The shocking thing is that no one is shocked. We have come to accept off-the-scale incompetence from the Home Office as a fact of national life, like rainy summers, delayed trains and being knocked out of football tournaments on penalties.
Still, the latest report into the failures of that department ought to make us incandescent. The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has issued a blistering report into what it calls the ‘failed, chaotic and expensive’ system whereby the Home Office houses asylum seekers.
The cost to the taxpayer has been vast: more than three times what was projected. But this cost does not simply reflect more numerous Channel crossings. As the MPs say: ‘The failure to plan for unanticipated developments, or to get a grip on the contracts as events arose, was chaotic, and led to significant costs to the taxpayer… We find this incompetence unacceptable.’
The timing could hardly be more poignant, coming just as we learn of the planetary levels of state failure associated with the release of Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian asylum seeker released in error shortly after being jailed for sexual assault.
Every chapter of Kebatu’s story tells of massive institutional incompetence. He should not have been in Britain in the first place. He had, by his own account, not seen Ethiopia for many years, and had come here from a place that does not engage in oppression or persecution, namely France.
Having arrived, he was sent to a small town in Essex and housed in one of those hotels that, as MPs say, are costing taxpayers so much more than they should. Here, he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, and was eventually sentenced to 12 months.
Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu was released in error shortly after being jailed for sexual assault
Police guard the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, where Kebatu had been staying, on July 27, 2025, July amid anti-migrant protests
Barely had he arrived in jail when he was released in error. Not only that but, according to witness reports, he kept trying to turn himself back in, only to be sent away by prison officials. How can anyone read that catalogue of disasters without concluding that our government machine is broken? ‘Clown country’, say commentators when such idiocies unfold. But that phrase does not begin to do justice to the depths of the problem. We are administered not just by clowns but by drooling harlequins, belabouring one another with inflated bladders on sticks.
The Home Office is by no means the only department that seems unable to discharge its basic functions; but it is the worst.
Nineteen-and-a-half years have passed since John Reid, that flinty and patriotic Labour Home Secretary, declared that ‘the Home Office is not fit for purpose in the modern world’.
He was speaking after it emerged that more than 1,000 foreign criminals had been released without being considered for deportation, as the law then required them to be. That scandal had forced the sacking of his predecessor, another flinty and patriotic Labour Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.
Neither Clarke nor Reid was able to fix the structural problems that the no-nonsense Scottish minister had identified: ineffective IT, poor data-keeping, lack of accountability. Since then, a dozen Home Secretaries have come and gone. All have tried to tackle the inward-looking, jobsworth, producer-led culture of the department. All have failed.
When we think back to the most basic failures of the British state – failures not of policy but of basic implementation – we find again and again that the Home Office is responsible.
Ten years ago, for example, it emerged that the database that was supposed to track potential security threats regularly broke down, and that consequently 16 million people a year were arriving unchecked. The then chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, Keith Vaz, described the system as ‘a billion pound waste of money’.
The asylum backlog, which every incoming Home Secretary promises to tackle, has become permanent, and is a big part of why illegal immigrants risk crossing the Channel. They do not come here to claim £49.18 a week.
They come because they know that, once they are here, they are almost certain not to be deported. Once the system eventually catches up with them, they will be able to convince an immigration tribunal that they have family ties here, so that removing them would breach their human rights.
At the same time, the Home Office is notoriously useless when it comes to issuing visas for innocent visitors who have no intention of remaining in Britain. Any private company seeking to bring in staff, any MP who has tried to help someone attend a family wedding, will tell you the same story. The Home Office can neither keep people out nor let them in.
And that is before we come to the fact that prisoners abscond at the rate of more than one a week, or that notorious foreign terror suspects cannot be extradited. And let’s not get started on the Windrush scandal in 2018, in which many were wrongly deported from the UK.
What has gone wrong? Is it that every one of the 12 Home Secretaries who followed Reid wanted to flood the country with criminals? Were they all idle? Were they stupid? Of course not. They were some of the most effective ministers of their time. But they found themselves tugging at levers that had worked loose, stabbing at disconnected buttons, in office but not in power.
The last effective Home Secretary was Michael Howard – in the sense that he made his officials follow his agenda, not their own. The reason that he was the last is that the incoming Blair government hobbled his successors in two ways. First, by passing the Human Rights Act, it massively strengthened the permanent bureaucracy against Parliament. Second, by reforming the civil service, it tilted power definitively from Jim Hacker to Sir Humphrey – or from elected ministers to permanent secretaries.
Do you recall the outrage about our inability to deport the Afghan hijackers who arrived here in 2000 by forcing a plane to divert to Stansted at gunpoint? Back then, it struck us as extraordinary that Home Secretaries lacked the power to remove criminals from Britain. Now, we take it for granted.
The current Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is by all accounts tough-minded and serious. Even if you think that all politicians are liars and cheats, you must surely allow that, like all her predecessors, she will want to get re-elected, which means wanting to secure our borders. But she is now finding, like all those predecessors, that she cannot promote or demote her officials, that a civil servant’s career prospects depend on pleasing the other civil servants, and that a minister’s instructions are treated as suggestions, or as opening bids in a negotiation.
One organisation that took the last government to court to overturn the Rwanda scheme was the trade union representing Home Office staff. That is where they stand on immigration policy. Does Labour, the party of trade unions, the party granting them massive new rights, have the guts to reverse the Blair-era reforms and put ministers back in charge? It seems vanishingly unlikely.
Might a future government take on the task? Reform has the will but lacks the policies. The Tories are developing serious policy proposals but lack credibility. A partnership of the two might be effective.
It is starting to feel like our last chance. Unless we can get back to a place where the Home Office works for the rest of us rather than for its own convenience, there will be precious little left to salvage.
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade.
