Speeches and Statements

Home Office Reform

Statement to the House of Commons by John Reid, then Home Secretary, on Home Office Reform, on 19 July 2006.

Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement about our plans for transforming the Home Office.

I have today placed in the Library a copy of a Reform Action Plan (new window) which gives full details of the changes we intend to make.

All political change should start with values and objectives.

The Home Office exists to protect the key elements of civilised society in this country. To reduce fear and increase security, from global terrorism to local cohesion in our streets and communities. From justice and fairness through to the protection of opportunities to live life in security.

But the context in which we seek to apply these values is changing fast and fundamentally - creating new and different challenges for the future.

In the last fifteen years we have seen seismic geopolitical changes, ranging from the global to the local.

Globally, the old Cold War froze the world into relative immobility. States were static and frozen, ethnic tensions and religious extremism was repressed, borders were inviolable, and peoples largely static.

The end of the Cold War brought a torrent of new problems and, above all, the challenge of international mobility on a hitherto unimaginable scale. We have seen unprecedented levels of migration with the movement of over 200 million people in 2005, we have seen the development of international terrorism; and the growth of global and organised crime.

Locally too, relative immobility has given way to social and geographic mobility, where the old group allegiances, extended family relationships, and inherited patterns of voting and religious observance have broken down, and with them the old forms of community cohesion.

Moreover, unlike most other Government departments, in this changing context many of the people the Home Office is trying to deal with – prisoners, criminals, illegal immigrants – see it as their primary objective to resist our authority and evade our control.

In the face of these challenges, the Home Office has been in a process of change and reform for some years. The department also now has a more streamlined focus as a result of some of our responsibilities being transferred to other departments.

I pay credit to my predecessors in this Government and the civil servants who worked for them. They took a system designed before the Cold War and improved it in three important ways: additional resources, improvements in technology and legislative and practical solutions.

These improvements have led to notable successes in key areas: crime is down significantly; your chance of being a victim of crime in this country is at its lowest level since 1981; we have record numbers of police numbers and an additional 6,300 Community Support Officers on the streets; asylum applications are now dealt with in two months, rather than in 22 months under the previous Government. The Passport Service, failing just a few years ago, now regularly tops customer service polls, beating leading private sector organisations.

But the underlying systems and practices for dealing with these issues have not changed sufficiently. Many of the fundamentals were designed for a pre-Cold War era and in the face of the huge challenges outlined earlier we have now reached the limit of what can be achieved without a fundamental overhaul.

The Home Office Capability Review, published today, strongly reinforces those views.

We have seen some of these inadequacies surface recently – individual issues of co-ordination, administration and accounts.

In co-ordination, the House knows all too well, for instance, how the release of foreign prisoners challenged systems across the Home Office and criminal justice system, and found them wanting.

In administration, the House will know, for example, that the National Audit Office last year suggested that 283,500 unsuccessful asylum applicants might still be here - excluding dependants and those who claimed asylum before 1994 and after 2004 - reflecting the difficulties that successive Governments have had in removing failed asylum seekers. This is reflected in IND’s caseload of around 400,000 to 450,000 electronic and paper records, which, as the House will also be aware, are riddled with duplication and errors and include cases where the individual has since died, or left the country, or are now EU citizens.

And in accounts, the House will also be aware that the Home Office’s resource accounts for 2004/05 were disclaimed by the National Audit Office.

Mr Deputy Speaker, we have sought to remedy these individual instances. I have today set out in a Written Ministerial Statement our plans to improve the way in which we deal with foreign national prisoners. We will tackle the caseload in IND with the aim of clearing it - not in 25 years, as has been speculated, but in 5 or less. And we will put our books in order. But, as today’s Capability Review shows, we need to go much further in general and fundamental reform.

For all these reasons, I am today setting out plans for an ambitious set of reforms across the department.

We will sharpen the Home Office’s focus on its core purpose of protecting the public through the six key priorities set out in today’s Plan.

We will establish a new top team in the Home Office with a reshaped Home Office Board and 15 immediate changes at Director level - which is over a quarter of all Directors.

We will reshape radically the structure of the Home Office with a major shift in responsibility and resource to the front line. We will fulfil our commitment to reduce the total size of the Home Office strategic and operational headquarters by 30% by 2008. But we can also now make a commitment to a further reduction of 10% by 2010.

The cumulative effect of these changes will be to reduce the size of the headquarters of the Home Office and its agencies from 9,200 in 2004 to 6,500 in 2008 and beneath 6,000, to 5,900, by 2010.

These changes will mark the biggest shift from the centre to the frontline in the Home Office’s history.

We will save £115m per year by 2010 in HQ costs which we will invest in improving front line services.

We will go further. We will establish the Immigration and Nationality Directorate as an Executive Agency of the Home Office with a shadow agency in place by April 2007, with strong accountability arrangements. More details of which I will give in the coming days.

We will establish clear performance frameworks for the operational services of the Home Office – the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, the National Offender Management Service, and the Identity and Passport Service – and hold the heads of those services accountable for performance.

The National Offender Management Service headquarters will be focused on the job of commissioning high-quality services for managing offenders and driving up the performance of the probation and prison services.

As a result, NOMS HQ will get progressively smaller, reducing by 50 per cent by 2010.

We will develop a renewed 'contract' between Ministers and officials, clarifying respective roles and expectations in relation to policy, strategic decisions, operational delivery and management.

We will seek to reduce further the bureaucratic burden on the police and other partners in tackling crime, by implementing simpler performance arrangements for policing, crime and drugs.

We are also launching today a radical reform programme in the Home Office with seven strands of change designed to transform the culture, skills, systems, processes and data of the Home Office.

We have today set out a clear action plan to deliver this reform – and more. By September, we will develop a full implementation programme. An external audit of progress will be conducted in December and annually thereafter.

And in the next few days we will supplement today’s Plan with two further sets of proposals – rebalancing the Criminal Justice System and reforming our Immigration and Nationality Directorate.

Mr Deputy Speaker, we are determined to deliver a confidently led and well managed Home Office, which delivers high quality services that protect the public and better meets their expectations.

I would like to thank my Ministers and senior officials for all the work already put in to the development of our new plans.

I stress that we do not start from year zero – and we will not end up with perfection.

But this is the start of a long-term programme for transforming the fundamental systems of the Home Office. All involved – Ministers, Directors and staff – know the extent of the challenge and that this will not be accomplished overnight. But we are committed to early progress to demonstrate our seriousness to the public and to our stakeholders and staff.

The fundamental change we are seeking will require determination and, above all, endurance. This is the unglamorous hard work of delivering good Government. That is now the task ahead.

View the Home Office Reform Action Plan (new window).