The Report
1.The Committee published its report on policy options for future migration from the European Economic Area on 31 July. In accordance with the Government’s commitment, wherever possible, to answer select committee reports within two months (recorded in the ‘Osmotherley Rules’1) we expected to receive the Government’s reply to our report by 1 October.
2.On 17 September, however, we received a letter from the Home Secretary indicating that he did not “propose to respond now to the specific recommendations and conclusions” in our report because we had described it as an interim report.2 We replied on 19 September to draw the Osmotherley Rules to the Home Secretary’s attention, and provided examples demonstrating that the Government has responded to interim reports in the past. We advised the Home Secretary that we consider it unacceptable that the Government should seek to pick and choose which recommendations by a select committee it will respond to, and when it will reply.3 Since the Government was at that time still within the two month window following publication of our report, we confirmed that we expected to receive a considered reply by 1 October.
3.That response was delivered to us late, on 12 October. We have appended it to this Report. We are disappointed that the Government has responded in such a cursory manner to our report which the Home Secretary, in his letter of 17 September, had described as “extremely valuable”.
4.We are particularly concerned that the Government has shown so little inclination to engage with scrutiny of its preparations for Brexit. We have previously written to the Home Office about the Government’s dilatory approach to our work on UK-EU security co-operation after Brexit: in that instance it took more than five months for the Government to reply to our report of 21 March.4 Having initially sought to avoid responding to our migration report, the Government response in this instance is derisory. As the UK’s withdrawal from the EU approaches, the Home Office has not shown us that it feels any urgency about addressing these challenges at all.
5.In our migration report in July we concluded that the Government had failed over the two years since the referendum to build a public consensus on migration, to address the risks of polarisation in the migration debate or even to set out the information on its post-Brexit plans for migration which might support the negotiations. The Government’s response has done nothing to change our minds.
1 Cabinet Office, Osmotherly Rules: Giving evidence to select committees – guidance for civil servants, October 2014
2 Letter from the Home Secretary to the Chair of the Committee, 17 September 2018
3 Letter from the Chair of the Committee to the Home Secretary, 19 September 2018
4 Home Affairs Committee, Fourth Report of Session 2017-19, UK-EU security cooperation after Brexit, HC 635;
Home Affairs Committee, Ninth Special Report of Session 2017-19, UK-EU security cooperation after Brexit: Government Response to the Committee’s Fourth Report of Session 2017–19, HC 1566;
Letter from the Chair of the Committee to the Minister of State for Policing and the Fire Service, 5 October 2018
Published: 29 October 2018