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Friday, March 30, 2007

Splitting the Home Office is no solution

The decision to split the Home Office by hiving off the department's judicial functions to a new Ministry of Justice (which will also comprise the current functions of the Constitutional Affairs Department) is superficially appealing. Superficial, because there is no reason to believe that it will result in any improvement in performance in the areas in which the Home Office has failed so badly in recent years.

We have argued before that the failings of the Home Office can only be corrected by a deep-seated cultural change. Those who have expressed concern that the absence of joined up government in the Home Office can hardly be remedied by dividing the department in two are surely correct. While there may be reason to suppose that a properly focused management team might bring some improvements, the most significant problems faced by the department may stem from the mindset which has been inculcated into Home Office staff over a number of years. There is some reason to suppose that a politicised civil service has failed to grasp some of the nettles it needs to, either because it does not believe in its own remit, or because political interference from the government party obliges it to take an overtly political line: if one has an ideological bias against, for example, immigration contols or a hard line attitude against crime, it is not hard to understand how this can get in the way of carrying through a government policy which does have these objectives. Equally the tension caused by overt political interference in civil service administration by party hacks (ther notorious "special advisers") is not necessarily going to be creative: the presentation of government information is particularly likely to suffer in these circumstances.

If this is the case, then it may be some time before some equilibrium is restored in the Home Office, and furthermore, the government would have only itself to blame. The current Labour administration has been notorious for blurring the line between the political and the administrative roles of government, and the integrity of the civil service has been a major casualty of this trend. Confidence needs to be restored in the conduct of government. It is doubtful whether Labour is able to achieve this.

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Splitting the Home Office is no solution