Home Office permanent secretary Dame Antonia Romeo has told MPs that her department will require a culture change to avoid repeats of the multi-million-pound failings related to asylum accommodation in recent years.
Members of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee today quizzed Romeo about her new department’s acquisition of the Northeye site in East Sussex in 2023. It was the latest in a succession of failed or only partially successful bids to deliver asylum accommodation, calculated to have cost a combined total of nearly £100m. Northeye was the subject of a damning PAC report earlier this year.
This morning marked Romeo’s first appearance before the committee as Home Office perm sec. She succeeded Sir Matthew Rycroft in the role last month after four years as the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Justice.
Romeo was also asked for her feelings on the Government Internal Audit Agency’s 2023-24 finding of “weaknesses” in the Home Office’s control framework. The GIAA also provided a “limited” opinion on the overall adequacy of the Home Office’s governance, risk management and controls – repeating its assessment from the previous six years.
PAC’s February report on the Home Office’s £15.4m purchase of the Northeye former prison site said there was a “dysfunctional” culture at the department that meant key controls in its processes are “easily abandoned”.
The purchase price was more than double the figure that the site had exchanged ownership for just a year before. It was also agreed without a proper understanding of remediation costs that were subsequently found to be £20m. In December, the Home Office announced that it was no longer planning to use the site to house asylum seekers.
In their February report on Northeye, PAC members said they were “particularly concerned” that then-accounting officer Rycroft had not sought a ministerial direction before the purchase because of how little was known about the risks involved.
Today, Romeo was asked how she plans to strengthen the control environment in the Home Office.
“These issues are cultural issues, so there’s two things that one needs to do," she said. "The first is to make sure that the right processes are in place.”
Romeo said the area she is giving most initial focus to is how accountability is being joined up to conversations happening at the strategic level by the department’s executive committee and the board.
“I think there’s further work to do there. And that is, in a way, a process issue,” she said. “It’s about the risk registers, what is the flow-through, how regularly are you meeting? We do have an executive committee strategic-risk deep-dive every quarter. We look at the risk register every month. That’s not enough because, of course, it’s in the culture.”
Romeo said that she had just introduced a process to the Home Office executive committee that was successful at the MoJ. She said it involved ensuring fortnightly executive committee meetings to look at the single biggest risks facing the department.
“So we always have an urgent business section where we are talking about the things we are most concerned about, and the directors general are sharing the information and data," she said. “Everybody knows not just the thing that they’re worrying about in their area but what we are worrying about collectively. We’ve just started doing that and I have found that useful in the past.”
On culture change, Romeo said officials needed to be “incentivised to worry about compliance” across the whole organisation.
“In lots of areas, we are very effective at risk management. There are some areas in the Home Office where risk management is the bread and butter of what is being done operationally, and in terms of policy advice,” she said. “The question is, how do you make it such that everybody feels incentivised to worry about compliance, to worry about assurance, to do the checks? To make sure they’re flagging things up the chain?”
Romeo acknowledged that effecting such a culture change would be “the work of several months, or maybe years”. However, she said seeds of change had already been sown.
“I think we’re already talking about it and the more we are talking about it and the more we are putting in place the right processes and holding people to account for worrying about those things, the swifter we will see behaviours change," she said.
Asked about the GIAA’s verdict on her department, Romeo said she was “not at all satisfied” with the “limited” assessment of its governance and risk-management arrangements.
But she said that as the Home Office’s new perm sec, four weeks into the job, it was “quite helpful” that the GIAA had set out areas of concern in the organisation’s control environment.
“It does help me identify some of the areas I need to look at,”she said. “I should say that quite a lot of the work has been done already on this in the department.”
Romeo said her predecessor, Rycroft, and current second permanent secretary Simon Ridley had introduced “quite good down-the-line accountability”.
She said there were clear areas of weakness identified by the GIAA where the department needed to go further, citing compliance, risk control, and linking the behaviour in business areas to top strategic oversight.
“These are things that I have seen before in other organisations,” she said. “I feel as though there’s work to do. But, as I say, I do think a lot was done by Simon and my predecessor and the whole of the exco to focus on this already. So we’re not starting from stand-still, but there’s further to go.”
Romeo subsequently told MPs: “I do hope we will get out of our limited internal assurance from the GIAA in some period. I don’t want to set myself a target but soon, in a number of years, one hopes.”
Elsewhere during the hearing, MPs also asked Romeo about fostering cross-government collaboration to reduce international recruitment and encourage companies to invest in and recruit from the UK workforce.
Romeo said there was already a large degree of informal collaboration at the official level, sitting beneath the ministerial-level systems such as cabinet committees and a ‘quad’ which brings together Skills England, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Industrial Strategy Council to develop an evidence-based approach in this area.
But a formal system could support this collaboration to go further, she added.
“The people at the Home Office are brilliant, dedicated, highly committed and working really hard across government. But sometimes, if you don't have a formalised process, things can fall between the gaps," she said.
She cited the example of the Criminal Justice Action Group, chaired by the Ministry of Justice permanent secretary and bringing together the MoJ, Home Office and the attorney general, which has helped to formalise cross-government co-operation across the justice system.