Home Secretary John Reid deserves credit for ingenuity. He normally leaves a department at the first sign of trouble. This time, by splitting up the Home Office, a department is leaving him.
However, cunning should not be confused with wisdom, let alone leadership.
His plan is to create two separate ministries – one for security and one for justice. Mr Reid publicly argued against this idea less than a year ago, only to float it recently through his press advisors. He then spent three months haggling over it with colleagues, quarrelling over ministerial Cabinet rank, responsibility for MI6 and budgetary control.
Ongoing bickering stalled the announcement for three weeks. As late as Wednesday 28 March, it was still touch and go. The Reid Plan was eventually smuggled into the public domain in a written statement on the last Thursday of Parliament before the Easter break. On 29 March, the Home Secretary had to be summoned to give an explanation to Parliament. It is precisely this lack of ministerial leadership that has left one of our great Departments of State in such disarray in the first place.
Mr Reid thinks the Home Office has too much on its plate, but there are two clear facts. First, the Home Office has never had so few responsibilities. Second, it has never been so poorly run. It has been well governed in the past by Home Secretaries of all parties, and it used to be much bigger. It is only over the past three years that ministers have failed to cope.
Communication and co-ordination
The Home Secretary owes his job to the foreign prisoner fiasco. His predecessor, Charles Clarke, was sacked in 2006 because he failed to ensure that the prisoners were duly considered for deportation.
Mr Reid ignored the lessons of communication, co-ordination and prioritisation that led to that debacle. His plan would dislocate the immigration and prison services at the very time when they needed to be more joined up.
In truth, he has only made the department’s problems worse. In January, it was revealed – by chance – that the Home Office had a backlog of 27,500 cases of convictions against British nationals, all of the offences committed abroad but not recorded. Ministers said they knew nothing about the backlog. They conveniently forgot about the police letter explicitly warning of the seriousness of the problem. The deputy chief constable said: “I recognise that this is something the Home Secretary would wish to be briefed about given the obvious links to foreign national prisoners.”
How would dividing up responsibility for Court and police records help in refreshing ministerial memories?
With a number of terror suspects already on the run, how does splitting up authority for making and enforcing control orders improve public safety? Exactly how would dividing ministerial responsibility for prisoners and police help catch the killers on the run from Sudbury open prison?
The answer is that it will not. The proposal is just a time-consuming, costly and bureaucratic distraction from the real task of getting to grips with the day-to-day problems this country faces. And that is just the Home Office. Under the Reid Plan, the Department of Constitutional Affairs is set to become a Ministry of Justice. This at a time when our Courts are in chaos, legal aid reforms are deeply flawed and unpopular, there are damaging new changes to the Freedom of Information Act and the electoral process is under attack from fraud.
Is this the right time for this department to take on additional responsibility for prisons, probation and criminal justice policy?
Too much legislation and red tape
When I was in the business world, if someone said a job was impossible it normally just meant that they could not do it. The answer to the Home Office’s problems is not to break it up. The cause of its serial failure is too much legislation, too much red tape and too many targets. The answer is less legislation and more leadership. Mr Reid is incapable of either. He failed to win support for a new security minister with Cabinet rank who could focus 100% on driving counter-terrorism policy.
In fact, Mr Reid failed to secure a single security budget. His plan fails to secure a Cabinet-ranking justice minister in the House of Commons – which shows a remarkable disregard for democracy and disdain for the criminal justice system.
Under the Reid Plan, instead of having one dysfunctional department we would have two. However, we would not be getting two for the price of one. Creating two separate departments will involve expensive duplication – of resources, personnel and infrastructure.
Mr Reid refuses to say what the costs will be, claiming they can all be met from existing resources. However, the Home Office budget has been frozen. As such, funding for the reorganisation will have to come from the frontline resources dedicated to fighting crime, terrorism and illegal immigration.
No wonder the Reid Plan has been roundly lambasted from all sides. The heads of the Civil Service and the Home Office have serious reservations. The Lord Chief Justice is concerned about judicial independence and funding. The Home Affairs Committee’s expert witness fears the breakdown of communications. Demos – the Blairite ‘Think Tank’ – describes the fragmentation as “ironic at a time when the Government needs to take a far more collaborative approach”.
Mr Reid’s idea is not much more popular within Labour’s ranks. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett thinks it will “Balkanise” matters, Charles Clarke calls it a “batty” idea and Margaret Beckett nearly bolted from Government over it. More importantly, since Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown intends to take direct control of security when (or if) he becomes Prime Minister, John Reid’s half-baked plans will also be short-lived.
The Home Office is crying out for strong ministerial leadership and effective operational co-ordination. The Reid Plan will achieve neither. Breaking up the Home Office will just undermine public security and overwhelm the justice system.
