Sajid Javid is determined to press ahead with a wide-ranging review of the culture and practices at the Home Office, despite concerns that it could point the finger at decisions made during Theresa May’s tenure.
The home secretary announced last month that he would institute a review, after it emerged that some immigrants applying to stay in Britain had been wrongly obliged to provide DNA samples.
Senior Whitehall sources suggested Downing Street was sceptical about the review, saying: “Yhey haven’t stopped it, but I don’t think they like it.”
But the scale of the Windrush scandal and the mishandling of the rules about DNA samples has left Javid believing too many people have been left in limbo.
Javid, who is widely regarded as a potential Conservative leadership contender, is keen to avoid the fate of his predecessor, Amber Rudd, who was forced to resign after misleading MPs about the existence of immigration targets.
Downing Street rejected the idea it had sought to resist Javid’s plans for a review on Friday. “I wouldn’t accept that,” May’s spokeswoman said. “The PM believes it’s clearly right the structures and processes in any department are reviewed to ensure they are effective and fair, and that’s what’s happening.”
The review, which will be carried out internally, was expected to focus on the way policy conceived in Whitehall was implemented by immigration officials up and down the country and challenge what Rudd called the “computer says no” Home Office culture.
However, the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, has consistently said that May’s “hostile environment” migration policies, not the actions of individual officials, were to blame for the treatment of the Windrush generation and other recent failings.
Javid hopes the review could be carried out before his department has to institute radical changes in the UK’s migration policy. A white paper setting out the government’s plans for post-Brexit migration was expected to be published later this month, with the emphasis on attracting high-skilled workers.
Rudd said on Friday she hoped “changes will be made” at the Home Office after a report found senior civil servants failed her at the height of the Windrush scandal.
She stepped down in April after wrongly telling the home affairs select committee there were no targets for removing illegal immigrants.
The report by the prime minister’s adviser on ministers’ interests, Sir Alex Allan, found officials repeatedly gave her the wrong information and failed to clear up the problem in time to allow her to correct the record when she appeared before MPs on 25 April.
An executive summary of the report, published by the Home Office on Friday after its findings were reported in the Times, criticised two senior officials for the way Rudd was told there were no targets, something put down to “crossed wires”, with other errors then meaning the mistake was missed.
The officials, Hugh Ind, then the head of immigration enforcement, and Patsy Wilkinson, one of the Home Office’s top civil servants, have not faced any disciplinary action and have both moved to different government jobs.
In the report, Allan criticised Ind for a “less than satisfactory performance” and said Wilkinson, as the manager of an exposed official, would have been expected to “play a more proactive role”.
Rudd told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There are elements of this report which just show that, unfortunately, that area of the department did not have a grip on what was going on.I hope that there will be changes made as a result of this report so that people get a better service from immigration enforcement.”
Rudd questioned why the report had been “sat on for nearly six months” and claimed she had been targeted by a series of leaks while she was home secretary. “There were a series of leaks during the past year at quite a high level that were definitely intended to embarrass me,” she said.
Downing Street said May, who preceded Rudd as home secretary, accepted Allan’s findings. “Clearly, the report has raised some difficult and important issues, and the Home Office has rightly said that they’re going to learn from those,” May’s spokeswoman said.
But she rejected any suggestion of concerted efforts by civil servants to undermine ministers. “It is about a specific set of circumstances involving a small number of individuals,” the spokeswoman said. “There is nothing to suggest such issues are widespread across either the department or the civil service.”
The PCS civil service union reacted angrily to the suggestion that officials should be held responsible. “It is galling how Amber Rudd cannot seem to take responsibility for the policies of the department she was in charge of as home secretary,” said Mark Serwotka, the PCS general secretary.
“To attempt to shift blame on officials and overstretched, under-resourced Home Office staff for the mistakes during her time as home secretary is shocking. The hostile environment she oversaw and a culture of bullying and discrimination that was allowed to take place is to blame, not hard-working staff.”
• This article was amended on 6 November 2018 to note that the Times first reported the findings of the Home Office report.
