Break up the Home Office for greater efficiency
be polling above the Conservatives on migration issues, that Natalie Elphicke would be a Labour MP, or that the Labour leader would be spending the day in Dover boasting that he would do a better job of stopping the boats than the Government?
One thing hasn’t changed, though. The Home Office is still the behemoth it was back when Ed Miliband was being yelled at for his taste in teacups, and anyone who has come into contact with it in the past decade is still saying it is too big to deliver on immigration, or indeed its myriad other priorities. This week, two Conservative backbenchers, Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien, made the suggestion that many others have made over the past few years: the Home
Office should be split up. Their argument is that there should be a department “whose sole mission is controlling immigration and securing our borders”.
Currently the Home Office also has to deal with policing, fire and rescue, violence against women and girls, counter-extremism, counterterrorism and many other briefs, all of them huge and in a state of flux. It has 28 agencies attached to it. While its civil servants are top notch and committed, the Home Secretary simply has too much to keep an eye on to be able to do any of it particularly well.
This is why the Home Office is normally seen as the graveyard complained that vital reforms on policing have been held up for no reason other than that ministers have had all their attention focused on stopping the boats.
Of course, there are good reasons why the split hasn’t happened yet. Boris Johnson did at one stage plan to split the Home Office into a department of immigration and a smaller Home Office, before he and his team realised that the institutional upheaval it would cause would be so great that it would make it harder to deal with immigration and other post-Brexit priorities in the short-term.
This is an important concern: when Whitehall departments and government agencies are moved around, there is a huge amount of disruption and loss of structures and organisational memory and delivery is seriously affected.
And yet, as with many of the big issues facing Britain, there is never going to be a brilliant time to make these necessary changes. The best time is always when an incoming