Criticisms of the Home Office in its various roles abound across the political spectrum. The No Way Home report, commissioned by Carla Denyer MP, summarises the extensive range of Home Office failures in the area of immigration and offers critically examined options for solutions.
A fundamental issue highlighted throughout the report is that asylum and immigration are highly politicised, making the context for reform highly contested.
The report does not deal in detail with how a number of political parties and media outlets contribute to an anti-immigration narrative. Nor is the potential role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in this area assessed. A short report listing all the elements of migration policies and related issues would be little better than a shopping list, so the considered focus on recent government actions in this policy area is welcome.
However, in reading this exemplary report, we should recognise that there can be little doubt that the continuing ‘hostile environment’ towards migrants at the Home Office continues.
The Home Office: a problem of scale
The Home Office is large in scale and in the portfolio of policy areas it covers. It presently leads on migration, passports, drugs policy, crime, policing, and counterterrorism.
Consequently, as the report makes clear, it has the capacity to have negative impacts upon other government departments and agencies and their goals. The Home Office is effectively treating immigration as a security matter rather than a normal feature of advanced industrial societies which are typified by low birth rates and the need for skilled labour. And setting aside the skills and cultural benefits of migrants legitimises discriminatory stances in politics, media, and society.
Despite the benefits of inward migration to the UK, successive governments have been content to show hostility towards migrants in general. We might conclude such behaviour suggests fear of media comment and public opinion.
How people entering the country are housed – whether they are asylum seekers, migrant workers, or students – is not a security issue, but one of basic human need.
The targeting of long-term UK residents in the disastrous Windrush affair, for example, appears like public relations appealing to the worst elements in media and politics rather than any reasonable, humanitarian course of action. And as the report points out, some recommendations in the Windrush Lessons Learned Review of 2018 have yet to be implemented.
No support or reform
The Home Office could hardly have a wider range of critics. Its roles in migration and policing have stimulated aversion amongst stakeholders and the public – aggravating those of vastly different views across a spectrum, from most to least liberal. Studies and reports on various aspects of Home Office functions do not lead to significant change by the Home Office or the Government as a rule.
If a report of 2023 can find the Metropolitan police to be institutionally racist, sexist, and homophobic, one might expect a home secretary to have enacted a comprehensive programme of reforms by now. After all, the Met is partially under the control of the Home Secretary. However, as Gardner’s report mentions, changes in areas of Home Office functions are slow and appear to leave a problematic culture untouched. Discontent and poor morale has inspired union action, including in the Border Force.
Whilst the current Labour Government did remove fire services from the Home Office, no further reforms have been outlined so far.
Failures of policy
Spending £700m on the ill-considered Rwanda deportation scheme was bad enough. Criticisms from the National Audit Office concerning value for money remarkably do not seem to make much impact upon the Home Office.
Ending freedom of movement after Brexit created a more complex and expensive system of visas, controls, and different rights for different groups. This labyrinth is inevitably more expensive than pre-Brexit arrangements.
Very poor housing for asylum seekers is a general problem, as are payments made to victims of unlawful detention; the lack of accountability of outsourcing organisations; health of asylum seekers, including mental health; and disconnection between some Home Office activities and those supporting goals such as securing community cohesion, improved race relations, and integrated neighbourhoods.
Tackling child poverty and homelessness amongst the poorest asylum seekers and refugees requires proactive and humanitarian measures from the Home Office. It certainly does not help that refusal of asylum claims is rising when the backlog of appeals is being pushed ever higher, as if this did not cause extreme stress to individuals and households.
Public opinion matters
Public opinion, despite decades of the encouragement of intolerance from political figures and certain media outlets, cannot simply be ignored. The report notes that, prior to the current government, only the fire service amongst the then functions of the Home Office has had strong public support.
For the public, it is bewildering that their local shops and shopping centres are experiencing unprecedented levels of shoplifting with comparatively little engagement by the police. There is a huge gap between public expectation and what police officers can deliver. One community liaison meeting led by the police which I attended included a police officer listing all the types of crimes he might drive past when being called out to something more serious.
Similarly, the public believes immigration and borders can be controlled to an extent difficult to achieve. Asylum seekers have the right to come to the UK to claim asylum and are not ‘illegal migrants’ despite frequent use of this term. But if Government does not explain this, preferring ‘hostile environment’ language, and policies, those caught up in such a system of abuses will continue to suffer.
How do we solve a problem like the Home Office?
In the context of suggesting solutions, the report does stress the value of planning changes in considerable detail as so many policy areas fall under the Home Office. We might judge that the oft-criticised culture of the Home Office, so long resistant to change, needs rather more revolution than reform.
Liek the rest of government, the Home Office exists, at least in theory, within human rights laws and obligations both national and international. Where liberal immigration initiatives have been implemented – for Ukrainians and Syrians as examples – the Home Office has delivered well despite its general record.
The report has a substantial section on solutions:
Should there be a Home Secretary at all?
The high turnover of MPs in the Home Secretary role and the exceptional range of functions notionally covered by the Home Office raises the question of whether a such wide variety of government policies might be better managed in more than one department.
Suggested reforms
The report advocates the create of a Population, Infrastructure, and Immigration department in government, accompanied by a Department for Community Security. Personally, I think my own idea of a Department for Migration might be more easily understood and could incorporate supporting internal migration to regions and locations where people and skills are more needed.
The community security referred to in the report requires very tight definitions and consideration of more separation between policing and counterterrorism as the public appear to find policing remote and often not easy to access already.
Rebuilding public confidence about policing surely has to be about what people can see in their localities rather than the more abstract, rarely seen actions to resist terrorism. It is certainly reasonable that the Cabinet Office coordinate, plan, and budget these changes. But it would also be reasonable that a wide-ranging scope of stakeholders are able to observe and comment upon such changes so that they may command public support.
The big ask
The final recommendation in the report is by far the most problematic:
“Politicians of all parties must stop demanding the Home Office act as a performance space for symbolic acts of cruelty to migrants and start treating the Department as a serious arena to achieve honest and evidence-based policymaking.”
Since law influencing the behaviour of political parties is limited, with no requirement for them even to be internally democratic, how this recommendation might be implemented is difficult to imagine at present.
Certainly, Conservative, Labour, and Reform parties would need quite extraordinary internal reforms – and probably some form of binding legislation – to achieve the above recommendation. A presumption of liberalism on migration where it rarely exists is optimistic.
What the report might have considered
The report does not discuss the importance of internal migration to address skills shortages and the strength of support for rejoining the EU, which would mean a return to freedom of movement in the European Economic Area. In other words, re-shaping discussion on migration is inextricably bound up with rejoining the EU. Would this also mean increasing the powers, staffing, and impacts of OFCOM upon media outlets and social media?
Around 948,000 long-term immigrants arrived in the UK in the year ending December 2024. However, emigration from the UK was about 517,000, so net migration to the UK was estimated to be 431,000. This is 50% down compared to the previous year.
This excellent report certainly raises many issues a reasonable government should note and act upon. But the use of migration as a political ‘lever’ goes back at least to the 1970s and requires legislative changes and re-shaping public debate over a period of years to counter. The extent to which major political parties have the will to do this is open to question.
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