Ever since the Blair-era home secretary John Reid, a no-nonsense character, remarked 20 years ago that the Home Office was not “fit for purpose”, the phrase – along with the problem – has cropped up time and again.
Indeed, it has done so twice in the past week. Shabana Mahmood, the latest incumbent to preside over that infamous graveyard of ministerial ambition, said a few days ago that her department was “not yet fit for purpose”, after the emergence of a confidential internal report from 2023 that highlighted, among other fatal flaws, a “culture of defeatism” on the issue of immigration and “a sense that high failure rates are an unavoidable fact of life in the system”.
