The Home Office has been ‘set up for failure’, the Home Secretary admitted on Wednesday.
Two decades after Labour’s then-home secretary John Reid said the Home Office was ‘not fit for purpose’, Shabana Mahmood said nothing had changed.
Responding to a report that the department suffered from a ‘culture of defeatism’ on tackling illegal immigration, she said: ‘This report, written under the last government, is damning.
‘To those who have encountered the Home Office in recent years, the revelations are all too familiar.
‘The Home Office is not yet fit for purpose and has been set up for failure.’
But she added: ‘Things are now changing. I will work with the new permanent secretary to transform the Home Office so that it delivers for this country.’
The damning study found that staff responsible for deportations saw high failure rates as ‘unavoidable’.
It concluded that the department’s approach to immigration consisted of ‘several confused and conflicting systems working to contradictory ends’.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood (pictured) has admitted that the Home Office had been ‘set up for failure’
Co-ordination with police and the criminal justice system was ‘poor’, while Home Office lawyers took an overly ‘defensive approach’, according to the review carried out by Tory MP and former Home Office adviser Nick Timothy.
He wrote in the report, which has been brought to light after a two-year battle by The Times, that ‘nobody knows who, overall, is responsible for the system’.
