“She’s a blunt instrument,” one former colleague said of Patel. hen the Home Office does acknowledge a mistake, the recriminations begin. “After three weeks their reply was ‘we don’t recognise your complaint as being a valid complaint’, with a link to a 35-page complaints guidance document.”. Catriona Jarvis, another retired judge, told me: “I’ve had presenting officers break down in front of me because they can’t bear hearing about the traumatic experiences of people whose cases they’ve been told to oppose.”, Why does the Home Office insist on fighting cases it knows it will lose? The Home Office tended to be slightly more trad civil service – men in reasonably well-turned suits who are into prisons.” The comms team had a kind of trench mentality, said the former press officer. She previously served as Secretary of State for International Development from 2016 to 2017. Last week, as allegations of UK H ome S ecretary Priti Patel bullying her staff were levelled by three previous employees, The Guardian came out with a cartoon depicting her as a bully. (On visas, the department is allowed to make a 103% profit. “If there’s one thing the secretary of state is supposed to bloody do for the people who work there it’s to defend them,” Alan Johnson told me. A member of the Conservative Party, she has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Witham since 2010.She is ideologically on the right wing of the Conservative Party and considers herself to be a Thatcherite. Yet the “hard” edges of the system seemed to always win out. Labour has suspended a leadership candidate for the Unite trade union from the party after he called for the home secretary, Priti Patel, to be deported … In the most extreme cases, the home secretary is forced to resign. The Guardian has been accused of racism over a cartoon showing Priti Patel and Boris Johnson. The home secretary, who oversees the domestic security agency MI5 as well as the Home Office, is the British state’s enforcer and its snooper-in-chief. He had lived in the UK for nearly a decade, he had a degree from an English university, he spoke English fluently. Yet I was surprised to find that he wasn’t entirely angry, because he was still hopeful that the British system would give him justice, along with others he had met who had been wrongly accused of cheating. The Home Office has long had a reputation for being somewhat dour and confrontational. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the UK’s immigration system is that it doesn’t do what the Home Office says it does. “The sheer weight of applications across the board,” said the former Conservative immigration minister Caroline Nokes, leaves the department “permanently struggling with a lack of people to do the job”. The British Home Secretary is the first woman of color to hold the role. Yet it’s a stranger, more isolated position than the others. “The outcome is legally inevitable, but it’s very important to them that it’s a judge who makes the decision, so they can say to the press: ‘We’re disappointed about the decision, we’re going to fight it.’”. Why would anyone think he had cheated on a test he had taken as a mere formality when he applied for a new visa? In the most extreme cases, the home secretary is forced to resign. “Socially, economically, financially, educationally and otherwise,” writes the barrister Colin Yeo in his recent book Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System, “migrants and their families are deliberately penalised for being migrants.” This can affect anyone, in theory, but it is very often people from black and Asian backgrounds, with roots in former British colonies, who get caught in the system’s traps. This article was amended on 14 May 2021. Ministers wanted to boost the state’s capacity to keep track of immigrants as they went about their everyday lives. In September 2020, a report by parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, 6.2 million foreign citizens who live in the UK. Ministers feel they are constantly blamed for things going wrong, but never given credit for getting things right. According to Gibb, it all comes down to perception. The current system is creating a growing population who lack legal status, or who are forced to live in forms of limbo. The cumulative effect of these changes, according to the former senior civil servant, “was to take away discretion from the people who were taking the decisions and insist that they follow the rules to the letter”. n the somewhat pompous language of Westminster politics, the job of home secretary is known as one of the UK’s four “great offices of state”. “But you can’t sell that to the public. While most public attention focuses either on the high political drama of Westminster, or the patrolling of Britain’s external borders – as in the reality TV series Border Force – casework is the real heart of the Home Office. “All departments get infected by the culture of the sectors they work with,” a Whitehall veteran who worked across several departments told me. The world in which most operational staff work is miles away from Westminster, a contrast encapsulated by the department’s two rival headquarters. The world in which most operational staff work is miles away from Westminster, a contrast encapsulated by the department’s two rival headquarters. Amin stayed in the UK and tried to clear his name, aware that at any moment he could be arrested again and deported. It was never an overwhelming number – claims peaked at just over 84,000 in 2002, a fraction of the million or so refugees who arrived in Germany during 2015, for instance – but the Home Office, as a former official put it, “nearly melted down”. (May declined to be interviewed for this article. Hardly a week passed without some sort of tweak to tighten things,” he said. Amin was terrified and humiliated – he had needed the toilet before he was led out of his house, and had to go while a female officer looked on – but he was also baffled. He was from a middle-class family in Dhaka and his father had given him tens of thousands of pounds to set up an import branch of the family clothing business. For any given policy, the former mid-level civil servant said, Labour ministers had wanted to know how they could justify it to their constituents. “Immigration is a good thing for the country,” Jacqui Smith, home secretary from 2007 to 2009, told me. But according to Monique Hawkins, who is now a campaigner for EU citizens’ rights, there is a familiar sense of frustration that officials won’t speak with them directly about problems with the scheme. But its policy departments are dwarfed by its operational arm, which is mostly dedicated to monitoring the 6.2 million foreign citizens who live in the UK, along with the many people who visit the country each year. “So we turned over everything to see what we could do. If governments don’t act within the law, then the whole system collapses.” In January, Caroline Nokes broke ranks, accusing the Home Office of “inhuman” policy towards asylum-seekers and of merely “paying lip service” to the Windrush report. Along with prime minister, chancellor and foreign secretary, it’s a role that any ambitious minister is supposed to covet. For most of the 20th century, immigration control had mainly consisted of checking people’s documents at UK borders. The Home Office, Miah told me, made basic mistakes about her case: she had applied for special consideration because she has four children from her first marriage, the oldest of whom was 15 at the time, and it would be a violation of their rights to uproot the entire family to Bangladesh. Migration can mean many things, but for some people it is an act of faith in the country they choose to make their home. One presenting officer told me that their bosses often asked them to perform the impossible. What’s going on at the Home Office has become an increasingly urgent question in recent years. Priti Patel warned not to ‘attack democracy’ by changing mayoral voting system. Why aren’t you removing people? Tayjay Thompson, a 24-year-old Londoner who has lived in the UK since the age of five, was one of the people scheduled to be on that flight. “Everybody makes mistakes, right?” he said when we spoke recently. Most home secretaries, as the parade of New Labour ministers could tell you, pass relatively quickly through the role. UK News: LONDON: A cartoon in the Guardian depicting British Indian home secretary Priti Patel as a cow with a ring through her nose and British Prime Minister. It turned out he wasn’t alone. When Reid arrived, he decided that he would fix what his predecessors had failed to, by slimming down the Home Office and focusing it more tightly on security. Several current and former civil servants told me, however, that immigration is seen as a poor cousin to other, “sexier” Home Office policy areas, such as counter-terrorism. “I want everyone in the country to help with this,” Cameron declared in a speech, “including by reporting suspected illegal immigrants.”, The hostile environment wasn’t an entirely new idea: the term, which originated in Home Office counter-terrorism policy, was first applied to immigration in 2008 by the Labour minister Liam Byrne, when he declared his intention to “flush illegal migrants out”. The phrase, as one former civil servant put it, “has hung round the neck of the department like an albatross” ever since it was. As several people who served in Labour governments after 2006 told me, while immigration remained one of the most controversial political topics, the focus shifted away from the ability of the Home Office to carry out its job. Other public bodies, including the NHS, schools and the police were encouraged to share data with the Home Office on immigrants they encountered. The hostile environment – which remains largely intact, although it has been renamed the “compliant” environment – has been in operation for almost a decade. From then on, immigration became the flashpoint. If that sounds like an unbelievable figure, it was: the data has since been shown to be faulty, but not before the Home Office cancelled thousands of people’s visas. The hostile environment – which remains largely intact, although it has been renamed the “compliant” environment – has been in operation for almost a decade. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here, Sign up for the long read weekly newsletter, EU citizens arriving in UK being locked up and expelled, Life after deportation: 'No one tells you how lonely you're going to be', Cruel, paranoid, failing: inside the Home Office, or the thousands of people who end up on the wrong side of the, he fear that drives the Home Office can be summed up in four words: not fit for purpose. The Guardian - “Why do people get involved in crime and serious crime? Caroline Nokes, then immigration minister, in 2018. erhaps the most bizarre aspect of the UK’s immigration system is that it doesn’t do what the Home Office says it does. In an apparent panic, the Home Office asked ETS how many foreign students at its wider network of test centres had cheated. The Guardian has learned that records related to serious offences, meant to be kept “indefinitely”, have been affected and police have already suffered what they term as “near misses” for serious crimes. How did it become so broken? The Guardian - A leadership candidate for the Unite trade union has apologised after calling for home secretary Priti Patel to be deported on Twitter. I asked the former Home Office press officer, who also worked under May, how much attention they paid to criticism from liberal media outlets. “Instead they are settled or withdrawn. More often, though, the job brings out a politician’s authoritarian tendencies. Dr Maya Goodfellow, author of Hostile Environment, reacts to UK Home Secretary Priti Patel's defence of a controversial immigration bill earlier this week. After Sheikh Shariful Amin was accused in 2015 of having cheated on his English language test, the message from all quarters – not just the Home Office, but even the first lawyer he contacted – was that he should go home. It is in charge of housing and a benefits system for asylum seekers. In 2020, after the damning conclusions of an official review into the Windrush scandal, Patel apologised for the “terrible injustices” that had occurred in wrongly stripping hundreds of Commonwealth citizens, mainly from the Caribbean, of their rights. After a short hearing of just over an hour, her appeal was granted. Among graduates who join the civil service each year, the Home Office isn’t considered the most prestigious department, but it is a place where an ambitious young official can show off their credentials and build a career. In recent years, Theresa May – who held the post from 2010 to 2016, far longer than any other home secretary in recent memory – is the prime example. Last modified on Fri 14 May 2021 08.47 BST. “Health is do-gooders, and education is beardy people who like to talk about education. For the thousands of people who end up on the wrong side of the Home Office each year, there is often a sudden moment of disbelief. Talk to people who have worked at the Home Office over the past 20 years and you are hit by an overwhelming feeling of defensiveness. (A frontline worker who represents the Home Office in court blamed ministers and managers’ “ignorance of immigration law” for “what is clearly a broken system”.). For Sheikh Shariful Amin, a young businessman from Bangladesh, the moment of disbelief came on 5 February 2015, in the back of an Immigration Enforcement van. Staff, said the former manager, “also hear the messages from their political masters, whether spoken or not. For Monique Hawkins, a Dutch software engineer, it was when her application for a residency permit was rejected, despite the fact she had lived in the UK for 24 years. David Blunkett, who was home secretary between 2001 and 2004, described his first impression of the department as a shambles. Priti Patel's two-tier asylum plan treats refugees with cold indifference Enver Solomon 3/24/2021 Man charged in connection with drive-by shooting of … For the thousands of people who end up on the wrong side of the Home Office each year, there is often a sudden moment of disbelief. To save money, much of this work was outsourced to the rest of society. Baker felt that the atmosphere encouraged civil servants to “come up with ever more ridiculous ideas on immigration, in order to get promotion and get brownie points. It does all this on a relatively small Whitehall budget, much of which is clawed back through fees for visa, citizenship and passport applications. How did it get like this? Then there is the current home secretary to contend with. Last year, Amin finally won an appeal against the decision to strip him of his visa in 2015. (It’s hard to know for sure, because the Home Office doesn’t make official estimates.) Many of these people have lived much, if not all, of their lives here: of 215,000 undocumented children, half were born in the UK. Its impact on them was something we felt very strongly about.” The official added that the Home Office “was quite an outlier in Whitehall” and “didn’t have many allies in political debate”. Why are the numbers so high?’, you’re going to use your initiative and focus on reducing numbers and removing people.”. When it is criticised, the Home Office is as likely to lash out as admit a mistake: “If you are not being challenged by someone, you are not doing it right,” one official recently told the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. In one notorious episode in 2003, Downing Street collaborated with the Sun on a special “asylum week”, a series of articles that began on a Monday with a piece headlined “Halt the asylum tide now” and ended on a Friday with a column by Blunkett promising “draconian” measures to clamp down on illegal immigration. They worry about being seen as callous or racist – “like right bloody Nazis,” as one official told me – yet this is frequently outweighed by not wanting to be seen as weak on immigration. Members of the public, in effect, would become border guards. Labour has suspended a leadership candidate for the Unite trade union from the party after he called for the home secretary, Priti Patel, to be deported on Twitter. Biden calls for 50% reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, Patel and Boris Johnson both went on to target “lefty lawyers” in their Conservative party conference speeches a few weeks later. Some civil servants were haunted by the Home Office’s dysfunctional reputation. Your support powers our independent journalism, Available for everyone, funded by readers, Howard Beckett, who is also a member of Labour’s national executive committee, has been suspended from the party, Bodies say survey is poorly designed, rushed and may exclude refugees from responding, Organised crime groups seeking small boats to bring asylum seekers across Channel, National Crime Agency says, MPs and peers are told proposed law would have ‘chilling effect’ on right to demonstrate, High court says FDA union can launch judicial review of Boris Johnson’s backing of home secretary. For much of the 20th century, the department even ran pubs and breweries in Carlisle, to control the alcohol intake of workers at nearby arms factories. “You’re in this constant fight with officials from both departments,” said the former mid-level civil servant, “who think that you’re a ridiculous, economically illiterate department.” While this tension isn’t new, the official felt that it grew more intense after the change of government in 2010. The bill, which divides immigrants into 'skilled' and 'unskilled', is edging closer and closer to being passed into law. The Home Office has introduced new “face behind the case” training for civil servants, “so that everyone involved in casework thinks about the individual”. The rest of the time, the blame is usually dumped on staff who work in the Home Office’s operational divisions. “She seeks to do and say the thing that will be perceived to be the toughest thing that anyone could possibly do or say in any given scenario.”. 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