The Home Office needs to get a grip

London is still in the grip of a spate of violent crimes, a dismal situation that the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, shows little sign of properly addressing. He should take the advice of his predecessor, Boris Johnson. “You cannot be soft on this,” Mr Johnson tells this newspaper today. “You have got to stop them, you have got to search them and you have got to take the knives out of their possession.”

Mr Johnson is correct. But the significant decline in the use of stop-and-search powers is the result of national guidance devised in the Home Office, by a home secretary who is now Prime Minister. The consequence has been rising violent crime not just in London, but nationally, and police warning that they no longer have the confidence to use powers that are legally theirs. The Tories were once the party of law and order. That is now a difficult position to sustain.

The Conservatives also have a reputation for competence, but that is not a word many people would use to describe the Home Office in the wake of the Windrush scandal. The department shows every sign of being in a state of landlocked dysfunction. It made a series of catastrophic errors that may have led to the removal from the country of people who had every right to be here, in the process tarnishing Britain’s reputation as a welcoming nation. It hardly matters who, precisely, was responsible for the decision to destroy the landing cards that could have provided proof of citizenship to people threatened with deportation. The department needs to get a grip.

The issue is urgent. If the Home Office is incapable of handling the immigration status of a small number of the Windrush generation, how is it possibly going to manage whatever system is put in place after Brexit?

Mr Johnson seems to favour a more liberal set-up, in which the UK is more open to talented people, wherever they come from in the world, while being stricter on low-skilled migrants. Others would like to limit high-skilled immigration to give employers more of an incentive to train staff here in Britain. The point of Brexit is that we will have taken back control, with an immigration system that reflects public opinion and our economic requirements.

But for this to work, we will need a Home Office that operates like a well-oiled machine. Right now, it does not seem to operate like anything at all.