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Home Office: Reform Action Plan
12.36 pm
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (John Reid): I should like to make a statement about our plans for transforming the Home Office. I have today placed in the Library a copy of a reform action plan which gives details of the changes that we intend to make.
All political change should start with values and objectives. The Home Office exists to protect the key elements of civilised society: to reduce fear and increase security, from global terrorism to local cohesion in our streets and communities, and from justice and fairness to the protection of opportunities to live life in security. However, the context in which we seek to apply those values is changing faster than ever before, and changing fundamentally, creating new and different challenges for the future.
In the past 15 years, we have seen no less than seismic geopolitical changes, ranging from the global to the local. Globally, the old cold war had frozen the world into relative immobility. States were frozen, ethnic tensions and religious extremism was repressed, borders were inviolable, and peoples were largely static. The end of the cold war brought a torrent of new problems and, above all, the challenge of international mobility on a hitherto unimaginable scale. We have seen unprecedented levels of migration, with the movement of more than 200 million people in 2005, the development of international terrorism— [ Interruption. ] That is hardly a laughing matter. We have also seen the growth of global and organised crime.
Moving from the global to the local, relative immobility has given way to social and geographic mobility, whereby the old group allegiances, extended family relationships and inherited patterns of voting and religious observance have broken down, and with them the old forms of community cohesion. Unlike most other Government Departments, we find that in this changing context many of the people whom the Home Office is trying to deal with—prisoners, criminals, and illegal immigrants—see it as their primary objective not to co-operate with the Government but to resist our authority and evade our control.
In the face of those challenges, the Home Office has been in a process of change and reform for some years. The Department now has a more streamlined focus as a result of some of our responsibilities being transferred to other Departments. I give credit to my predecessors and the civil servants who worked with them for facing those challenges. They took a system that was designed before the cold war and improved it in three important ways: through additional resources, improvements in technology and legislative and practical solutions.
Those improvements have led to notable successes in key matters. Crime is down significantly—the chance of being a victim of crime in this country is the lowest since 1981. We have record numbers of police and an additional 6,300 community support officers on the streets. Asylum applications are now tackled in two months, as opposed to 22 months under the previous Government. The UK Passport Service, which was failing just a few years ago, now regularly tops customer service polls, beating some leading private sector organisations. It is a shining example of transformation, and what can be achieved.
However, the underlying systems and practices for dealing with those issues have not changed sufficiently. Many of the fundamentals that underlie the systems in the Home Office were designed for a pre-cold war era. In the face of the huge challenges that I outlined earlier, we have now reached the limit of what can be achieved without a fundamental overhaul. The Home Office capability review, which is published today, strongly reinforces those views.
Some of the inadequacies have surfaced recently—in co-ordination, administration and accounts. In co-ordination, the House knows only too well—I do not have to rehearse the matter—how the release of foreign prisoners challenged systems across the Home Office and the criminal justice system, and found them wanting.
In administration, the House knows that, for example, the National Audit Office last year suggested that 283,000 unsuccessful asylum applicants might still be here—excluding dependants and those who claimed asylum before 1994 and after 2004—reflecting the difficulties of successive Governments in removing failed asylum seekers. That is reflected in the immigration and nationality directorate’s case load of around 400,000 to 450,000 electronic and paper records, which, as hon. Members also know, are riddled with duplication and errors, and include cases of individuals who have since died or left the country, or are now EU citizens.
As for accounts, the House knows that the Home Office’s resource accounts for 2004-05 were disclaimed by the National Audit Office. We have sought to remedy those individual instances. I have today set out in a written ministerial statement, through my hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality, our plans to improve the way in which we deal with foreign national prisoners. We will tackle the case load in the IND with the aim of clearing it—not in 25 years, as has been suggested, but in five or less. We will put our books in order. However, as today’s capability review shows, we need to go much further in general and fundamental reform.
For all those reasons, I am today setting out plans for an ambitious set of reforms across the Department. They are outlined in the document that we published today, and I shall highlight some of them. We will sharpen the Home Office’s focus on its core purpose of protecting the public through the six key priorities set out in today’s plan. We will establish a new top team with a reshaped Home Office board and 15 immediate changes at director level—that is more than a quarter of all directors.
We will reshape radically the structure of the Home Office, with a major shift in responsibility and resource to the front line. We will fulfil our commitment to reduce the total size of Home Office strategic and operational headquarters by 30 per cent. by 2008—and today I can also tell hon. Members that I am making a commitment to a further reduction of 10 per cent. in headquarters staff by 2010.
The
cumulative effect of these changes will be to reduce the size of the
headquarters of the Home Office and its agencies from 9,200 in 2004 to
6,500 in 2008 and to 5,900 by 2010. These changes will mark the biggest
shift from the centre to the front line in the Home
Office’s history. We will thereby save £115 million a year
by 2010 in HQ costs, which we will invest in improving front-line
services.
We will go further by establishing the immigration and nationality directorate as an executive agency of the Home Office—a shadow agency will be in place by April 2007—with strong accountability arrangements. I shall give more details of this in the next few days. We will establish clear performance frameworks for the operational services of the Home Office—the immigration and nationality directorate, the National Offender Management Service, and the identity and passport service—and hold the heads of those services accountable for operational performance. The National Offender Management Service headquarters will be focused on the job of commissioning high-quality services for managing offenders and of driving up the performance of the probation and prison services. As a result, the headquarters of NOMS will get progressively smaller. We will reduce it by 50 per cent. by 2010.
We will develop a renewed contract between Ministers and officials, clarifying respective roles and expectations in relation to policy, strategic decisions, operational delivery and management. We will seek to reduce further the bureaucratic burden on the police and other partners in tackling crime, by implementing simpler performance arrangements for policing crime and drugs.
We are also launching today a radical reform programme in the Home Office, with seven strands of change designed to transform the culture, skills, systems, processes and data of the Department. Today we have set out a clear action plan to deliver this reform, and more. By September, we will develop a full implementation programme. An external audit of progress will be conducted in December and annually thereafter. In the next few days, we will supplement today’s plan with two further sets of proposals: on rebalancing the criminal justice system and on reforming our immigration and nationality directorate.
We are determined to deliver a confidently led and well managed Home Office which delivers high-quality services to protect the public and better meets their expectations, and which builds through transformation on the improvements that have been achieved so far. I would like to thank my predecessors, my Ministers and my senior officials for all the work that has already been put into the development of the Home Office and into our new plans.
I stress to the House the fact that we are not starting from year zero, and that we do not expect perfection at the end of the process. This is the start of a long-term programme for transforming the fundamental systems of the Home Office. All those involved—Ministers, directors and staff—know the extent of the challenge, and that this will not be accomplished overnight. However, we are committed to making early progress to demonstrate our seriousness to the public and to our stakeholders and staff. The fundamental change that we are seeking will require determination and, above all, endurance. This is the unglamorous hard work of delivering good government. That is now the task ahead, and I commend the plan to the House.
David
Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con): I thank the Home
Secretary for giving me advance sight of his statement, much of which
we agree with. We
wonder, however, why it has taken 10 years for some of these lessons to
be learned. I was quite surprised by the right hon. Gentleman’s
undertaking—which I did not see in the original
statement—to clear up in five years the backlog that the Home
Office faces. Working on today’s numbers, that implies that it
will be deporting a net figure of 80,000 people a year, and I would be
interested to hear the Home Secretary confirm that that is the
case.
In the past 12 weeks, we have witnessed a serial catastrophe in the Home Office, with daily disclosures of massive failures of policy. The issues have included the release of foreign prisoners, murderers on probation, sex-for-visas scandals, dangerous prisoners being put into open prisons, hundreds of thousands of failed asylum seekers, and massive numbers of illegal immigrants.
This has been a spectacular serial failure of government, the like of which has not been seen in modern times in this country. Each and every failure that we have talked about in the past 12 weeks has serious implications for ordinary decent British citizens. At the very least, the Government have wasted hard-earned taxpayers’ money and put excessive pressure on housing and public services. At worst, they have threatened public safety and even, in some cases, national security.
We need to understand why that has happened; the wrong analysis of the problem will lead to the wrong conclusion. The Home Secretary puts it down to the end of the cold war, and with it the rise in asylum seekers and other threats. But that does not explain why Britain, which is further away from the failed states than any other European state—except Ireland—and which is an island and therefore harder to get into, with borders that are easier to control, has had the second highest number of asylum applicants in the world in the past five years.
The reason is simple. The new Labour Government—I see that the previous Home Secretary but two is on the Treasury Bench—repealed Conservative laws allowing us to send people straight back to safe countries on the so-called white list. They terminated Conservative welfare arrangements designed to deter economic migrants, and failed to negotiate a continuation of the right to return asylum seekers to France. I see that the right hon. Gentleman is nodding. They later tried to reinstate some of those laws, but too late. In the following five years, more than a quarter of a million failed asylum seekers—failed asylum seekers, not real asylum seekers—tried to enter Britain, with almost 90,000 in one year alone. That, along with political decisions to increase net immigration by nearly 200,000 a year and not to strengthen our borders, is why the immigration and nationality directorate was overwhelmed.
Of course there have been failures of management, but there have been much bigger failures of political leadership. The same is true elsewhere in the Home Office. We have seen the disaster over foreign prisoners, the debacle over putting dangerous prisoners in open prisons, and the catastrophe of murderers released after a 25-minute telephone call and going on to murder innocent people. All those came from the same cause—a political decision not to build enough prison places.
The Government’s own review showed that they needed 100,000 prison places by 2010. Even after the 8,000 new places that I understand the Home Secretary will announce tomorrow, they will still have less than 90,000 places by 2012. Again, there are failures of management, but in a system put under intolerable pressure by failures of political leadership. We could go on. We have a police force so overburdened with central targets and politically correct red tape that its detection rates dropped to an all-time low two years ago. As a result, violent crime is spiralling out of control, as we will no doubt hear tomorrow when the crime figures come out, putting extra pressure on the police, the courts, the prisons and the Home Office.
Of course, Ministers themselves have put intolerable pressure on the Home Office. Since 1997 there have been more than 1,300 new regulations, many hundreds of initiatives and over 50 major Home Office Bills—more than the total number of Criminal Justice Bills in the previous century. Some of those Bills were useless—not in my opinion, but in the Government’s. In the case of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, 110 of its provisions never came into force. Seventeen more were repealed before they could come into force, and another 39 were repealed after they came into force. That is by no means the only example; there are many others. Massive amounts of work were piled on to the Home Office, for no use whatever.
This is not a Department that is impossible to run. Since 1997, as the Home Secretary mentioned in his statement, it has given up responsibility for 24 policy areas. It has less to do in straight policy terms than it had. Under the burdens of a target-driven, red tape-driven, bureaucratic, top-heavy approach pursued by this Government, however, its central staffing has doubled—and is it not revealing that the number of press officers has trebled ?
It is true that some of the Home Secretary’s proposals have merit. For example, the agency proposals for the IND—I think that I disagree with my ex-leader on this—may improve some aspects of its management. It may, however, make communication and co-operation with other parts of the Home Office more difficult, so none of these things come free. It will certainly not absolve Ministers of responsibility for effectiveness and delivery.
The main issue is that the Home Office is a Department in severe crisis, as a direct result of Government policy. It is no hyperbole to say that the crisis is the biggest faced by a Department in modern times. The failures are multiple and massive, and will have a serious impact on the public. We all hope that the Home Secretary’s measures succeed. Even if they do, however, they are unlikely to resolve problems of the size that his Department faces. And whatever they do, they will not allow him to sweep a political problem under a bureaucratic carpet.
John Reid: I shall try to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s questions—although I must say that he asked very few. I do not, however, begrudge him his entitlement to make a statement on the matter.
On the clear-up rates, I think
that his long division was based on the false premise that every case
file
equals a person. That is a wrong assumption on which to work. As I said
earlier, some case files are duplicates, and some represent a decision
that someone can stay here but we have not been able to get in touch
with that person to tell them. In some cases, the person concerned may
be dead, or may be from a state that has now become part of Europe. In
some cases, the limited evidence that we have suggests that the person
may have left of their own accord.
I did say that we would aim to clear up the caseload legacy in five years—or, I hope, less time than that. That is because we have made significant progress since the right hon. Gentleman’s party was in power. We no longer take 22 months to deal with a case; we deal with it in eight weeks— [Interruption.] I think that Opposition Members will accept that I am always ready to admit our inadequacies; they should not be so sensitive when I point out some of the inadequacies of the Conservative Government. The truth is that we have made massive progress in recent years to reform the asylum system. We have reduced applications by 72 per cent., and we have reduced the time taken to deal with them from 22 months to two months.
The right hon. Gentleman asked why so many asylum applicants come to Britain. First, we have the English language. Secondly, we have had a more prosperous economy than anywhere else. Thirdly, his facts are wrong—in terms of asylum applications per thousand, the rate of application in this country is no greater than that in many European countries, and less than in some, including France. We should get our facts right. The truth is that there are inadequacies, and as I said earlier, one of the greatest is that the Home Office’s fundamental systems were made for a different age. That created problems for everyone, including the last Home Secretary under the Conservative Government.
It is just not fair to suggest that my predecessors did not have major achievements. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, when he was Home Secretary, halved the time taken for persistent young offenders to be dealt with in the court system. He introduced a ban on handguns and the first race relations legislation in 25 years, and developed and introduced antisocial behaviour orders. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) brought in a record number of police officers, and created community support officers, neighbourhood policing teams and the street robbery initiative that did so much to reduce crime. My right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) established the Serious Organised Crime Agency, dealt with 7/7 and its aftermath with great statesmanship, and achieved the tipping-point target whereby, for the first time in the past 20 years, we are deporting more failed asylum seekers than we are importing. It is a mixed balanced sheet, but to pretend that the previous Conservative Government achieved anything like what my three predecessors did is to fantasise about political history.
Mr.
John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab): My right hon.
Friend’s plans are certainly bold. One of the problems with the
immigration and nationality directorate in recent years has been not
that it has failed to meet its targets, but that it has met its targets
and failed to deal with other problems, such as foreign prisoners, on
which common sense requires action.
Agencies are usually managed against targets. The great challenge to the
Government and my right hon. Friend’s proposals is to ensure
that the new agency does not just deliver on a narrow set of targets
laid down by Ministers, but deals with the whole problem.
Does my right hon. Friend accept that at the core of his proposals is a belief that the slimmed-down centre of the Home Office will be able to offer a higher quality of leadership from officials, and—if I may say so—a less ministerial impatience and desire to intervene than we have perhaps been able to show in the past?
John Reid: The answers to my right hon. Friend’s questions are yes, yes and yes, particularly on the last point. If we want to encourage a spirit and culture of acceptance of responsibility and accountability among officials, that will require us to tolerate a degree of risk-taking on the part of officials; and that will require a degree of self-denying ordinance when such risks result in something going wrong, as they inevitably will. Hopefully, however, those tactical mistakes will be to the benefit of an overall strategic change in the systems, giving us more effective and efficient management and output.
The reason we want to do this is that, even after so many years in government, we should take upon ourselves the process of renewal of government, of Government Departments and of Government delivery—in a self-critical and, we hope, a constructive fashion, but also in a way that delivers from the centre what people want, rebalances our criminal justice system as people want it to be rebalanced, and provides a fair and effective system of managed migration that people can see to be both fair and effective. At the end of the day, we must show the public that we pay some attention to their concerns about government and governance.
Mr. Nick Clegg (Sheffield, Hallam) (LD): I thank the Home Secretary for allowing advance sight of his statement.
Given the suspense involved in awaiting this important blueprint for reform of the Home Office and given that the Home Secretary has been working on it for 18 hours a day, I must say that I am somewhat underwhelmed by what appears at first glance to be a hotch-potch of managerial doublespeak and wildly implausible targets. Some of it, of course, is welcome—we have been calling for the creation of a semi-independent agency from the immigration and nationality directorate for a long time, and we obviously welcome it now—but can the Home Secretary explain why he did not go further and look at models in other European countries and in north America, where the monopolistic functions of the Home Office are divided between a justice ministry dealing with judicial issues and a separate ministry dealing with police and security matters? That model works extremely well in large parts of the western world; perhaps the Home Secretary could reflect on it further.
I was
intrigued to learn that the end of the cold war is now held to be at
least partly responsible for some of the woes in the Home Office, but I
wonder why the unrelenting flow of headline-grabbing legislation from
this Government—more than 50 Bills and more than 1,000 new
offences in under a decade—was not mentioned in the statement.
Surely the Home Secretary accepts that no Home Office, however
structured or
however reorganised, can work effectively as long as Ministers push it
from pillar to post on the back of a volley of half-baked media
gimmicks and legislative
initiatives.
I believe that the Home Secretary announced today a new contract between Ministers and civil servants. Will he confirm that his side of the bargain will be to guarantee that he will not announce any new initiatives at the behest of newspaper editors until he has discussed them in full with his civil servants?
In the light of what is widely regarded as a bold if somewhat implausible claim that nearly half a million failed asylum seekers will be deported in less than five years, will the Home Secretary agree to look at the example of Canada, where a totally independent asylum agency has been created? Its functions are separate from the other functions of the immigration service, and it has proved spectacularly successful in dealing—free from political interference—with a highly sensitive area of public policy.
John Reid: I take it that when the hon. Gentleman spoke of the making of policy, he was referring to the protection of children. May I remind him gently that I was an Opposition spokesman on children 15 years before he entered the House? I spend considerable time thinking about these matters before I announce them.
As for the implausibility or otherwise of the performance objectives, I think it best to make them public and to let people judge, according to the milestones that we are also making public, whether we achieve them. I thought that, as an adherent to the policy of open government and good delivery, the hon. Gentleman would welcome that. As for management practices, I cannot pretend to be a management expert. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is one, but I assure him that I have full confidence in my permanent secretary and the top leadership, and in the external management experts who advise them.
The hon. Gentleman was a little churlish to diminish the efforts of many good people in the Home Office who have worked very hard for the past two months. They worked long hours, including weekends, to produce this as well as two other plans. The fact that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) was able to welcome many of the proposals is testimony to the good sense of those proposals.
The hon. Gentleman spoke of a monopolistic tendency in Departments. I should have expected him to welcome the fact that we are moving from the centre to the front line, talking about devolving accountability and responsibility, moving from centrally controlled to agency status and introducing contestability, which may result in a degree of privatisation in certain areas. What the hon. Gentleman said makes me wonder which document he has been reading. Nothing in this document moves towards monopoly; everything in it moves in the other direction. It may be the right or the wrong direction, but I should have thought that he would be able to discern the direction of travel.
The hon. Gentleman cast aside,
rather dismissively, any suggestion that the cold war could have had
huge geopolitical consequences that caused problems for all
Departments. I remind him that my first job in Government involved
reconfiguring the whole of the
British armed forces because of the changes brought about by the cold
war. It has affected all our lives. The extension of Europe to the
east, which the hon. Gentleman will have welcomed—eight more
countries, and possibly another two, with all the migration that that
involves—is a direct result of it. Those are not insignificant
events. We ought to start facing up to the challenges that the new
world presents to us, and that is what I am trying to do
today.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. A good many Members are seeking to catch my eye. May I appeal for brisk questions, and perhaps for brisk answers from the Home Secretary?
Mr. Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South) (Lab): As regards asylum, may I put it to my right hon. Friend that with all the talk of targets, tipping points and agencies, we are in danger of losing sight of the fact that we are dealing with human beings? Most people in this country are not as mean and nasty as most of our loathsome tabloids would have us believe. They do not want children who have lived in this country throughout their conscious lives sent back to destitution in countries such as the Congo, Angola and Sudan. May I therefore express the hope—
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. That is enough to be going on with.
John Reid: My hon. Friend made some of those points recently in an Adjournment debate, the report of which I read with interest. I have a degree of sympathy with what he has said, but I hope he understands that the aim of those of us who talk of providing a fair and effective system of managed migration is partly, at least, to ensure that when genuine cases such as those that he mentioned arise, everyone in society accepts that fair and genuine decisions have been made. The problem at the moment—with so many unknowns, so many illegal immigrants and a system that so many people feel is not fair and effective on the immigration side and not balanced in favour of the law-abiding majority on the criminal justice side—is that the legitimacy of taking decisions gets undermined, but that is the balance that we are trying to strike.
Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con): Does the Home Secretary recognise that his proposals for transferring or transforming the immigration and nationality directorate of the Home Office into an agency will limit his ability to intervene as part of what he rightly described as carrying out the “unglamorous” business of good government if things continue to go wrong—if, for example, the fears expressed by the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) about the effect of targets prove to be justified? Is that the Home Secretary’s objective? Does he agree, given that he has described that part of the Home Office as not fit for purpose, that it would be better for him to continue to accept personal responsibility for its future performance rather than to offload it to an agency?
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