The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has described the Home Office as “not yet fit for purpose” after an internal review from 2023 was released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The report from former Home Office special adviser Nick Timothy, released to The Times following a legal challenge, found a swathe of issues at the department including, a "culture of defeatism”, poor relations with other departments, “overly defensive” lawyers, and a reluctance by senior officials to tell “difficult truths” to ministers.
Timothy’s review, which focused on the immigration system, also found an “unhealthy culture of junior members of staff dictating the actions of senior officials”, inadequate record-keeping, optimism bias and that operational staff were “undervalued and neglected”.
The report, which was commissioned in November 2022 and completed in March 2023, also hit out at “listening circles” during office hours, saying “too much time is wasted” on identity politics and social issues, and criticised the department’s approach to hybrid working.
It also found an aversion among civil servants about joining the Home Office, particularly in areas like immigration which were perceived as “a risk” to their careers.
Mahmood said the “revelations are all too familiar” and the department had been “set up for failure”.
She said “things are now changing and that she will work with the new permanent secretary, Dame Antonia Romeo, “to transform the Home Office so that it delivers for this country”.
Her comments have drawn comparisons with those made in 2006 by then-home secretary John Reid, who said the Home Office was "not fit for purpose" and ordered an overhaul.
'Disappointing': Union boss says report misses the mark
Responding to the findings, FDA general secretary Dave Penman, told Times Radio: “I think what’s disappointing in the report is it doesn’t look at: why are these problems being caused? Why is it in some bits of the Home Office it’s working well, but in the immigration side it isn’t. So if all of these things were true, it would be true across the entire Home Office."
“What you’ve got on that side, in terms of the immigration side, is a lack of clear political leadership," Penman added, noting that there had been nine home secretaries since Theresa May's departure in 2016.
"We’ve had chaotic immigration policies, unrealistic immigration policies, ‘everything is free’ immigration policies, and the blaming of civil servants when those policies fail."
He also criticised “the idea that the problems with our immigration service are caused by listening circles, rather than a failure of policy and political leadership”.
“If that’s what you think is the problem, you’re going to miss the boat when it comes to actually trying to solve the problems that are beset within the Home Office,” Penman added.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “This report was conducted under a previous government.
“The home secretary and permanent secretary are making significant changes to the Home Office to deliver for the UK public to secure our borders, make our streets safer and protect our national security.”
Here are the key findings from the report:
Feedback loop
Timothy, who is now a Conservative MP, found that senior officials "often know too little about the operational reality to adequately inform and advise minister" and that ministers in turn "find it difficult to trust the system to do the things it says it will".
He said officials "then overcompensate by not wishing to tell difficult truths or by providing advice that is overly optimistic, compounding the problem with trust". This “feedback loop” made success “far less likely”, he found.
Timothy picked out the 2022 Manston detention camp crisis as a case study of these failures, with its “fatally overoptimistic” forecasts of how many migrants the camp could process.
Culture of defeatism
The report found that the immigration system consisted of “several confused and conflicting systems working to contradictory ends” which meant “the enforcement of immigration laws is poor and has grown considerably worse in recent years”.
Timothy said this had led to "a culture of defeatism among officers and a sense that high failure rates are an unavoidable fact of life in the system.”
Responsibility vacuum
Timothy warned that "nobody knows who, overall, is responsible for the system”.
One official told him: “Ask what is going on and you get multiple different spreadsheets from multiple people.” Another said: “It takes a team of people weeks to answer a straightforward question.”
Timothy also said councils reported “receiving calls from three different parts of the Home Office about the same issue.”
Neglected operational staff
Operational staff were “undervalued and neglected,” the report found.
It noted that a “grade six official” at headquarters earning around £70,000 “might lead a small team working on policy that is neither a ministerial priority nor subject to significant change”, while an equivalent Border Force official was “responsible for all passenger operations at Heathrow airport”.
Mutual distrust
Timothy also found a “mutual distrust” between the Home Office and other departments.
Officials told him the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Work and Pensions had been “particularly uncooperative” in the Windrush scandal. He said Home Office officials, in turn, presented its proposals to other departments as a “fait accompli”.
One official told Timothy: “Our habit is to seek to do things to others, rather than include them.”
Identity politics
In his criticism of “listening sessions”, Timothy described civil servants meeting during work hours to discuss their feelings about social and political issues, including policies they were responsible for implementing.
He said this culture was “counterproductive, contrary to the spirit of impartiality in the civil service and divisive for those officials who feel unable to challenge the opinions of more strident colleagues”.
Office attendance
Timothy said the department’s policy at the time that staff should attend the office at least 40% the time was “unambitious”.
He also criticised officials for working from home during the “hottest of Home Office crises”, and said senior officials spent too much of their in-office hours at the Home Office’s Whitehall headquarters “rather than among their teams in operational centres such as Croydon, Sheffield and Liverpool”.
Aversion to joining Home Office
Timothy found an aversion among civil servants to join the Home Office’s migration and borders group, as it was perceived "as a dangerous place in which to work with lots that goes wrong and plenty of scrutiny”.
He said other officials avoided these roles because “they disagree with either the principle of immigration control or the policies needed to achieve it”.
Timothy said controversies the department has faced in this area meant morale among staff is "sometimes lower than it should be”.
Defensive lawyers
The report criticised Home Office lawyers for taking a “defensive approach”, with “assessments of likely legal challenge, and even the possibility of defeat” used “as a reason not to do something”.
Timothy also found that poor legal work was undermining cases, with immigration decisions being “quashed by the court on the grounds that they contained errors caused by poor processes and flawed reasoning”.