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Student Zone - Update Materials

Update 16: July 2007 - Dismembering the Home Office

The developments discussed in the two accompanying updates for July 2007 are about very public ‘high politics’ – the sort that dominate headlines and front pages. Yet it is possible that less widely noticed changes in the organisation of the administrative machine may have longer lasting consequences for the system of government. A case in point is likely to be reforms of the administration of homeland security and justice announced by the Home Secretary John Reid in March 2007. The reforms split the functions historically performed by the Home Office in two. The Department for Constitutional Affairs (itself a recent creation out of the traditional Lord Chancellor’s Department) was renamed the Ministry of Justice, and acquired responsibility for probation, prisons and the prevention of re-offending. Future Home Secretaries will have cause to say a prayer of thanks to Mr Reid, and future Ministers of Justice will curse him – the administration of prisons has been a destroyer of political reputations for a generation. The Home Office will concentrate on terrorism, security and immigration, and will also take over responsibility for counter-terrorism from the Cabinet Office. The reforms were the product of views famously (or infamously) attributed to Mr Reid on his accession to the post of Home Secretary, following the sacking of his predecessor Charles Clarke in May 2006: that the Home Office was ‘not fit for purpose’ and was ‘dysfunctional.’ Like many remarks for which politicians become notorious, this was a misattribution. What Mr Reid actually said (in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons in May 2006) was that the Home Office’s immigration operations were ‘not fit for purpose.’ Nor did he claim that Home Office was dysfunctional. His judgement was considerably more cautious: it was ‘not inherently dysfunctional….but I do believe from time to time it is dysfunctional in the sense it does not work.’ The history of the reorganisation of central departments in the core executive is littered with cases of institutional restructuring that did not last, and it is possible that this will be the case with Mr Reid’s reforms. But most of the ephemeral changes have been the product of attempts by Prime Ministers to solve problems of Cabinet making – the most infamous in recent years being the efforts to create administrative empires for two successive Deputy Prime Ministers, Michael Heseltine (Deputy to John Major) and John Prescott (Deputy to Tony Blair.) Both attempts unravelled. Mr Reid’s reorganisation addresses enduring, substantial problems of policy making and coordination. It also serves the important political function of removing the political hot potato of prison administration from the hands of the Home Secretary. His reorganisation was not disturbed in the upheaval in the core executive associated with Mr Brown’s cabinet making but whether the reforms endure in the longer term will depend in part on whether a future Secretary of State for the Department of Justice is politically strong enough to throw the hot potato back.

Lord Falconer (Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice) must certainly have wished he could throw it back in June 2007 when he was roasted in the ‘red top’ press for his plans to alleviate prison over-crowding by the early release of 25,000 prisoners. Lord Falconer was dropped from the Government by the new Prime Minister in June (see update 14), though this press coverage was probably not a serious contributory factor. His successor, Jack Straw, is a former Home Secretary, and just about the shrewdest political operator in the new government. We shall have to wait and see how he handles the political sensitivities of his new responsibilities.

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