in that chair in Marsham street, which is where the Home Office HQ is, because the public see the issue of immigration and then it pops up in the news in various forms, whatever the story is that day that people are worried about. How does the immigration system look to you when you're at the top of it?

[Charles Clarke]

Well, I would say two things. This main headquarters at the time I was there, I'm not sure if this is still the case, was in fact down in Croydon and they had the offices which dealt with Borders and Migration Service. When I became Home Secretary, it was a very, very top heavy system and the second dimension of it was deeply legalistic. It was a system where any decision that was taken was going to be legally challenged. Often the Home Office lawyers decisions were wrong and the Home Office was defeated in court. I went to the extraordinary steps, possibly even unconstitutional steps, of having breakfast with the then Lord Chief justice and Deputy Lord Chief justice myself personally, to say, look, what can we do about this? Because the Home Office doesn't want to be in a position, we're constantly losing these cases, we're obviously doing it wrong. How should we be improving ourselves to make sure we weren't constantly losing the cases? And the legal system was what dominated you. The biggest memory I had was asylum cases, which were literally rooms, enormous rooms full of cases which had not been looked at for five years. And there's a massive system of people just in limbo, waiting for the situation. One of the first things that happened to me after I became Home Secretary that day in the House of Commons, Gerald Kaufman grabbed me and he said, charles, come up to my office. And he took me up to his

[Chris Mason]

office, long standing labor mp, long standing

[Charles Clarke]

Labour MP and senior Labour mp, and he showed me his filing cabinet in his constituency in Manchester, which was full of cases which had come to him, which he tried to take up and there'd be no answer. It was a frozen system. Now, I may be exaggerating, but that was the impression I had when I was there.

[Amber Rudd]

Well, I took over from a Home Secretary who had become Prime Minister, Theresa May, and so I wasn't Wholly critical of the Home Office. When I arrived at it, given I hoped to survive, you didn't do a

[Adam Fleming]

not fit for purpose maneuver, I think

[Amber Rudd]

ended my career very quickly. And for me, the first issue I came across on immigration was the Calais camps. If you remember, there was a big campaign in 2016 when I sort of took office, which was all about, how are we going to disband the Calais camps and rescue the children who were in the camps, who had legitimate access to being in the uk. So, I mean, that was a time, it's just such a different time now to think about when the campaign, also from the right wing newspapers, was to bring the children back to the uk, people who had cousins or brothers or sisters, and for those camps to be disbanded. And so that was the first immigration crisis I was working.

[Adam Fleming]

But that's so interesting because you. You were presented with, as you said, a campaign and a thing unfolding on the ground. That's not the. That's not the system. No, it's responding to things that are coming up in front of you.

[Amber Rudd]

But the system actually, if I may, just. Just responded incredibly well. And what I would say was significant about the system then, which was lost thereafter for a while, was the fact that we had such a strong relationship with the French and the French Home Secretary and I would meet regularly. Theresa May and him used to go on holiday together. I mean, they had. Well, with the German one, they, three of them used to each other so well. They kind of. They were so concerned about each other's countries and working well together, and so that that relationship with the French really mattered. But I would say the bigger answer to your question, Adam, is what does it look like as the Home Secretary, you come and you're looking at legal immigration and illegal immigration and the legal immigration, you get so many letters from the MPs on behalf of their constituents. Why is this person not being allowed in? He should be allowed in. And what is the plan for this? And then when you write your answer in the letter, which is what the Home Secretary has done, if you had a family of five, there'd be 10 different pieces of legislation. Everybody would have different access. Exact. It's very complicated.

[Adam Fleming]

And you would be spending your time as Home Secretary, responding to individual cases via other MPs.

[Amber Rudd]

That's correct. You do that and you have to sign them off to the other MPs. In an ideal world, like many things in government, you would say, let's tear it all up and start again and have the policy for this new government in this way. But it is a very complicated system. So that's the legal immigration. And then you're trying to set the rules, as Charles said, which will try and encourage the right amount of dentists or whatever you want, and to have a legal route from air areas of a conflict. That I always thought was very important because it enabled you to, in a way, say, we've got a legal route for refugees. This is what we're doing in Syria, this is what we're doing from this region. And then you can say, but we're incredibly tough on illegal refugees. And in a way you have to have that balance to have any sort of legitimacy in it. And I felt we did that at the time with some. Some balance. But you to. To. I think, reflecting on what Charles just said, if you're going to have any sort of conviction as a Home Secretary, you have to hold the borders secure.

[Charles Clarke]

There's a really key point here which is you can only govern immigration in alliance with your neighbouring countries. The idea that you can erect a citadel which simply keeps everybody out is basically nonsense. You have to work with the others. And Amber's quite right to point to the relationship that her government had with the French. I would say it started with David Blunkett and the French and the Calais camps, many before. But what's a key point for this isn't where it started. It got completely broken. And I'm glad to say we're gradually beginning to put that together. But that's not a criticism of either, certainly Vanber or Theresa May. I think they were very conceived of that argument.

[Chris Mason]

Isn't there an element of this as well, Charles? And I think you reflected this on this in an interview in the Telegraph last summer around not just the relationship between any British government and its near neighbours on the continent, but also the relationship within the government in terms of the demands from other departments within government who might be outwardly hawkish about immigration, but desperately keen that there are more, whatever it might be, that are useful to their. To their individual political.

[Charles Clarke]

When I did our immigration white paper, which I'm still proud of, in 2005, before the election, which I. I would say this is me self aggrandizing, was something that hadn't been done previously by our government. You had all kinds of government departments wanting immigration very much, not only the treasury, for all the general economic reasons, but people like Agriculture, Environment, Trade and Industry, because they thought that not in a theoretical economic way, but in a practical way, we needed migrants to be able to make sure our economy worked Effectively, yes.

[Amber Rudd]

I remember leaving a Cabinet, I think it was in 2017, when Theresa May had set out the policy that was going to be adopted. And everyone nodded, of course, and said, you're so right, Prime Minister. Then afterwards, I had Jeremy Hunt from Health, Sajid Javid from communities and local government. We need houses, Michael Gove from defra. We need more people to pick everything in the fields. Each. Each department had a reason to have

[Chris Mason]

an existence playing out 20 years apart under different government.

[Charles Clarke]

Because when you said it earlier, both of you, there is a tension between the correct desire to control our immigration system, whether it's asylum or immigration, and the need to see ourselves in a world economy. In fact, the effect of Brexit, as I predicted at the time, was not to reduce the number of migrants into this country, but to switch the migration from the EU to southern Asia, mainly. And that's. You can say that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it didn't reduce immigration as such. Why? Because the economy is this great maw saying, we want. We need people to run our economy and that's what needs facing up to. And so if you take any particular professional skill, the builder, the plumber, the dentist, whatever it is, you have to say it is a classic example. You have to say, we want a growing economy in this field. What is the trade off between getting migrants in, possibly very highly qualified, possibly not, to help us do that, on the one hand, versus educating and training people who are not migrants to fill those jobs, which by definition takes time. A dentist is six years or whatever for all of them, it takes time. And that's the trade off. And that's why what Amma describes is happening in her Cabinet.

[Amber Rudd]

And the other problem you've got, really, is that Home Secretary with the Prime Minister, may try and set what feels like the right immigration policy. And perhaps after Brexit, that's what Boris Johnson's Cabinet were trying to do. But people aren't very easy to put into a spreadsheet and behave as you would like them to do.

[Charles Clarke]

Exactly.

[Amber Rudd]

They do it differently. And so we had this enormous number that came and that was with their families. You know, I understand that the.

[Adam Fleming]

Particularly on the health and social care

[Amber Rudd]

visa, particularly on the health and social care visa, they came and they came with an average of four to five members of their family. So, you know, that created a much larger number, much more difficult to work out whether that was economically a plus or minus for the country.

[Adam Fleming]

But that's why I asked the question about how does the system appear from your vantage point when you're sat in the Home Secretary's chair, because you would presumably go mad if you were having to then analyze every permutation and how many children people in, I don't know, Senegal might bring with them if they get help and social care visa, which you just announced you're going to introduce in the House of Commons.

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah. No. So you.

[Charles Clarke]

How.

[Adam Fleming]

How detailed is it?

[Amber Rudd]

So I would say, as when my experience was as Home Secretary, you do three things. You do immigration, you do counterterrorism and you do policing. And those three things are your bailiwick, as it were. And my experience was, for apart from the first one when I was working with the French on this camp, is that immigration was the kind of the sleeping giant, really. And we had in 2017 a lot of. Of terrorist attacks, as you know. But in the end it was 2018, which I couldn't get my hands around. The Windrush crisis that made me leave the Home Office. In the Home Office, very something I found which was difficult to do long term planning for because you're reacting so much to events around you.

[Charles Clarke]

In my time we also have prisons and probation, but I essentially agree with them.

[Amber Rudd]

Something else.

[Charles Clarke]

Yeah. With Amber's predictions, but you have to not just wait. Of all things to happen. When I walked into the Home Office, the then Permanent Secretary said to me, this is the most difficult department in government, which Tony Blair also said to me, actually, because just things happen, prison breakouts, terrorist attacks, whatever it might be. And I said, we can't operate on that basis. We've got to say we can predict all of these things happening. The question is, have we established a system which minimizes the chance of them happening and if they do happen, enables us to control, mitigate them in whatever way we can? I thought there was a fatalism in what he himself said to me, this man, then the then Permanent Secretary, which was against everything I believed about politics, just to say things come out of the blue and you then deal with them. I mean, things do come out of the blue, but the thing is to minimize the damage that we've got as to what comes along. The Home Office has particularly got the responsibility to do that.

[Adam Fleming]

Yeah. Did it sometimes feel like it was more like an emergency service?

[Amber Rudd]

It did in 2017 when it felt like the country was under siege, when we had five, six serious terrorist attacks in fairly quick succession. So it did at that point. Yeah.

[Adam Fleming]

Amber, you talked about. You sort of nod whenever you see a police officer now in a respectful way, which I'm sure you probably did.

[Charles Clarke]

But then back to you, give us a pay rise.

[Adam Fleming]

How much control do you feel you've got over the place as Home Secretary and what's the right. As soon as I said control, that felt like a kind of undemocratic, dictatorshipy kind of words. But the relationship between the Home Secretary and the police is. Is quite tricky, isn't it? It's complicated. To sum up, yes, it is complicated.

[Amber Rudd]

As I've just proved, you don't have control because the whole principle is that a politician should not have any operational control. You're not allowed to say to a police officer, go and arrest my rival there. He's really inconvenient. So it's hands off, but it's guidance, it's support, it's sort of trying to influence, trying to shape, trying to help them and find out what they need. And in my case, a lot of it was about trying to do new programs, seeing what might work. And then you also set your own priorities as Home Secretary. So violence against women and girls was very much something I wanted to prioritize, so I made sure that we had more meetings on that. So you. You set your agenda and the police forces respond. I did get the impression that they would have liked a bit more help from the Home Office. And I detect from what I'm hearing at the moment, that this government is looking at whether they can do that a bit more. And about merging.

[Adam Fleming]

What sort of things did they want?

[Amber Rudd]

Well, the Home Secretary has more. More role in deciding which. Which. Which direction, which. To support a bit more guidance, really. A bit more. Sometimes there's so much third party activity in government that the third party, in this case the police, feels a bit left out, a bit like, come on, take some ownership, work with us, support us when something goes wrong, rather than not. And I think that I'm. I'm quite interested in what the current Home Secretary has announced about potentially merging all these police forces.

[Chris Mason]

And, Charles, that was an idea, wasn't it, back 20 years ago, when, when you were. Which didn't happen at the time. But the current government is pretty keen on.

[Charles Clarke]

I'm delighted Siobhan is doing. I think the key principle is the operational independence of the police. I think that was massively badly damaged by the establishment of police and crime commissioners by Theresa May. I'm delighted that role is now being taken out. You've got to have a Chief Constable who's got responsibility for what he or she does, and I think that's weakened it's massively weakened when individual politicians, as some Home Secretaries have done, have criticized police decisions in a very direct way, without even really knowing the facts, or said that a police officer should or shouldn't have done X or Y or Z, when in fact it is the operation independence. I was very clear that I wasn't trained as a police officer. It wasn't my job to second guess police officers about what they did. Of course, the cultural questions, for example, in the Met, which needed to be taken on.

[Amber Rudd]

From the Home Secretary's point of view, though, the issue of policing, its oversight, its support, is hardly political at all. The only element of politics, I would say, is about how much money you're going to put in. Are there going to be more police officers? Are there going to be less? That's the only spiky point in terms of law.

[Adam Fleming]

Or, I suppose if there's a. If there's a horrendous crime that everyone's talking about and there's a clamor for action, you then have to decide whether to intervene.

[Amber Rudd]

But it's not like immigration, where there's this huge policy issue, in my case,

[Charles Clarke]

coming to head with the attacks on 7th of July 2005 that I was Home Secretary and had to deal with at that time, and which, as I said earlier, the key question is, can you create a system which is able to prevent that so far as possible, and to deal with it as well as you can in those appalling circumstances,

[Chris Mason]

and in addition to that, dealing with it minute by minute as something like this is playing out, not knowing what might still be to happen.

[Amber Rudd]

Yes, that, that, that. That is right. And you are sitting, as I was on several occasions, many occasions, in COBRA meetings, chairing them and, you know, trying to give direction. But it comes back to that point too. You're not in charge, you're trying to convene and support, but the operational execution is not done from your office. And, you know, perhaps the most dramatic thing that I was part of was the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, and I chaired a number of cobras then, and I was very much struck by the fact that. That your role as Home Secretary in that case is to get the best out of government support mechanisms all around, to get to the bottom of what's taking place and to support the public. But in a way, you are. The most critical role is to reassure the public and to be out on the news and to be out in Parliament setting out what we're doing and making sure that we're getting the best outcomes we can. So it's just as much sort of an expert role as a communications.

[Charles Clarke]

I'd agree with that with one important addition, which I'm sure Amber would agree with too, which is expecting people to work in teams and partnerships to address these kind of problems. You've got a whole range of different agencies working in different ways. One of the things before 77 was there been very detailed planning, which I take no credit for, by the way, as to how police, fire, ambulance, security services work together to deal with the threats when it came along. So classically, the gold command, who's in charge when the issue comes along? Is it the fireman or the police officer or whatever? And because that had been rehearsed intensively, it meant that when the attack came, we were able to deal with it. Our biggest problem, actually that day was the Madrid bombings had been two separate attacks. So the question is, would we have another attack later that same day? And how did we deal with that when we didn't know? In fact, there wasn't, though the second attack came Fortnight later on 21 7.

[Adam Fleming]

And it's interesting because TV and film have trained us all to think, oh, what's it like when you get the call in the middle of the night saying something awful has happened? But actually, from what you're both saying, the system is designed to make it not feel like that. It's not about, oh, does, is there a hero there to pick up the phone at 3:00am?

[Amber Rudd]

Yeah, no, you're definitely not the hero. But you are phoned at 3am and you are whisked in to chair these meetings where the other heroes, the real heroes, have to work out what to do. And then you're told, you really work out how you are, then you're the front of house for everything that's going on.

[Chris Mason]

And that reflection mirrors, doesn't it, the observations of our panelists in the first episode about. About the elements within the department that have worked well, particularly around counterterror, versus the skepticism or criticisms that often come from all sorts of different points of view around immigration, both legal and illegal. I wonder, as a final thought, given that this is something we did kick around in the opening episode, that phrase that gets trotted out every single time. There is a perceived failing in the Home Office, which is a phrase of two decades vintage. Now, as we discovered in the last episode, the author of which was David Normington, the former former Permanent Secretary in the Home Office, this idea that the department, or parts of it, are not fit for purpose to what extent. Is that label description helpful, useful, useless, a distraction, useless, totally useless.

[Charles Clarke]

I think it has no value to say. Obviously, as in any organization, there are things that are done well and things that are done badly. And the job of the leadership, including the Home Secretary, but also including the permanent officials, David Normington in this case, is to review how the department is doing, where it's doing badly, where it's doing well, and what you have to do to rectify or learn from those things. That's what any good, even the BBC might benefit from that sometimes and take it through a number of different ways. But there's a generic, dismissive phrase not fit for purpose, I think teaches you nothing.

[Amber Rudd]

Some of the people I worked with in the Home Office were some of the best I have ever worked with.

[Charles Clarke]

Exactly.

[Amber Rudd]

There are some excellent people working there and one of the reasons for that is that what they do is so important, keeping us all safe, planning how to do that for the future. The problem that people focus on on the Home Office are issues to do with immigration. And in a way those were the troubles that I mostly had. But the rest of it I think it does very well. But if we want better outcomes from the Home Office or immigration, we need a bit more truth telling from the politicians.

[Adam Fleming]

Amber, thank you very much. Thank you You Charles, thanks to you too.

[Charles Clarke]

Thank you.

[Adam Fleming]

And that's all for this episode in our miniseries.

[Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser]

This week with digital coupons at Safeway and Albertsons get beef rib roast for $7.97 per pound member price with minimum purchase of $50 or more in a single transaction. Exclusions apply. See Store for details and broccoli, cauliflower or Russet potatoes are $0.97 per pound Member price limit 6 pounds plus. Selected sizes and varieties of Lucerne butter cheese or Philadelphia cream cheese are 197 each member price. Visit safeway or albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.

[Lowe's Advertiser]

Spring Fest is happening now at Lowe's. Keep the spotlight on your yard with stay green premium 2 cubic foot mulch, 5 bags for $10. Plus when you want more help indoors, get up to 40% off. Select major appliances that help you superchar your chores. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Valid to 422 World Supplies. Last selection varies by location. See lowe's.com for details. Mulch off for excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

[RK Zero Proof Advertiser]

Spring is packed patios, parties, wedding weekends and RK0 proof keeps you in the mix without the morning after regret as the original zero proof spirits brand RK's warm molecule gives you that real deal burn of whiskey or tequila with none of the alcohol. Zero calories, zero sugar and a whole lot of freedom to enjoy the moment. Sip smarter this [e-mail] that's rk0proof.com this

[Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser]

week with digital coupons at Safeway and Albertsons get beef rib roast for 7.97 per pound member price with minimum purchase of $50 or more in a single transaction. Exclusions apply. See Store for details and broccoli, cauliflower or russet potatoes are $0.97 per pound member price limit £6 plus selected sizes and varieties of Lucerne butter cheese or Philadelphia cream cheese are 197 each member price. Visit safewayralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save

[Adam Fleming]

Chris There is another one

[Chris Mason]

coming up where we will talk to Dominic Casciani, Home affairs correspondent extraordinaire from the BBC. Has reported pretty much daily, hasn't it, on the Home Office for for decades. So get his sense of how the place works or doesn't work and the extent to which there are those kind of long term recurring challenges that come back round. And as a little teaser, because it's there in your feeds already, we've already spoken to Dom. He has a fascinating thought that runs through perhaps everything that the Home Office does. So press play and you'll find out what it is.

[Charles Clarke]

Bye.

[RK Zero Proof Advertiser]

Newscast Newscast from the BBC.

[Adam Fleming]

You've come to the end of Newscast Newscast. Some people, and you know who I mean, might say you ooze stamina. Can I encourage you to subscribe on BBC Sounds and you can get in touch with us anytime. Email [e-mail], you can WhatsApp us on 033-01-2390.

[Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser]

This week with digital coupons at Safeway and Albertsons get beef rib roast for 7.97 per pound member price with minimum purchase of 50 or more. Single transaction exclusions apply. See Store for details and Broccoli, cauliflower or russet potatoes are $0.97 per pound member price limit £6 plus selected sizes and varieties of Lucerne butter cheese or Philadelphia cream cheese are $1.97 each member price. Visit safewayralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.