BBC The Great Offices of State: 1. The Dark Department

this is the secret world of Whitehall decisions taken here behind closed doors affect all our daily lives three great offices of state that deal with money power and crime dominate Whitehall and they seek jealously to guard their secrets in this three-part series I'll be talking to ministers past and present and to normally camera-shy Whitehall mandarins and telling the story of the great offices from the inside the oldest of the three is the Treasury the Ministry of tax and tears which can trace its roots back to the medieval Exchequer in Whitehall knowledge is power and the Treasury likes to think it's the ministry that knows most of all treasures a brilliant Department it was the best department I ever served in it's like an Oxford College know from brilliant minds engaged in open debate and completely detached from the real world the Foreign Office is the grandest of the three great Offices of state it's accused by its critics of being the Ministry for foreigners run by toffs we had an awful lot of sporting metaphors when I joined the Foreign Office we kept straight bats on sticky wickets against pretty fast bowling and we like went home a close of play and in tonight's first part the Home Office the Ministry of law and order that's long been known as a political graveyard departments can lose their reputation in a moment and on that day our reputation was in shreds I'm gonna resign mr. Carr you still be homesick so tonight the Home Office has long been seen as a glittering political coffin many recent home secretaries have left it feet-first it's summer 2009 and the sir Humphrey of the Home Office it's chief civil servant Sir David norming tton is going down to its placement car park to await the arrival of his latest political boss the new Home Secretary will be taking over from Jackie Smith who resigned following the scandal over her parliamentary expenses her successor will be the 6th New Labour Home Secretary in 12 years well it's really good to see Allen Johnson has just come down by train from his constituents in Ho where Gordon Brown had promoted him by phone from the Health Ministry to the Home Office he's got a journey it's different holidays range when I get to Kings Cross where we've taken into custody about the next few years the former postman Alan Johnson is the fourth Home Secretary in today big Naaman turns four years as the Home Office's chief civil servant why he's not like my usual return I suggest we just walk around this corner for a minute business leader my business opinion agent the it's in three buildings the central bit missus called poppy laughter Robert Peel as he surveys his new domain Johnson learns that the press pack is waiting outside to talk to him but first he wants to consult the Home Office's chief spin dr. Simon Wren they not expecting me till we've had a chat Olli is Simon oh yes I see something else are you Tommy I've heard about your mental goes before I was supposed you don't have to they're not they're not expecting you to know anything at the moment other than obviously what you already know what do you think that char there before all his guns just say something there yeah great place Mia yeah so about Jackie as well yeah genders similar to the pumping and being very good about public appearances rabbits crime immigration security yeah yeah and I saw that let's do an errand and get them away so being Home Secretary's a bit of a poison chalice you must have really wondered whether you wanted to accept this job it's not a poison chalice it's a three called MIT three-course meal with the coffee and dessert it's great it's so real honor and a privilege some of the greatest politicians of our time and I'm not including myself in that category but you know they've been home secretaries and they've been here because it's it's precisely because there are challenges here you know out of a clear blue sky can come all kinds of things you never know what's going to happen from day to day I actually find that a challenge and it's our job to deal with climate disorder and I'll be working very hard to ensure that we can really go into the next election whenever that is and give the British public a reason to vote later ok let's get him out again thank you very much Alan Johnson is now on the frontline in what's traditionally been seen as the most politically hazardous job in government and he's treading in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors a century ago at the famous siege of Sydney Street London police confronted armed criminals from Eastern Europe the young Home Secretary Winston Churchill arrived to take direct personal command of the operation having summoned the newsreel cameras to film him in action the police force had been created in the previous century by one of Churchill's great predecessors as Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel peels clock still sits behind the desk of the Home Office's top civil servant today there is a sense of history in the whole office even now even though we're in a very new and modern building and if because you can trace our core responsibilities for law and order for keeping the Queen's or before that the king's piece right back through 200 more years to the 1780s the Home Office was born out of the barrel of a gun it was created after troops shot dead nearly 300 people in 1780 in the Gordon riots in London two centuries on keeping the Queen's peace and protecting the public remains the Home Office's top priority 25 years ago riots have broken out in Birmingham on the day Douglas hurt became conservative Home Secretary this is the job in which you get to know your own country most closely you tend to see the bad bit rundown housing estates prisons brats horrors of all kinds drabness of all kinds wickedness of all cards comes your way more as Home Secretary in any other job in the Home Office unlike any other Department you are dealing with the most intractable problems I mean dealing with prisons and probation drugs immigration organized crime and desertion behavior dealing with terrorism I mean it's not a bundle of fun someone has escaped from prison the son great police scandal someone's broken into Buckingham Palace somebody's been deported and has been instantly shot upon arrival at his home country all these things on serious quite tragic cases suddenly explode in the Home Secretary's area there grew up them a view that the home office was a graveyard for politicians it was was someplace you walked through arpel being almost certain to lose any reputation that you had got okay the artist is Natasha security Harrison Charlotte Allen Johnson the latest candidate for the graveyard meets his private office staff their high-flying young civil servant who will brief him about the hazards of the home office see I'll be reading a lot of your briefing and you'll be giving a little knowledge we're currently there is none whatsoever that will spoil see you later and here's the office and actually well I paint it what you did and I think that they have got your staff right here we've got some of the things on your desk the outside they were that size pointed on the Friday so that was a wonderful had some time at the weekend well they're not a lot but sat down with this brief studiously going through as you would boning up for exams or whatever you know and and you read every word because you want to kind of absorb as much of it as you can but when you get to like page 50 you'll put a marker in there then I'll come back to this and you start the job on the Monday and you never get back to it because what happens is you're suddenly in the Maelstrom you can walk in here and on day one you can be facing a terrorist problem so you have to be pretty tough an attempted car bomb attack which could have caused carnage in London's West End a Mercedes was loaded with explosives petrol and nails two and a half years ago an attempted terrorist attack on London came just one day after Britain's first female Home Secretary took office I got the job on the first day in very early the next morning my principal private secretary who I'd literally only just met the day before rang me up with a slightly sort of apologetic tone in his voice and said we've had a report from the police that there is a card that has been found in Haymarket full of explosives had a briefing from somebody who I hadn't met previously but who came in and said Home Secretary what I can say to you is that when you see me it usually means that something bad is happening a deliberate attempt to drive a car into a packed British airport and blow it up Glasgow Airport was the scene of the second stage of the coordinated terrorist attack on Britain it came on Jackie Smith's second full day in office I don't think any hope Secretariat had quite the baptism of fire she had when I never left her sight during that terrorism threat in London and Basco I remember on one occasion as she and I walked again out of number 10 with the world's press taking our photographs saying remember she'd been there about what 24 hours at most she said is it always like this it often is the Home Office moved into new purpose-built headquarters in the late 70s its brutalist concrete and glass exterior seem to reflect the distinctive culture that had grown up among its civil servants secretive defensive and designed to repel boarders it used to be a real fortress of a department which resented outsiders and erected fortifications to prevent outsiders now what the hell was going on inside the castle there is a sort of ethos there is a character about the department where you can still see traces of those fortifications it was a better high-powered department I like the home office that was but it's also very traditional very slow to move didn't like having its policies chains by its ministers without a great deal of careful consideration and constraint it was very hierarchical there has always been a hierarchical system the home office and always will be I suspect even when ministers had meetings with officials there was always some practice that officials walked into the minister's room in order of seniority I had when I was permanent secretary was able to push people in ahead of me sir bran coven was the Home Office's top Mandarin for nearly ten years in which time he served four different home secretaries over the past two centuries they've been more than 80 home secretaries but only 25 permanent secretaries yet it's the home secretaries whose photos are placed on the walls of the home office by its civil servants I have noted the way in which they put the photographs of their Secretary of State in a prominent place around ministers now you know I've joked with senior civil servants that effectively that is about saying you know it's not about celebrating their Secretary of State it's about saying look at all these home secretaries that we've got through a we're still here relations between successive home secretaries and their permanent officials are key to understanding how the home office operates well some ministers and mandarins have gotten well others have been at daggers drawn over who was really in charge of running the department it's extraordinary to think back that say in the mid sixties you could have a position which the only person pretty well in the whole department who was allowed to put notes to the Home Secretary was one individual department secretary in the mid 60s Sir Charles Cunningham had been permanent secretary for nearly a decade when a youthful Roy Jenkins became Home Secretary the department had the reputation of being a closed society where policies would continue unchanged whoever was Home Secretary it was a somber department always in the sense of dark department and I am sectors one that was a little alcove in which there was a board which everybody waiting execution was moved up day by day and of course the prerogative of mercy rested personally upon the Home Secretary advised by his officials and that did have a considerable effect Jenkins replaced the board with a drinks fridge and speeded the abolition of hanging but his plans to modernize the Home Office came up against his permanent secretary Sir Charles Cunningham's practice was to run the department himself and use the Home Secretary as his rubber stamp I was perfectly clear that I had passed the system this involved well on her was Muslim wearing hours interview I've ever had in my life when I told Kali on that the system had a girl and what was his reaction but it was not favorable the one stage new interview his eyes filled with tears and I thought oh dear the one moment where I almost weakened thought I should know reduce this distinguish serve public servant to state of such misery towards the end of his career it was only later I realized the tears were tears of rage and not of soil I suppose the view is that there is a specific cultural ethos within the Home Office that whoever's Home Secretary the Department will want to continue with the policy which they think over the years oh it is it yes I've been there's inevitable inertia in all in all institutions and one of my tasks as Home Secretary was two weeks but one of my tasks our audience Lee one of my tasks as permanent secretary and was to explode occasionally and said doesn't the office realize that there's been a change of government doesn't the office realize there's been a change of Home Secretary after Charles Clark became Home Secretary he was to have a series of clashes with his permanent secretary well the first thing that then permanent century Sir John gage said to me I thought was disgraceful he said to me you've just got to accept this is a job where things come along and you just have to deal with whatever disasters happen well known Charles I expect he he told me what the nature of the job was first and of course he'd been a Ministry of State at the Home Office I said well we can't go like that whether you're talking about prison breakouts or terrorist attacks or great police issues whatever it is these are all predictable they all have certain or not the exact event itself but you know it's something will happen and so our task is how to present prevent those things happening and then if such things do happen how do we deal with them well and effectively to protect the public in whatever way there are events you are disturbed by events it's not a department you can hope to set out a plan on January the 1st about how you're going to spend your time and then stick to it I think you never can absolutely sit back in your desk and say this is all going well you always have to say to yourself so far you always had to touch wood I learnt in the Home Office to touch wood in a way I never had in any other department along with the unpredictability one of the home offices most difficult tasks is to strike the balance between freedom and order and that's made all the harder by the constant pressures of public opinion in the media I've got nothing to say I'm available and the home art is always in to be in trouble I remember my immediate predecessor worked on one occasion on a minute paw old home office we are sometimes right but we always get the blame there was when I joined a degree of defensiveness a sense of being got out possibly not being understood the persisted a number of parts of the office and when things were going badly you could see that defensiveness that sense of being bunkered who or was being attacked of people not appreciating you were trying to do a good Nonna's job you know the one hand immigration control was too feeble on the other hand the other side said immigration control was oppressive it's a well-known feeling in them office that every man is his own home secretary and we never remember the public is enhancing they'll remember the public thinks that he knows the right way of dealing with a particular situation of this kind as the man whose responsibility it is to deal with it there are those the hangers and floggers who think the home office is too wet the readers of the Guardian and new society who think we're much too strict and I wouldn't advise a politician who was looking for instant in universal popularity to choose the Home Secretary each of the home offices key responsibilities crime prisons terrorism and immigration have over the years led to bitter behind-the-scenes battles between the permanent officials and their temporary political masters problem number one is crime and you burry with violence this particular state has got problems in relation to you better social behavior drug-dealing by some of those youths dogs are a problem I can be a problem on his second full day as Home Secretary Allen Johnson is visiting a local council estate in West London it's been a perfect first visit this is actually an estate I was assaulted on when I was 15 years of age 15 years of age I didn't know till I came here it's great to be reading lots of briefs and getting lots of stuff from my splendid civil servants but nothing beats coming out and seeing and hearing it from the front line my priorities to make people feel safe and secure in their homes and on the streets that's the mantra that all new home secretaries tend to declaimed on coming to office whatever their political party may be see mr. Howard yes great responsibilities we must fulfill maintenance an order is a government's first duty that I'm determined to do all I can to ensure the people filling in the last 30 years the balance in our criminal justice system has been tilted too far in favor of the criminal and against the protection of the public the time has come to put that right Michael Howard had come to the home office with a hardline agenda to cut crime but he and his young political adviser David Cameron came up against the home offers his own distinctive view about the problems of crime that officials had developed over the years I was jailed charts and they showed crime rising inexorably and the officials actually said to me this is the pattern of rising crime it's gone on with one or two small and inconsequential blips like this for most of this century it is going to continue to go up and the first thing Home Secretary that you have to understand is that there is nothing you can do about it I hate to agree with Michael Howard about this but he and I shared a view that the Home Office didn't really believe that they could change the world that they could really make a difference to reducing crime tony blair's most famous soundbite tough-on-crime tough on the causes of crime had helped him come to power but he and his chief of staff soon discovered the home office didn't reflect their view that things could only get better one of the things that sticks in my mind when we came into office in in 1997 was we had a presentation by the Home Office they came over with slide since the Cabinet Room they made a presentation with the projected figures for crime showing them inexorably rising during our years in government and they said this was a result of the economy improving and as the economy improved to be more stuff to Nick and therefore to be more crime we're a bit amused by this and we said well I said what would happen if the economy turned down and we suffered a recession rather than a growing economy they to know what crime would go up there'd be more people to Nick things suited to get that sense that the the kind of mindset at the Home Office was was that rising crime was inevitable yes the code the Home Office had a clear iseman faith which was a crime would rise and extra bleed and there was very little that you could do about you have to manage it rather than try to reverse if you're in the home office you do have a sense that you are the department of law and order the department of authority in an age when authority may not be the most fashionable of the roles to play and I think what they what they feel is that when they're faced with the growth in crime this is the sum total of endless other failings which no one home secretary has the capacity you know however brilliant and however powerful to tackle Jack Straw was New Labour's first home secretary what did you discuss with Mr Blair as your priorities your new job I discussed the job of Home Secretary and the importance of making Britain a safer country and one where communities and individuals feel a greater sense of responsibility one to the other after the mandatory mug shot with the guardians of law and order the new Home Secretary went straight to the command headquarters of Whitehall's crime-fighting mandarins I came across to this building which was the old Home Office and it was awful in those days as we used to call it little Bianca I mean the KGB yeah it was like a sort of prison and he had little cells off it and there was a car park which was windswept and litter strewn all those days she could got ministerial lift you had your own loo and with a bit of like you'd never been contaminated by it any other form of human life except in a meeting and then go down the lift and and leave the Prime Minister wanted his Home Secretary to take a hard line on crime but Tony Blair came increasingly to feel the Jack Straw had become a convert to the official Home Office view that nothing could be done to stop the rising crime but did get irritated with tiny sometimes been mr. Satan I think you asked me to push water our pill aren't you to counter the Home Office approach Tony Blair enlisted John birth the former BBC director-general as his blue skies thinker on how to reduce crime what did you think when Tony Blair appointed John BIRT to engage in blue skies thinking about the causes of crime not a lot in truth and I groaned I dutifully cooperated with these blue skies and the thinking and John Birks began life as an engineer and he's famous for sort of wiring diagrams technical drawing of shores of he was very good at at school so we had lays of wiring diagrams and end-to-end solutions and stuff what about the Dumbo report on cram when it reached you ah I'm afraid it's I this is a serious admission but I remember remarkably little about it except thinking that we'd study it with great care Tony Blair felt that Jack Straw in his four years at the Home Office had become a prisoner of its defeatist approach to crime he decided to replace straw with a tough-minded populist figure he chose David Blunkett one of the things I was going to do was to hold a trench him but I was advised that this was not a good idea Plunkett was determined radically to transform the traditional mindset on crime of the home office mandarins but he came up against the new permanent secretary David Blunkett wanted to shake up the home office the political agenda if you like was to reclaim law and order as a labor issue and to seize this traditional bit of Tory ground and it made the Home Office the main political battlefield we did have our clashes and frustrations John needed to establish as any permanent secretary has to do that they were defending their new Department to come in with a Home Secretary with a radical agenda and the intention of driving change at breakneck speed and to have been presenting himself as a permanent secretary that was going to pull all the routes up and shake everybody I think that he felt felt would have been too much of course you know I was also responsive to David's policy agenda but you know he should have been looking to me not just to be a supporter but to be someone who was minute telling truth to power you described in your Diaries one group of home office officials as the worst most obstructive miserable disengaged and disinterested group of people I've ever come yeah it was probably a bit harsh to some of the officials but what really got me was that we needed a can-do attitude we needed people who said not these are difficult decisions you'll not always get it right home security we don't even agree with you let's have a good description but just to sit there sullenly around the table thinking pray God somebody remove this pestilent beast from our presence was the sort of feeling that I sometimes had prisons have been the second key responsibilities of the Home Office over the years home secretaries have fought great battles with their officials over how best to manage prisons it's a very dramatic thing to go into one of these huge Victorian prisons in the late afternoon with the sort of darkness gathering about it there are such a striking part of your job and therefore I think almost all home secretaries you know it's not something you can simply pass by on the other side saying I get a look at the think about this every other Friday I mean it is in a way the most dramatic part of the as a job Michael Howard was convinced the more criminals who were banged up the faster crime would come down and prove the home office orthodoxy wrong prison works we shall build six new prisons and I can tell you one thing Butlins won't be bidding for the contract but the new high-security prisoner Dwight more near Cambridge did turn out to be something of a holiday camp apparently run by the prisoners although security cameras showed prisoners cutting their way out and escaping over prison walls the warders didn't notice they were engrossed in a game of Scrabble I was support I was just as supported as everyone yeah the picture of the regiment was portrayed at white Moor seen to suggest they had lobster takeaways that the the prison officers were more or less the creatures of the prisoners and people were very surprised that anyone would want to break out of a prison like her it was appalling it was appalling and I was absolutely horrified but a few months later came another Great Escape this time from the maximum-security Parkhurst jail three extremely dangerous live prisoners let themselves out of five sets of doors with a master key they then scaled the walls using rope ladders they'd made in the prison workshop I was then pretty angry because after the Mike Moore escape I had been given assurance after assurance that that measures were in place that nothing like that could ever happen again that everybody was now fully seized of the importance of security that all the procedures were being followed that everything was in place and so when that happened I was I was pretty angry Michael Howard sought to pin responsibility for the escapes on his officials presents are done for a number of I'm secretary said it did for Michael Howard's reputation and so I put a lot of effort into the management to the Prison Service and I did say to everybody look including the prison officers I said I don't mind what happens but could you please not allow a category a prisoner to escape this will be bad my career and bad for yours inshallah so far 12 now Fe is on there has not been a category a escape no no down one will happen tomorrow I've said this go back up the street it is not safe move yes I do now move back up the street out of white terrorism has been the deadliest at the Home Office's key responsibilities the threat has grown steadily since the birmingham pub bombings by the IRA in 1974 that was a horrible incident worst one which had occurred on the mainland ever I think about reading one people were killed mainly young people within a problem center of Lebanon and there was a great sense of horror but I went to Birmingham the day after mental apartments all of victims in hospital talk to the police and other people their relatives I've never felt such an oppressive atmosphere lying anyway we're gonna smell it in the air there is a danger of taking decisions the wrong decisions and emotional stress events and under the bombardment of tremendous publicity I'm not sure I always get that right better date decisions when you can in a karma atmosphere but who God always come out there 7/7 was the work of homegrown suicide bombers the perpetrators had evaded the Home Office's counterterrorism Network a few minutes ago I spoke to the Home Secretary Charles Clark I asked him if he'd had any warning of today's attacks no it was completely unanticipated in any form whatsoever does it indicate a failure of intelligence do you think intelligence is always a matter of trying to establish what we know with limited resources that is the challenge we face the whole time the Home Office is key resorts in countering terrorism has its headquarters upriver from Westminster at Thames house mi5 the Security Service answers directly to the Home Secretary but its critics claim mi5 has over the years acted as a secret state within a state I did not have afraid for a period I regard for how their discharge their duties what why did you not have a harbor for how am I thought just a fluke duty well I suppose there was like they're naturally a secretive atmosphere but this meant that they were secreted bees via the government as well as we have to be what people who might be the enemies of the state as it were you mean you as Home Secretary didn't necessarily know what mi5 was doing no one always had a feeling of a certain lack of frankness I also think that living one's life in this sort of spy bound world gives people have a slightly distorted view of things if you're not careful to get into a sort of Alice in Wonderland world in which truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth and nothing nothing is in real contact with reality I see the man who headed mi5 joined jackstraws whole time as Home Secretary was Stephen Lander your server Landa also served under David Blunkett well Stephen is what's known as a spook spooked are spooks they're in a world which is very different the security services do a phenomenal job much better than I'd ever envisaged when I came into office but it is a world apart by its very nature because you said at one stage that steam Lander spoke in riddles he put things in the kind of terms that you get in junk like Airy novels really um and I was reading one or two of them at the time so I did notice they that the particular nuances you you always as with all these spooks have to know how to read the print that's disappeared between the lines the most secret documents in the Home Secretary's office and the requests from mi5 for authorization to bug and spy on suspects but how much the Home Secretary's really know about what mi5 is up to in there named Merlin Reese was Labour Home Secretary in the late 70s and I talked to him shortly before he died four years ago I just wonder whether you feel that that you knew what mi5 was up to no you didn't know I neither does any Home Secretary well by definition you don't know what everything everyone is doing every minute of the day so you need to know what you need to know IIIi did not feel ever let down on that I think I knew what I needed to know the late Mellon Reese when I interviewed him said that he didn't know what mi5 was up to and no Home Secretary can yes and that was a different time and the striking thing at the time when Merlin Reese was Home Secretary between 1976 and 1979 was that there was no statutory base whatsoever for either Security Service or for the powers that it was using absolutely extraordinary it's all done on a royal warrant or Royal Charter which had never been published so it's unsurprising that as I know for certain the security service were tapping people's telephones in circumstances where you'd never get an offer raishin today you may say i'm deluded or deluding myself but I certainly never felt and don't now feel that there was a process going on to pull the wool over my eyes in any respect but as I say mace a naive fool but the conspiracy theorists are all out there in various ways but I certainly felt mi5 and its leadership was absolutely ready to help and respond in any way of all the battlegrounds between ministers and mandarins immigration is the one that has proved politically fatal the growth of immigration both legal and illegal has starkly revealed the inadequacies of the home office bureaucracy asylum claims swamped the department's old-fashioned systems and massive backlogs built up when Jack Straw came to office his officials assured him that the system was being radically modernized my office said we've established this new all-singing all-dancing IT system for processing asylum claims and it would be fully working by November 1998 anyway and the come November 1998 far from being fully working this system had completely collapsed and with it the whole of the asylum system and we had a hundred thousand cases piled up in manual file that were supposed to have been disposed off and everything was supposed to have been scanned in and it was one of the many things that happened to me Sam secretary nearly wrecked my career but I kept saying to him this was your idea good evening more illegal immigrants ER tonight attempting to enter the Channel Tunnel in Calais and make their way to Britain the spiraling growth of illegal immigration became a major political problem for the Home Office and for number 10 Tony Blair and David Blunkett championed high-tech measures to identify bogus asylum seekers and Blair himself stepped up the pressure on the Home Office by pledging to slash the annual number of asylum claimants coming to Britain ninety-two thousand roughly the last year for which published figures are available what would you like to see it reduced to I would like to see us reduce it by thirty forty percent in the next few months and I think by September of this year we should have had it halved when blanket who hadn't been consulted heard Blair's pledge to have the number of asylum claims within months he was furious firstly I phoned him and he apologized secondly I said you can make it a name but you can't make it an absolute imperative because there are so many other factors I can't control the judiciary and their decisions or the way lawyers were playing the system appeal after appeal with the problems of illegal immigration taking their toll on Blunkett his private life now became entangled in official business and as he went into the rundown home office in Queen Anne's gate he felt that even the building itself was turning against him I went in first thing in the morning to the Home Office the building was creaking it too was beginning to fall apart I kind of metaphor really and I went up to the upstairs toilets and I walked in and I was very quick on the uptake in realizing there was something amiss here and I was very glad I did because I called him one of the private secretaries who declared with an entirely straight face that the sewage system had obviously gone into reverse and the whatsit was now in the wash basin and the bath area rather than down the toilet and I thought well just about sums it all up within the past few minutes the Home Secretary David Blunkett has resigned the Home Office now moved to glossy new purpose-built headquarters the hope was that bungling over immigration had been left behind in the old building is after your crime so she can't count again but as the new Home Secretary solved with the high-tech biometric systems for the new ID card scheme that was touted as a tool for tackling immigration fraud Charles Clark couldn't see what was going to hit him a huge political row erupted 'add as it became clear that within clark sprawling Empire the left-half didn't know what the right hand was doing the Prison Service had released more than a thousand foreign criminals without the Immigration Service considering them for deportation as it should have done tonight they came to Britain they murdered and raped and robbed and then the Home Office turned them loose on the streets again they should have been considered for deportation instead of which they might be living next door it happened on his watch is it time for Charles Clark to do the decent thing well it's a scientist a to defend what happened was there were faxes and communications to the Immigration Service to consider them for deportation which didn't get responded to and it wasn't dealt with properly was essentially what happened but but how did that happen why did why did that because the communication system between the Immigration Service and the Prison Service was not as it needed we had this absurd situation that we didn't for example keep the data about an individual's nationality when they were in the prison system so you didn't know who the actual foreign prisoners were because you didn't know what their nationality was it was one of the ridiculous things all these different agencies working in different ways and I made the mistake relying on Sir John gave he'd given evidence to the Public Accounts Committee on this and had assured me that he'd got the matter in hand in terms of dealing with the immediate situation would turned out not to be the case we've got an arrangement now where the prisons notify the Immigration Service when there is 12 months or so to run on the sentence so that we can sort out the documentation problems and so on and why did he say that if he said it was being probably just an event you know you'd have to ask him well I would say I regretted that that we'd sent some information to the the to say committee which we then had to revise and obviously you know be good to have dealt with the thousand cases better over six years actually before I was there as well as when I was there we know but he obviously had doubts about me and I about him you about him why well I can't say any more than that in fact I'm scarcely going to say any more I'm due to be at luncheon Baker Street John give left the home office and a new permanent secretary arrived to try and handle a full-blown crisis of confidence there wasn't time to sleep really there it was a constant drama a constant sense of things coming at you a constant problem of taking a grip on what the facts were because it was an insatiable demand for more and more information and of course it's the case that when you're dealing with prisoners and people who've been released released from prison that they're not lining up to be counted and they're actually trying to disappear and evade you family the forum rules have you felt this Home Secretary has presided over systemic failure he's failed to deal with it and he has mislead people about the scale of the problem isn't it clear that he cannot give the Home Office the leadership it's so badly needed it's surprising her I don't agree with that what really upset me about that was that administrative problems in the home office were impacting directly on the Home Secretary the worst thing for any civil servant is if the things that you have been doing fail and that leads to your minister having to carry the can I think Tony felt somebody needed to take the fall and so I took the fall I regretted it I didn't in fact resign I think I'm one of the very few people to left government of that writing letter of resignation I was dismissed from the post and I regretted I think it was a wrong decision Clark successor dr. John Reed was determined to perform major invasive surgery on the home office John Reed came in like a whirlwind and and of course he was put here and to steady the ship and to take a grip and he certainly did do that when I went in I talked to all of the directors in the permanent secretary and I'm putting this crudely but our more or less said bring me out all of your problems all of your skeletons all of the the terrible bodies you've been hiding because it's obvious that our problems and Department what Reed learn shocked him he discovered that although the public had been told there were only 20,000 outstanding Asylum cases immigration we've got backlogs the true number of cases still being dealt with was far higher I asked a simple question how many have been started and are not finished is it 50,000 still no more is it a hundred thousand no a slightly more and eventually after question I found it was 450 7,000 what's it say so what appeared to be a massive reduction was actually just opening a file and adding it here no so nearly half a million unfinished Asylum cases and I drew that in the public to me and if I may introduce myself John Reed I've been imposed two weeks going on two years it seems with his permanent secretary David normanton sitting beside him dr. Reid gave his diagnosis of the home offices ills to a common select committee and the wake of the problems of mass migration that we have been facing our system is not fit for purpose it is inadequate in terms of its scope it is an adequate and times in terms of its information technology leadership management systems and processes the analysis he gave the Select Committee that day I completely agreed with I wish he hadn't used the not fit for purpose word because of course that then became the label that attached to the Home Office for the next several years and to some extent still does when we run into heavy weather people always remember that phrase and what did it do to morale in this place was a reports that I had was that people felt very hurt as a result of him saying that yes well morale was low because of what we've been through over several weeks the previous Home Secretary had lost his job that was the result of something that we had done wrong that was not great for morale we're here to serve our home secretaries not to cause problems for them and then of course later yes when John refused the not fit for purpose phrase that affected morale as well departments can lose their reputation in a moment and on that day our reputation was absolutely in shreds with the support of Tony Blair Reid decided on the biggest shake-up in the Home Office's history it would no longer be responsible for both crime and punishment there would now be two ministries on continental lines criminal justice prisons and probation would be handed over to the newly created ministry of justice and the home office would now be effectively the Ministry of the Interior concentrating its efforts and resources on crime immigration and counterterrorism that change in 2007 was very much driven by John Reid he and I argued a bit about it in a friendly fashion but he was very clear that one of the problems we had here was we were not able in the home office to give enough attention to tackling counterterrorism because of all the other things that we were trying to do and he had a very clear view that we should shed some things I would have preferred the home office to stay as it was I made my representations at the time I argued for what I thought ought to happen and then the decision was taken and as a civil servant I have to accept that and others have to account for the decision that was taken I believe very very strongly that there should be at least one minister at cabinet level one Secretary of State who got up every morning and thought my main task D is the safety and security of the people of this country and norm sector can no do that you were the first time section with the changes in terms of ministry of justice haven't been created would you like to have been times active with the whole vast rambling hands no as John Reid frequently used to say to me when there was some crisis happening at the Home Office think yourself lucky Jackie you might have to go back to the home office and try and find places for prisoners this evening Jackie Smith was determined to show that the home office was transformed it's some of the most sensitive information held by the home office police intelligence on repeat offenders and the personal details of all prisoners in England and Wales have gone missing the Home Secretary Jack E Smith has launched an inquiry are not good news for the attempted shiny new image of the Home Office I was furious you know I said first of all is undermining my objective to say about you as a department that you are fit for purpose one and secondly it's undermining our ability to be able to deliver the policy objectives that we that we've got and incidentally that was a view shared by the permanent secretary as well who was equally um furious but you know I'm that I was the public face of the Home Office I was the one who had to answer about that Jackie Smith resigned following her parliamentary expenses scandal it's a home office tradition that they hang their Home Secretary once they leave office Jackie Smith joins the ranks of those who've served and sometimes failed to come up to the demands both personal and political of the most perilous of Whitehall offices Allen Johnson became the sixth Labour Home Secretary in 12 years thank you very much for joining us you don't have a lot of traditions in this building but and we've had one or two home secretaries here it is a bit of a tradition that as they arrive and we ask them just to say some things to us in this atriums thank you very much David look the first thing I want to say is how delighted I am to be here I asked if I could have a quiet intimate word with the staff so this is a I mean all this rubbish you hear about poisoned chalices this is the most wonderful chalice I have ever seen and I couldn't be more delighted to be the new Home Secretary I am a huge admirer of the British civil service and we can have our internal discussions about what happens but on the public face of this department and I intend to take the rap when things go wrong and take all the credit credit obviously when things things go right I'm a politician after all thank you very much the Home Office has had three different locations in the past half century and along the way it has shared many of its traditional functions few of its staff were sad to say goodbye to the brutalist building in Queen Anne's gate and moved to shiny new headquarters but the splitting of the home office and its transformation into a ministry of internal security has led many to wonder whether it can still probably be called a great office of state great thing about the home office was it was his enormous collection of very disparate often functions together with a whole series of core criminal justice things that's not the nature of the home office now it is a less wide-ranging more narrowly focused place and therefore I think two people of my generation put it quite simply it is not the home office there can still be these incidents that can occur from day to day you know there's still a whole series of events that will affect us from day to day I'm pleased that you're not one department trying to straddle too many areas but I think actually the nature of this job the kind of edginess of the whole office is what makes it a really satisfying political challenge well I think it's leaner and it's more manageable but I don't think it necessarily has the same clout that it had one of the tasks of the Home Secretary certainly when I was there was to ensure that number 10 or number 11 Downing Street Prime Minister or Treasury didn't simply push you about because it's very important in terms of the balance of power in government that the Home Secretary and foreign secretary are able to counterbalance the power of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor I think the home office because of its traditions its history the fact that it is responsible for the basics of the state law and order the border countering terrorism protecting the public will always be a very important department whether it's a great department of state I'll leave others to church I mean do you think it is still one of the great departments will stay out and well I would say that now I'm in it yeah would it better stay one of the great departments of state because I've just reached it in the second part of this series the Foreign Office I'll be telling the inside story of its battles with number 10 and between Foreign Office mandarins and ministers the Farkas regards the arrival of each nuke Minister like an oyster regards the arrival of a grain of sand the intrusion of an irritant with a very less statistical probability of ever producing the pearl mrs. Thatcher she denied far off to talk famously she said we have a Department of Agriculture to look after farmers who have prompted fence to look after the soldiers that we've got the Foreign Office to look after the foreigners that's Palace of dreams part 2 the great officers of state next time and our corridors of power season continues here on BBC four tomorrow at 9:00 with getting our way there's a brand new series next this evening here on BBC four as we take a spectacular journey on the Indian Hill Railway

Channel: Expat UK

Views: 363,553

Rating: 4.8125 out of 5

Keywords: State (polity), BBC (TV Network), Michael Cockerell, Whitehall, Home Office, Foreign Office, Treasury, ministry, law and order, immigration, MI5, MI6, counter terrorism, counter intelligence, home secretary, chancellor of the exchequer, Alan Johnson, Jacqui Smith, 10 Downing Street, Downing Street, Chancellor, Number 10, Alastair Darling

Id: TyGhg8BmECw

Length: 59min 8sec (3548 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2012