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“It’s not that the Home Office is too big. It’s that the brains of many of the people who run it are not big enough,” says one former departmental insider.
Unwieldy, dysfunctional and plagued by poor morale, the Home Office is once again the subject of debate about whether it is beyond repair and should simply be chopped up into two more manageable units.
No 10 is so far showing no appetite for a big restructure, but Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, has acknowledged that she has a turnaround job on her hands along with the new permanent secretary Antonia Romeo.
Politicians have been calling for the Home Office to be split up every couple of years when a major scandal shines a light on its persistent problems such as those exposed in the Windrush and immigration centre abuse scandals.
Karen Bradley, the home affairs committee chair and a former Home Office minister, is the latest to do so over its “failed, chaotic and expensive” system of housing those seeking asylum in hotels run by private contractors.
Currently one of the biggest core departments in Whitehall with more than 50,000 civil servants, those who advocate a split argue there could be one organisation to deal with crime, policing and security, and another to oversee borders and immigration.
It was last reorganised by Tony Blair in 2007, who hived off the Department of Justice with responsibility for courts, prison and probation. At the time, John Reid, then home secretary, was the first to acknowledge that the department was not fit for purpose – and the diagnosis does not appear to have changed in almost 20 years.
Since then many – from Robert Jenrick, the ambitious former Home Office minister, to the Liberal Democrat 2019 manifesto and the Green Party this week – have called for it to be further broken down.
But successive No 10s have come to the conclusion that rearranging the department will not solve its intractable issues that range from where and how to house those seeking asylum to dealing with small boat Channel crossings.
And many Home Office alumni and experts believe that improved leadership and culture change would be more effective than a structural reorganisation.
Nick Timothy, the former Home Office aide to Theresa May, came to the opinion in a recent paper that addressing poor management in the department would be a better use of time than splitting it up.
In a 2023 document, recently released to the Times after a legal challenge, he wrote: “Such a move would cause significant administrative disruption, and at a time when the Home Office faces many urgent challenges it would represent an unnecessary distraction from the delivery of core business.”
He also highlighted a “culture of defeatism”, poor relations with other departments, “overly defensive” lawyers, a reluctance by senior officials to tell “difficult truths” to ministers, and a disconnect between officials working in operational roles and those working on policy as priorities for change.
Despite her different political position from Timothy, Mahmood appears to have taken his criticisms seriously, saying the report from 2023 was “damning”.
At the same time, recommendations for systemic change at the Home Office to protect migrants from its poor decision making were made in a report after the Windrush scandal, but a number of them have not been implemented – including the recommendation for a migrant commissioner – and the unit in charge of transformation has since been disbanded.
Heloise Dunlop, a researcher at the Institute for Government, said many “deep-rooted and deep-seated problems” remain. “If you just move the problems to another department you are not necessarily solving the issues inherent with a particular policy area and you might be taking up so much time with a machinery of government change,” she said.
She also acknowledged that the Home Office was in an “incredibly high-pressure, rapid policymaking situation, especially in asylum policy which is a difficult space for any department to be in”.
Dunlop added: “No part of the Home Office’s brief is easy to deal with but it does have institutional problems that doesn’t make it easy for it to work to tackle these issues it’s facing.”
With pressure from the right by the Tories and Reform over the bill for asylum hotels, and from the left by the Green party over the government’s “destructive and hostile” approach to migrants, it may be possible for the government to blame dysfunction at the Home Office for some of its problems on asylum and migration.
But having identified that the Home Office is “set up to fail”, Mahmood will have to come to a decision about whether to attempt a long-term transformation of the department or continue persistent fighting fires.
