There is a stark disconnect between how well the Home Office thinks it is doing at transforming itself into a more compassionate organisation and the extremely modest progress external observers believe the department has actually made. Four years on from the government’s first apologies for the Windrush scandal, the publication of yet another critical investigation into the Home Office followed a well-worn pattern. A forensic summary of the department’s outstanding problems was met with cheerful declarations from ministers and officials suggesting things were going pretty well.
Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary, said he was pleased the report recognised the “significant progress made” in transforming the Home Office. Priti Patel, the home secretary, said the publication “highlights many achievements, including the work we have put into becoming a more compassionate and open organisation”. After four years of critical investigations into Home Office failings on Windrush, these familiar declarations that everything is more or less fine have become increasingly wearisome and decreasingly plausible. As a civil servant, Wendy Williams is balanced and thoughtful in her conclusions: she acknowledges that some progress has been made and offers a scattering of damning faint praise, noting signs of “slight cultural change”. It is understandable, she adds, that “in an organisation as large as the Home Office, the scale of change envisaged in my report takes time”. But overall her tone is one of muted disappointment. She makes it very clear that insufficient progress has been made in areas that really matter. There was limited evidence that a compassionate approach was being adopted, a migrants’ commissioner (empowered to stand up for migrants’ rights) has not been appointed, a target-driven approach remains, and the department has shown little progress in improving the way it engages with the public. Williams detected complacency. The Home Office has a tendency to overstate the amount of progress it has made, she noted, warning that it faces a tipping point, where it can either continue the efforts it has begun to take to implement change, or it can “sit back, rest on its laurels, be self congratulatory”. At a time when concern is mounting about the Home Office’s slow progress in issuing visas to Ukrainian refugees who are trying to flee a warzone, and when there is growing unease about elements of the nationality and borders bill that will criminalise refugees who arrive by unauthorised routes, a reminder of the Home Office’s slowness to reform feels very timely. But it is important to be clear about who is to blame. Some of these failings may be down to cultural and bureaucratic problems within the department, but others simply reflect government policy. Despite promising to review its hostile environment policies – now rebranded “compliant environment” measures – the Home Office has not done this. The vital question not addressed by the report is: how can the Home Office transform itself into a compassionate department when some of the policies it is being required to implement are designed not to be compassionate? Steve Valdez-Symonds, the refugee and migrant rights director at Amnesty International UK, points out that ultimately officials are just required to implement policy. “If that policy is oppressive or insensitive to the realities of the people to whom it is applied, it will sustain an oppressive and insensitive culture,” he said. “There is little officials can do to change this unless the policy is radically rethought and revised – and currently ministers show every inclination to do the very opposite.”