Adam Fleming (1:56)

Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio

Chris Mason (1:57)

and it is Chris at home for this one.

Adam Fleming (1:59)

And joining me in the studio is home and legal affairs correspondent for the BBC and very good friend of newscast, Dominic Casciani. Hello, Dom.

Dominic Casciani (2:06)

Hi, how are you doing?

Adam Fleming (2:06)

Very well, thank you. Before we look at the topical issues around the Home Office and the things that we're covering as news stories about the Home Office. Now, Chris, I just thought maybe we should have a couple of big thoughts about what we've heard previously.

Chris Mason (2:19)

Can I start with a small thought?

Adam Fleming (2:21)

Any second thought.

Chris Mason (2:22)

I just thought as we were introducing ourselves then that I am in my home office talking about the Home office.

Adam Fleming (2:27)

Wow.

Chris Mason (2:28)

So there you go. Entirely trivial. Small H, small O and small T H o u g h T as well.

Dominic Casciani (2:34)

Do you call it an office Or a study, though. That's. That's the right.

Chris Mason (2:37)

It's actually just a dumping ground, is the honest truth, Dom. So I've got my children's bikes in here, there's a scooter, there's a giant Percy pig carrier bag.

Adam Fleming (2:46)

Well, this episode is even more topical than I thought it was going to be.

Chris Mason (2:50)

Lampshade on top of a filing cabinet. So, yeah, yeah, Office would dignify it with a description it doesn't really deserve.

Adam Fleming (2:57)

Well, you know what? I'll give you my big thoughts about what I've learned from quizzing former Home Secretaries and former kind of behind the scenes people in the Home Office, which we did in episode one. First thing is it is still an incredibly controversial department, even though it's been stripped of quite a lot of its functions and quite a lot of its controversial functions were put into the Ministry of Justice a few years ago. Hasn't stopped the hard headlines hitting the Home Office all the time. Thought number two is about the role of the Home Office in that they're sort of quite often competing against other government departments, especially when it comes to what the economy needs. And I thought it was interesting when Charles Clark was telling us that he set up the Migration Advisory Committee when he was Home Secretary in the Northeys, and I got the impression that was to try to inject a bit of sort of economic thinking into the Home Office so that it could sort of understand some of the wider implications of what it was doing. And then my third big thought.

Chris Mason (3:52)

Thought.

Adam Fleming (3:52)

And I've thought this for a long time now, and this has just been reinforced over the last few episodes. The migration system is a very complicated and we've only scratched the surface about all the different visas and routes and conditions on people coming to the uk. But the fact is it's constantly evolving because it's being confronted by different things in the world. Different politics in the uk, different things happening in the economy, different personalities, different priorities of different governments, different things happening in the media. And so it's not as if we're on a journey towards Home office perfection in 100 years time, it's just a product of the time that it's in now.

Chris Mason (4:29)

So a couple of big thoughts that I would throw in. So one is a recurring sense of what many of the big issues are that come up from one generation to the next. And to an extent, Adam, as we've reflected, that's been our experience, hasn't it, over the last couple of decades as sort of general political reporters covering the Home Office and we'll be interested to hear Dom's take on it as a more specialist follower of the goings on in that department. The other is the recurring topic of whether it is too big or not. And then the hassle, the political hassle of doing anything about it. And then the third would be, it seems to me, in addition to the magnitude and the seriousness of the stuff that the Home Office wrestles with, it's also the department, it seems to me, the ultimate department of trade offs that they are confronted with decisions to make, whether it's about migration or other things where they will have competing voices within the wider Whitehall system and then just wider society about what those other interests might want. And that will come with consequences for the Home Office and a Home Secretary alongside a Prime Minister having to juggle those trade offs. Of course, trade offs exist all over government. That's the nature of politics. But it seems to me in the Home Office, they are particularly sharp.

Adam Fleming (5:44)

Dominic, would you like to have some philosophical thoughts about the nature of the Home Office?

Dominic Casciani (5:48)

I'd like to rename it the Department of Control because that's really what it's about at the end of the day, it's about trying to control things. There was a period during the Blair years, you know, there's sort of like the fuzzy end of the Blair years where there was a lot of rebranding going on around the Home Office when I was quite a young reporter, and they were coming up with sort of slogans like, you know, building a fair and tolerant Britain, little things like that. I can't, forgive me, I can't remember the exact words now. And that was really about trying to balance what the Home Office has historically been about, which is about law and order. Yeah. With a new era of the Human Rights act and, you know, equality and all those things. Where are those slogans now? Right. And I have one stat of one great stat. I haven't come here with loads of stats, but I've got one stat which I think really illustrates this whole issue, which also goes into what Chris says about trade offs as well. 1971, Parliament passed the most important piece of immigration legislation of our times, which basically created the. Effectively the groundwork. So the foundations of the system we still have. Between 1971 and 1997, there were five immigration acts. So basically every five years they were tweaking and they were developing things. Okay. Between 1997, today there have been 15 acts. So every two years the home officers felt a need to look at things, go, oh, my God, we've got to do something new, we've got to take some more control, we've got to create some more offenses, we've got to restrict this, we've got to do this. One of those pieces of legislation, the Safety of Rwanda act, came in and went out the window within basically 15 months as it got repealed. I mean, so, so that, that, so that sense of urgency in the place

Chris Mason (7:28)

and the need to trebbling, is that like a, That's a trebling, I think, isn't it? Just roughly on the maths in terms of the, the rate at which governments felt the need to legislate on immigration. Yeah, in the, in the last 30 years versus pretty much the 30 years before that.

Dominic Casciani (7:42)

Absolutely. And it's, it's funny, like, very, very early on in my time kind of covering the Home Office, I kind of worked out kind of department where people really want to talk. You know, there are some departments of state where journalist, specialist journalists find it quite easy to talk to officials and get briefings and they can wander off to, like, specialist conferences and hear the

Adam Fleming (8:03)

technicalities of what they're working.

Dominic Casciani (8:04)

Yeah. And they'll go like, you know, a health colleague perhaps would go to, like, some kind of, like, health conference about, you know, you know, whatever it is, and there'd be lots of officials there from Department of Health and they'll just chat away. It doesn't happen the same way, the Home Office. And you have to work out very, very. You have to work really, really hard and strain your mind about how it is you're going to get in contact with the people you really need to speak to, and it takes a long time to warm them up. And I remember, much to my surprise, after seven, seven, the 20 years ago, the London suicide bombings, I was invited to a private event and I think partly because I was one of the few journalists at the time that was doing a lot of stuff about what young Muslims thought and government was panicking about. What do young Muslims think? And I kind of went along to sort of say, well, you know, actually they're just like us, but you've got this, this issue of extremism, just like you have with the far right. Anyway, I'm at this event and there were some very, very senior people there from the Home Office who I was surprised to find myself in the company with. And I kind of buttonholed one of them because I wanted to speak to him for a long time about the Blair approach to dealing with what was becoming the asylum crisis. And I was saying, well, I was effectively Sort of like, yeah, really, sort of playing devil's advocate, saying a lot of this stuff they were doing about trying to clamp down everything, it wasn't working. You need to actually think about actually how you protect the people who are genuine asylum seekers and refugees whilst excluding illegal immigrants. Feels familiar today. Yeah. And his answer really stuck in my mind and he said to me, it's about the numbers. Do you not understand? It's about the numbers. And that has stuck in my mind for 20 years because it gave me a sense of actually how the institution thinks that it needs to control things. And it doesn't matter what the lofty ambition is. If things run out of control, you've got to get control back. And in the case of immigration, it's about the numbers. And of course those numbers now are very visible because of the small boats. And even though that's a tiny component to the whole overall picture, that's the number in the picture that matters.

Chris Mason (10:05)

I love that controlling thought of the Department of Control when they're wrestling with trying to control things that are very often very difficult to control. But where also, and this gets us into the small boats issue in particular, where a lack of capacity to control is so self evident, is so visible and therefore so politically salient.

Adam Fleming (10:28)

Anyone listening to episode two of this series will realise that an organization run by Charles Clarke is going to be very different from an organization run by Amber Rut. And that brings me on to the current Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who Chris. I mean, presumably a lot of the stuff she's announcing was in Train under Yvette Cooper, but she does give off like energetic vibes of trying to get a lot done, doesn't she?

Chris Mason (10:51)

Yeah, I mean, she absolutely did that certainly with political journalists, me included, pretty much as soon as she was appointed. A sense of leaning into fairly or otherwise, a perception that the Home Office under Yvette Cooper hadn't got enough done quickly, hadn't been willing to work quickly. She was certainly making the argument and has been making the argument that she's willing to pick fights, including with the courts, which, given as Dom sets out the history of these things, that's probably a good thing for someone going in as a Home Secretary, because that looks like it's likely to happen and continue happening rather a lot. And then the other thing that I think is a fascinating element of the contemporary politics at the moment around the Home Offices agenda is how much appetite and drive is there in the Home Office to deliver what is central to their policy offer at the moment. Everything I pick up is there's plenty politically, but big but how much appetite is there in Downing Street? So take the current argument that's going on about changing the rules around indefinite leave to remain. So back to that central issue for the Home Office of immigration. We saw that speech from the Home Secretary a handful of weeks ago, sort of doubling down on her case for change. You know, the political argument being one that there was that big wave of migration which critics call the Boris Wave of the early part of this decade. How do you address that? The argument from the Home Secretary and her team is that you need to change the rules. And the argument of plenty of Labour MPs is that it's unfair to change the rules for people who arrived assuming a certain set of rules, and then might be subject to rather different sets of rules. Folk I speak to in government, in addition to having to deal with the fact that they've got to persuade quite a lot of folk on their own side to back their ideas, and you have the Conservatives helpfully, unhelpfully, politically saying, as long as you don't change them, we'll back you. No government likes to carry legislation by relying on the votes of opposition parties. The fear I hear from some within government who are passionate advocates of this is a recurring fear for ministers in this government, which is what happens if Downing street goes wobbly. In other words, how keen are you to go out and passionately advocate for your cause if a week on Wednesday or indeed tomorrow, the centre changes its mind? And that is crippling for any government. We saw this under Boris Johnson when ministers were sent out to defend stuff and then the government changed its mind. It's crippling for the confidence of. Of a government. And that is a fear I hear right now about that particular central bit of legislation that the government is contemplating. One final thought on this, just whilst we're on the contemporary politics of the current Home Office. Those ministers who are in there right now were appointed when Morgan McSweeney was still the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, who had a particular outlook in terms of his how he saw himself politically and how he wanted to prosecute. A kind of labor argument. And, you know, that's not one that's universally shared and is not as vociferously articulated in Downing Street. Now he's gone as it was when he was there. And you can argue that the Home Secretary and some of her ministerial team are broadly of that outlook and worldview, rather than necessarily where the Prime Minister might instinctively Find himself. I mean, let's see.

Adam Fleming (14:17)

And Dom, the policy issue that Chris is referring to there is changes to indefinite leave to remain. So this is the status you can get if you move to the UK and after you've been here for five years, you basically get all the same rights as a. As a British national, pretty much, if

Dominic Casciani (14:31)

you apply for it. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Fleming (14:32)

And the idea is that Shabana Mahmood is going to double that from five years to 10 years.

Dominic Casciani (14:37)

Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to declare an interest because this is the route that my father got settlements in the uk, you know, five decades ago. So I'm familiar with how, how this works, but it's, it's politically, you can understand the objective there. Right. It's going to be a really, really difficult sale to parts of the Labour Party, and I suspect actually it may be a difficult sell, actually to parts of the Conservative Party as well, because they'll all know people who say. HANGS UP We've come, we've played by the rules, you see, going back to single control, play by the rules. And then. Hang on a second, you're changing the rules now. How does this work? What would be really interesting to me is it would be a fly on the wall in the conversations in the Cabinet, around the Cabinet table on this, because that trade off question which Chris mentioned at the beginning, because when you're talking about migration, the trade off is of course between security and overall numbers, but also then economic opportunity. And I dare say there'll be voices coming from the site, from biz and education, saying this is going to make us less attractive and economically, long term, this will have potentially quite a damaging impact. That will be some of the arguments which the Prime Minister and Home Secretary will be presented with.

Adam Fleming (15:51)

Well, because the quid pro quo for, for an immigrant and the country is that the. The person moves to the uk, contributes to the economy, works hard, doesn't have the same rights as a British national for five years, but then once they've reached that milestone, they're sort of quote, unquote, rewarded with indefinite leave to remain.

Dominic Casciani (16:08)

Yeah, I mean, I remember years ago, somebody saying to me, in relation to some other proposals about restrictions on, on settlement during the Conservative years, they gave me the example of the scientists at Manchester University who discovered graphene, one of the, you know, one of the substances of the 21st century. And the point is, is I can't remember exactly the nationality. I think I believe one of them is Russian. And the point being, if you don't allow brilliant people into the country and allow them to settle and get on with their life and innovate and make Britain their home and feel secure. They're just going to go somewhere else. And that example was used to me as well. Would those scientists have come to the UK or would they have gone to the US had a particular rule been in place at the time? And I think that's the kind of dilemma, but that's the trade off they've got to deal with.

Adam Fleming (16:51)

And Chris, a couple of days ago in an episode of Newscast, we were talking about a very high profile new critic of this policy arriving on the scene in the basement of a pub.

Chris Mason (17:00)

Oh yes, indeed. By the way, I just got slightly sidetracked by the discovery of graphite in the city there. Dom professors on Andre Geim, I may be mispronouncing that surname. And Professor Kostya Novoselev. I think that's right. So there you go. He won a Nobel Prize for physics.

Adam Fleming (17:16)

Still not exactly sure what graphene is in yet. I mean, I'm still waiting to find out exactly what's going on.

Dominic Casciani (17:20)

It's in my bike tires.

Adam Fleming (17:21)

Oh, wow, fancy.

Dominic Casciani (17:22)

It's in my bike tires. They don't puncture.

Adam Fleming (17:25)

Wow, okay.

Dominic Casciani (17:25)

It's amazing. They just don't puncture.

Adam Fleming (17:28)

Anyway, Chris, the rigorous. It was Angela Rayner in the pub, wasn't it?

Chris Mason (17:31)

It was also of that fine city of Manchester and indeed yes, a Russian British physicist, Professor Nova Salev. And I apologize, I love Michael that name as well. So yeah, there was Angela Rayner in the basement of a pub with her critique, her 1500 word. Actually, most of it wasn't about this particular policy. It was a wider critique of Keir Starmer and the government. But the particularly sharp directed policy critique was around this whole question of the. The changing of the rules on indefinite leave to remain. And in her view, and she's not alone in the parliamentary Labour Party, that it's unfair. And when I asked the Home Secretary about this, when she sort of doubled down on her position in the speech two or three weeks ago now, she said to me, I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but the essence of it was a majority of Labour MPs back me. You're thinking, well that's, that's not politically, that's not really good enough. You know, she needs than that. And you know, that's the reality of the arguments and the persuasion that they're embarking upon. But those critics are doubling down. And when those in government about 10 days ago, including Downing street sought to point to some of what they would see as a sort of mitigating elements that they're baking into their plan. So, for instance, being open to thinking about the time frame over which it's being implemented or being open to potential caveats around who it is is applied to speaking to some of the critics. They say ultimately that's not good enough because this is a binary thing. You're either changing the rules and that, as they see it, is unfair, or you're not. In other words, then they don't appear open to persuasion. A lot of them, maybe not all.

Adam Fleming (19:08)

The thing that's larger in my mind from Angela Rayner's critique was she said, doing this is not British. So you can see she was trying to redefine what. What being patriotic is. Because for the last few years or so, being patriotic has been presented as caring about how tough the immigration system is. So you have a grip on the number of people coming to the uk That's Angela Rayner trying to consciously say, no. The patriotic thing is about being fair and decent. And so she's trying to change the conversation there.

Dominic Casciani (19:35)

Some of this also feeds into a slightly unspoken argument, which is an argument against immigration, which is there has to be a frank conversation in society about actually what we're prepared to pay for. So I remember somebody on the right saying to me when they were advocating a great deal of control during the labor years, I mean, this is a long time ago. It was 15 years ago, this conversation, saying, look, here is the argument. People have to understand and think about the costs, right? Okay, you can basically import cheap labor. That's what Gordon Brown is doing. This is how the conversation went. That's great for the middle classes because the middle classes benefit from the cheap labor. This is his argument. And he says, but the reality is, is you're then bringing a great deal of social and cultural change into small towns and cities all across the country that people haven't really been given an opportunity to have a say over. And that kind of transformation undermines people's sense of control over their own community and the nature of their society. And it doesn't mean they're necessarily. It doesn't mean. I stress his point wasn't a racist point saying, we don't want anyone in. His point was, you've got to make an economic decision. You've got to make a decision about as a society, are you willing to either basically bear the cost of everything being more expensive because you. You basically employ local workers at higher costs, or do you go the other way and bring in cheap workers, and therefore that's great. Everyone's inflation stays down. But the consequence of that is change elsewhere in society. And one of the arguments from the right is we've never really had that conversation as a society about what we really want from immigration. And that, in essence, is also an argument against the proposal which comes up every now and then, that the Home Office should be taken out of immigration policy and the whole Immigration Ministry set up like there are in other places, because then it really just purely becomes an economic question, and then people have no control if it's just simply about the economic levers you're pulling.

Chris Mason (21:35)

And just, Adam, to wind back to your observation about Angela Rayner talking about the indefinite leave to remain thing and talking about it in the context of what was British. You had Shabana Mahmood advocating for the change, grounding it again in a first principles argument, saying that the essence of what she was doing was Labor. So, you know, you're seeing in this argument both sides going back to. Yeah. A first principles case for why their perspective is the. The right one. Oh, and I should say, shouldn't I, that we invited Shabana Mahmoud onto this very episode, didn't we, The Home Secretary, but she couldn't make it.

Adam Fleming (22:10)

She could have had a whole hour in the newscast studio talking about all of this, but she was not available. And then to talk about another big current thing. And it's related to what we were just saying about indefinite leave to remain, because it's about the right to be and stay in Britain, Dom. The changes to refugee status, these huge changes that Shabana Mahmud has introduced, but which actually didn't require legislation. So there wasn't a parliamentary battle over changing with the stroke of a pan what the rights of a refugee is in Britain.

Dominic Casciani (22:38)

Yeah. I mean, because all this relates to actually, effectively, interpretation of The Refugee Convention, 1951. Yeah. And the funny thing about that also is while there's a lot of political debate and anger and, you know, clashing over the European Convention of Human Rights, arguably actually the ECHR is less important than the Refugee Convention when it actually comes to actually some, you know, some of the control things that people are demanding, it often feels to a lot of legal experts I speak to in this field that everybody is banging on about the ECHR when actually their real complaints is with the Refugee Convention. But I will say one thing about this, which is. Which is a noted difference between this government and the last government. The last government went really, really full on saying we're going to basically take on all these international laws. We effectively got to the point now with the Conservative Party where they're saying we're going to pull out of the echr. We know what reforms position is, pull out the ECHR and Refugee Convention and everything. And at the international level there was this real, real trepidation that suddenly the UK was going to walk away from all these institutions, helped build. What's been really interesting in the time since Starmer came in is at those institutions, particularly at Strasbourg, there's a growing confidence that they can actually modernize a lot of this international framework to respond to domestic political pressures whilst actually still retaining the core of what all these rights and protections mean. Now that's a deeply controversial proposal and a lot of people would disagree with that and say this is profoundly shameful what's going on, because you're ripping this stuff up.

Adam Fleming (24:17)

But the very fact national law isn't there to be rewritten at your whim,

Dominic Casciani (24:21)

as it were, but the very fact that there are deep ongoing talks continuing at the moment between London, other capitals and the people who run the European Convention of Human Rights in Strasbourg at the Council of Europe, those talks are productive and are continuing about coming up with some kind of political language about how the framework should apply to immigration in the context we now find ourselves with just mass movements of people through Europe that perhaps is a glimmer, a glimmer of light that you can actually balance these trade offs between control and, and political expediency and all the rest of it. Going back to Chris's original point, and I think that's really going to be really interesting to watch to see if this government can pull off something there which satisfies that domestic political need to show control over immigration, but also keep on board a lot of their supporters and allow them to claim, you know, we're staying true to the kind of international equality measures.

Adam Fleming (25:16)

Although let's remind ourselves of how difficult international negotiations are because the European Convention on Human Rights is a part of the Council of Europe and the Council of Europe has got 46 members. Y& we saw how hard the Brexit negotiations were where there was basically two sides.

Dominic Casciani (25:30)

But you know, there, there are officials from, you know, that top team in Strasbourg who are, who are, want to make it work. They are working very closely with the Brits at the moment to make a deal work by May because they think, you know, they think they got London on board, right? If they got London on board, they think they've got Denmark on board. And Italy on board and France on board, and they can come up with something and it will not satisfy a lot of the voters on the left right. But I think what this labor government is gambling and this Labour Home Secretary and, and, and also David Lamb is very heavily involved in this because it's international law and justice and all the rest of it. They think they can pull something off which will balance that need to show we've got proper control of immigration and we can reform our interpretation of these international institutions and, you know, effectively have our cake and eat it.

Chris Mason (26:17)

And isn't that fascinating in the context of a political argument where you now have, you know, reform, who have been leading the opinion polls for a year, for a year now, and have been long advocates of withdrawal from the echr. And you have the Conservatives who came to that view publicly as a party position last autumn. In other words, there is a live discussion about whether it is viable and a pitch from two significant parties into the next election, everything else being equal, will be withdraw from it. And therefore, for advocates of its retention, there is a, there is a political necessity to proving that you can change it in a way that delivers what you want, as Dom says, with trade offs from some broadly of the left, but perhaps others as well who'd be uncomfortable with that. But if, if it can be pulled off from Shabana Mahmood's perspective, what a thing to be able to say that you've been able to address some of the fundamental concerns that some critics of it have, whilst retaining what advocates of it see as the advantages of it.

Adam Fleming (27:16)

And what sort of changes are they talking about in Strasbourg, Dom?

Dominic Casciani (27:18)

In essence, what they're talking about is coming up with political language to rewrite the European Convention would, would take a million years because you've got to get all, all the member states to agree to it and then all, all those individual parliaments and assemblies to vote it through. You know, I mean, that's just the nature of how international law works. Slowly. Yeah. What they want is a political declaration, which is something which Strasbourg has only rarely done. But a political declaration is basically where everybody comes together and says, right, politically speaking, we are going to say that the right to family life, Article 8 now means this, so that when individual countries are facing, for instance, like in the UK, an awful lot of claims under Article 8 to stay in the UK. Yes, I admit I've come here illegally,

Adam Fleming (28:03)

but I've made a family, but I've

Dominic Casciani (28:05)

made a family here. The aim is to give those individual governments a way of reinterpreting that so that it actually makes it easier for them to say no. You're basically pushing Article 8 too far. Your case has to fall. Cheerio. Pack your bags. And that's the aim, whilst really protecting the absolutely core cases. So a lot of this comes down to what was the original meaning of Article 8? What do we really want to do to protect here?

Adam Fleming (28:34)

Back to my earlier point, though, about Shabana Mahmood's reforms to refugee status. So this is the idea that basically if you come to the UK to seek asylum because you're fleeing somewhere where you're being persecuted or you're unsafe, you'll still be able to go into the asylum system now, but you will get reassessed every two and a half years to see if it's safe for you to return to your home country. That's a big change to the, the refugee system, isn't it?

Dominic Casciani (28:59)

Yeah. And I think if you speak to most refugee experts outside the government and NGOs, they think it's completely unworkable because, well, where are you going to find the staff who are going to carry out these assessments every couple of years? These staff don't exist. And you say, well, they could just basically repurpose the jobs, divert people. And then of course, well, where do you divert them from? Do you divert them from the immigration removal teams? Because that's the priority is to actually get removals up and that's the kind of trade off internally in the Home Office is difficult. A lot of this work is also actually just, just from a purely human level is very difficult to do. And the Home Office doesn't pay particularly well. You know, it's, it's. The salaries aren't fantastic when you look at them on the jobs board. I'm not saying I look at the jobs board every time, but I had

Adam Fleming (29:48)

a good find contact somewhere.

Dominic Casciani (29:50)

Well, yeah, I had to glance at the Jobs Board before coming up here just to see what was going. And, you know, there were some really interesting jobs going at like policy level and all the rest of it. But you sit there and think, well, what's the comparable job in the private sector? And the salaries can't compete in that way. A lot of these lower grade jobs as a Civil Service grade, not lower quality, but these back office jobs where you're assessing people like asylum casework, they're very, very stressful. You're dealing with very difficult circumstances and very often those policy officers aren't paid a great deal. It's very, very difficult work and stress levels can be very, very high. You know one of the reasons for the backlog was back in about 2018 the stress levels were so high in the casework team they removed a effectively a target for most cases to be dealt with in under six months given the time secret decision within six months. And that was to ease the stress on the individual workers because they were really feeling it Consequence of that those the backlog went up. Yeah. And then we get hotels and in

Adam Fleming (30:54)

terms of the backlog, I'm just checking now figures from September 2025 it's 80,841 people awaiting an initial asylum decision. But that's a 17% decrease from the previous year. So it doesn't look like the backlog

Dominic Casciani (31:09)

is falling except there's now a new backlog where people who've been given a decision are now appealing it and there's. So there's a backlog in the tribunal which deals with that.

Adam Fleming (31:20)

And Chris, I just wonder in the politics of the next few years, I mean you look at the numbers for net migration and let's be honest, the number that has driven the conversation for immigration for a long time now has been the net migration number. So the difference between the number of people arriving in the UK and the number of people leaving, I mean that, that seems to have been

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plunging in the last year or two.

Chris Mason (33:00)

Yeah, it has. And the government has been very keen to both deliver that and then to talk about it, given how salient the issue of the big numbers has been. And obviously that has fed through into the current arguments about indefinite leave to remain, etc.

Dominic Casciani (33:14)

Etc.

Chris Mason (33:15)

There's also a sense from some I speak to in government that, yes, there's that, but at the same time there's the whole issue of small boats, which the numbers of which are vastly smaller, of course, but which where questions around visibility and fairness and also back to Dom's controlling thought. Control are absolutely key. You know that just that sense. We've talked about this on newscast before, that it's just a. Particularly for a. It is that sense of demonstrable failure to control, demonstrable failure of the state to be in control of its borders. But on legal migration, yeah, those numbers are tumbling and tumbling big time now, yes, there are trade offs. Back to our trade offs. Thought around what that might mean economically, particularly in particular sectors and at what point and for how long do you have those numbers at a lower level before the argument starts happening kind of in the opposite direction. But the government would be delighted to be able to start to dilute the salience of the migration conversation in the public debate conscious. There's two strands to it, but if you can dilute one of them for at least a little while, until, as I say, the argument probably starts happening in the opposite direction, they would regard that as a. As a big win.

Dominic Casciani (34:39)

Can I just tell you both just a couple of anecdotes, things which have been unusual, but I've experienced where the Home Office has been less concerned to talk about control and been more concerned, unusually, to talk about care. And that side of it.

Chris Mason (34:55)

Spruce, is that quite recent?

Dominic Casciani (34:56)

Yeah, both of them. So, I mean. So one of them was 2021, when we had the evacuations from Kabul during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And we all knew that effectively hundreds and hundreds of people were due to come in from Kabul on flights organized by the British military and everything. And we all know the background to whether or not that was a shambles or not. But the point was, here's the thing that I thought was remarkable about that. Very late on the night before the first flight or the second, I beg your pardon? I think it was the second flight was due to come in for Heathrow. I got a call from an official Home Office saying, do you want to come to Heathrow at silly o' clock tomorrow morning because the Home Secretary is going to be there to see these Afghan families coming in. I said, whoa, really what? She's going to be there, we're going to see this because, like, we've wanted to see this and everything and. Yeah, yeah, come along. Because, you know, she cares a lot about this. She really wants to see these families and to show that the Home Office, you know, can do this stuff. Right. And we were there and it was a very, very moving thing to see. See his families arrive. And I. I have to be, you know, completely candid. The Home Secretary itself was clearly very moved. Pretty. Patel was very moved by what she saw, you know, the human moment. And she spoke to these families and said, you know, we're going to give you a new home and everything. You know, it didn't quite work out that way for a lot of them. A lot of them we've spoken to since are quite angry about what happened after they arrived here. But be it may, that was an example of the Home Office thinking about telling a different story about itself, which is like more of a modern balance. The other one that comes, but that's

Adam Fleming (36:34)

also an example of a new ad hoc humanitarian route for people to settle in the uk. There was a response to, A, a crisis happening and B, a public clamor for something to be done.

Dominic Casciani (36:43)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Adam Fleming (36:44)

And that wasn't the normal immigration system working.

Dominic Casciani (36:47)

No, indeed, indeed. It wasn't. Something which was a little bit more normal, was a couple of years ago, we had the first prosecution of a man for effectively holding the tiller on a small boat coming across the uk, and he was. He was charged with basically contributing to some of the deaths at sea. And he said, well, all I was doing was holding the tiller. And I said, well, no, it's your fault, because you were effectively in charge of the small boats. And he was prosecuted at Canterbury Crown Court. And as part of that, I kept saying to the Home Office saying, well, look, come on, you've got to let us into the facility where all these small boats come in. We don't get to see this place, you know, what the operation is. And to their credit, and there's a particular press officer who I can't name, but he'll know who he is, who worked very, very hard to get us into that place. Right. And to make the arguments on our behalf. And what we saw when we got there was really interesting. What you saw was the control bit. This is where effectively the border starts and we're going to process to you and make sure we've got you in control. And that kind of like, ties in with all sorts of allegations at the time about how those mismanagement of people after they moved into temporary accommodation at a site called Manston at the Road. But that facility, that reception facility which was built, which was built right on Dover Docks, the Home Office officials there, the immigration teams, were very keen to. For us to see actually how much work they put into actually making this a safe environment where they could actually take people who basically have been at risk of drowning and actually make sure they were safe. The building looks like a great big marquee. Was like the warmest thing I've ever been in a sauna. And I'm saying, why is this so warm? And then they said, well, it's because everyone's soaking wet and they've been at sea and we've got to dry them out as quickly as possible in order they don't get hypothermia. And so there is this side of the Home Office where they're taking all this kind of stuff very seriously, but it's very difficult to see. And it's really, really illuminating when you do because you think, okay, they've got all these laws to try and keep people safe, but actually some of this stuff is, you know, it's also about care and attention as well.

Adam Fleming (38:53)

Right, last thought. And it's where we actually started this whole series of that now infamous phrase, the Home Office is not fit for purpose. Just give me both some thoughts on that phrase.

Dominic Casciani (39:03)

So the thing about it in relation to immigration, I think that is a really, really serious, ongoing argument. And I think, you know, tbc, let's see where Shabana Mahmood is able to take them on that and whether they'll really make any change in. And if you think about it, we get to 2029 and the general election around that time, if they have not made serious progress on the small boats, that is still going to be, you know, an albatross around their necks. That, that phrase. I think in relation to other parts of the Home Office, I don't think it's a fair characterization. I think on counterterrorism and national security, the system is pretty impressive, right? It's pretty impressive. Some amazing work's gone on down there down the years. It's, you know, great part of my career has been spent looking at that and I know that other countries look at envy at how the UK runs counterterrorism security operations. I think the real risk on that side, on the security side, though, is, and this is something Danny Shaw said to you is, have they got enough attention on the thing which matters on that side, which is the urgent need for police reform. So much money, bureaucracy and policing. We've got to modernise the police with

Chris Mason (40:14)

the question on that particular policy of whether or not they can do it quickly enough that it doesn't become a live political issue at the next general election, which from their perspective might mean that they fail to complete what they think is a good idea in terms of big thoughts. The thing I would tease out, it's tapping into Dom's controlling thought about control in this episode. And then that line from David Normington, not fit for purpose. I hazard a guess that those four words, just as they have for the last 20 years, will be occasionally sprinkled around the Home Office, fairly or otherwise. Not always fairly, for at least the next 20 years. Because when you are a department seeking control and dealing with things that are so often difficult to control, sometimes that label will be used fairly when policy solutions or whatever are reasonably concluded to be not up to the job. And sometimes it will be used unfairly because perhaps something was set up with the right intentions, as many people would see it, etc, etc, but then for whatever circumstance beyond their control, they're not able to deliver. So I think those four words that were fairly specific in their initial deployment and were never, as we've discovered in this series, meant to publicly see the light of day will forever dance around the front door of the Home Office for as long as the three of us are reporting upon that department.

Adam Fleming (41:39)

And hopefully that's for a very long time yet. I'm gonna end on a very pretentious note in that when I was away on holiday a few weeks ago, I was reading a novel, just one of them, just one of my holidays. Poet who's in hospital because they're really ill and he's thinking about his favorite poem and the reason he loves that poem is because, like, the language is quite simple, but you never feel you've really got it and you keep looking at it and you keep looking at it and you keep thinking that you're nearly going to get to the true meaning of the words, but they keep changing and that's what makes a great poem. And you realize that phrase not fit for purpose is a little bit like that, because as soon as you think you've got to the bottom of it and what it means and what's happening and what's going on, you then realize you haven't. And the Home Office is a bit like that because we'll be looking at it and thinking about it and trying to work out what's going on and how it could be better or where it's getting worse forever. And also the other thing about Fit for Purpose is that suggests there's a world where you can start again with a blank sheet of paper and create something that is fit for purpose. But there's one thing I've learned covering politics these last few decades is like there are very few blank sheets of paper. In fact, there are usually none.

Chris Mason (42:44)

I like these poetry references. I look forward to the next one.

Adam Fleming (42:48)

Next up, the Newscast miniseries on poetry. Dom, thank you very much.

Dominic Casciani (42:52)

Thank you very much, Cheers.

Adam Fleming (42:53)

And Chris, good to hang out with you too, Tara. And that is all for our three part miniseries. We'll be back with some normal episodes of Newscast very soon. Bye bye. Newscast.

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