Blaming the tools?

9th March 2007
By Jon Davis

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The Home Office is in turmoil. A fortnight after he succeeded Charles Clarke as Home Secretary in May 2006 after the foreign prisoners scandal, the ultra-Blairite John Reid told the House of Commons’ Home Affairs Select Committee that, while he did not consider the Home Office to be ‘intrinsically dysfunctional’, he did ‘believe that from time to time it is dysfunctional in the sense that it does not work, and it does not work within or across silos’. He went as far as to dismiss the Immigration and Nationality Directorate as ‘not fit for purpose’.

The months following these observations have not been easy for the home secretary. Media revelations have included how details of 27,000 criminals convicted abroad (including 500 individuals deemed serious) were not merged into UK databases, a third terrorism suspect held under a government control order absconded, that the police have lost track of hundreds of convicted sex offenders and Dr Reid himself was forced to advise courts to think carefully before they recommended imprisonment as the prison population reached breaking point.

The pressure on him has been intense and in late January 2007 he was forced to reject repeated calls for his resignation, saying that he needed ‘two and a half years’ to put it all right. The Home Office’s travails did not begin with Dr Reid but have accelerated under him. Understandably, morale is said to be at an all time low and a ‘culture of fear’ for civil servants pervades the department.

Among other reform-minded actions, it appears that the difficulties have led Dr Reid to the analysis that the Home Office is indeed ‘intrinsically dysfunctional’ and he has become a passionate proselytiser for the urgent dismemberment of the historic office.

Created in 1782, the Home Office has undergone frequent change with functions coming and going, yet the current proposals are fundamentally unprecedented.

If the plans come to fruition the Home Office will be responsible for counter- terrorism, police and immigration — to form a national security department — while prisons and probation (the National Offender Management Service) would be merged with the bulk of the the former Lord Chancellor’s Department (LCD), recreated in 2003 as the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA), covering the courts and legal aid to form a ministry of justice — a division, according to Peter Riddell of The Times, ‘between pre- and post-arrest’.

The Home Secretary is doing all he can to secure the split with strong support from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer (another keen supporter of Tony Blair). Dr Reid has presented his proposals to Cabinet and has had two meetings with Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister-in-waiting. The whispers of Whitehall say that a split will indeed take place, but that the home secretary is encountering robust resistance. This has taken several forms.

The most immediate criticism was the thoughtful reaction of the former home secretary David Blunkett, known for his belief in strong government. Mr Blunkett warned that ‘we should think twice, three times, five times before doing it’.

Mr Blunkett’s remarks have been echoed publicly by Charles Clarke and privately by other senior ministers and officials with Peter Riddell writing that ‘it is hard to find anyone at a senior level who favours such a … bizarre split’.

The machinery of government is, and always has been, the direct responsibility of the prime minister who can do with it as he or she chooses. Tony Blair has made many changes both big and small during his decade in power, some of which have worked wonderfully like the granting of operational independence over the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England (perhaps due more to Mr Brown but it was the premier’s final say so), some of which have encountered more rocky roads of which the shift from the LCD to the DCA comes to mind (amongst other problems was the ignorance that it required changes to primary legislation).

It is entirely possible that the perceived botching of major machinery of government changes like that which created the DCA has engendered a certain amount of reform fatigue.

Moreover, with this particular set of proposals, there are a great many senior officials, both recently retired and still in post, who on these issues have a much greater experience than Dr Reid. A most senior one who went public with his thoughts was Sir David Omand, formerly permanent secretary to the Home Office, Cabinet Office and the Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator, who observed ‘that for the last few years the Home Office has had the mission of helping create ‘a safe, just and tolerant society’ with responsibilities that go much wider than security. I believe that it is important that the Home Office retains that ethos, and does not just become a State Security Ministry’.

Officials with international experience privately back this analysis of the way many foreign countries organise their justice and security affairs while the current extreme Islamist terror threat demands input right across government, not just from one or two sources which may well encourage turf fights.

The counter-terrorism aspect is said by Dr Reid to be the motivating force of the proposed cleavage. He argues that much more needs to be done to meet the terrorist challenge, that the Home Office needs to rid itself of other functions in order to concentrate fully on it and that it simply cannot wait six months for Mr Brown to take over as al-Qaeda continues to plot (the Home Secretary must understand that the Security Service MI5, who report to him, are at ceaseless work to counter precisely this).

The Brown aspect is hugely important, as it has been rumoured that he is busy planning significant changes to the machinery of government, perhaps of the magnitude of the Bank of England bombshell, once he arrives at No. 10. But Mr Blair remains premier and if he is persuaded that a Home Office split has to happen right now, it will do so. The nagging doubt will be that Mr Brown could undo it in six months time.

That counter-terrorism needs an overhaul is broadly accepted by both the temporary and permanent sides of government. Yet until very recently the belief was that a newly beefed-up co-ordination of counter-terrorism would be housed in the Cabinet Office, which accommodates several other co-ordinating units, perhaps most notably the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Senior officials have thought that the co-ordination of counter-terrorism will eventually find its home at the centre. As Sir David Omand has pointed out, ‘organisational changes that are seen to be going with the grain of history tend to produce longer lasting results than the discontinuities introduced by sudden shifts of direction. The law of unexpected consequences tends to apply to short cuts.’

It is interesting to note that when faced with the Cold War, another threat that lasted a generation as the current one is also thought to do, no new department was created and the Cabinet Office was used extensively in co-ordinating the various Whitehall fiefdoms involved.

A wider issue regarding the proposed split is another that Mr Blunkett highlighted when he argued that ‘the Balkanisation of government needs to be taken into account: smaller and smaller departments ... with the only really powerful positions held by the prime minister and chancellor’.

Whatever one thinks of Mr Blair, the concerned custodian of classic Cabinet government he is not. He has taken Margaret Thatcher’s autocratic conduct of Cabinet business much further than she ever dared and it is clear that he chooses to avoid open discussion with his colleagues, bar a very few hugely important decisions like the invasion of Iraq (when all the relevant facts, figures and nuances were demonstrably not provided to Cabinet ministers).

Mr Brown’s conduct here is also to be criticised by traditionalists over his hoarding of information and decision-making in what is a ‘twin stellar government’.

The practice of decisions being taken away from Cabinet may be inevitable in an ever more technocratic, complex and fast-moving world. So may be the process whereby individual ministerial responsibility is being eroded to the extent that there is little discretion left for a minister by entities such as the prime minister’s Delivery Unit which single-mindedly focuses on comparatively few priority outcomes to the detriment of a department’s overall responsibility.

The British constitution as previously understood has changed greatly in the past decade and many are uneasy or downright antipathetic to how it is currently operated. The Home Office split is another element to this debate.

Civil servants advise and ministers decide but it is a brave minister who ignores the considered weight of Whitehall opinion on such a technical area. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the timing of the proposed major reform to the Home Office’s responsibilities has at its heart significant political impetus — to protect Dr Reid and pre-empt Mr Brown.

Jon Davis teaches at Queen Mary, University of London, and is Assistant Director of the Mile End Institute.

Filed Under: Reform, Home Office, Gordon Brown, John Reid
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