THE HELLISH INCOMPETENCE OF THE HOME OFFICE

Matthew Rycoft, head of the Home Office, a man who last year described the Home Office as 'a beacon of light for the vulnerable'. 

A thing that has become increasingly apparent, and is brought into sharp focus by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, is the astonishing incompetence, at the most basic level, of the British State. In the refugee context, it is incompetence mixed with carelessness.  (Conceivably, the two naturally go together. If you don’t care what happens to people, why care whether what you do works or not?)

A lot  of this, clearly, is due to ministers – Priti Patel,  a woman fired by pathological hatred of the most vulnerable, but who  is also surprisingly dense; and of course Johnson, who doesn't do detail and doesn't care about anything except himself.

But it's increasingly clear that there is a deep seated and very basic incompetence at official level also.
For example, the decision even some  weeks into the crisis that one official would be adequate at Calais, with  no need for a Ukrainian interpreter, and no need to set up a visa processing office there. Then the bizarre idea of setting up one at Lille but concealing its whereabouts, and the decision that  visa processing  did not need reinforcing at other locations in Europe, and that there was no  need for Ukrainian translation of the  visa documentation, are all surely  the actions of officials.

The new scheme for allowing  people to house  in their homes Ukrainian refugees not eligible for the previous scheme is equally shambolic. No thought was given to how hosts and refugees would be matched up. The idea that charities and faith groups could somehow do this was not brokered with them  at all before the announcement, and they are  simply not equipped or resourced to do. As a result all sorts of ad hoc arrangements are growing up, and I know  from my own experience of using them that they are wide open to abuse of various kinds, but equally worrying, there is nothing to support people whose immediate instinct  is to offer a home with thinking through what that will actually mean for them.

And very worryingly, nothing has been done to put in place the specialist resources needed to support refugees themselves, and hosts. Oxford council tell me that government did not talk to or even inform local government before the announcement - parts of a pattern of pathological centralization which is a mark this government. Or rather,  a pathological centralization of decision making, combined with the casual assumption that local authorities can always sweep up the mess thus created. And of course, many of the services most  urgently needed for refugees, such as housing, social care, mental health services, are precisely those services most badly damaged by Tory cuts. Nor is any source of help identified full cases where either host or refugee come unstuck, and a new home is needed urgently.

What is striking is that these are not complex or technical issues, but very basic and  very obvious, and exactly the sort of thing that an hours brainstorming would put up on the whiteboard as issues which simply had to be tackled. I mean, there was a room full of Home Office officials, and someone said, let’s allow people to welcome Ukrainians into their home, just as long as they already know the Ukrainian in question, and the person chairing that meeting said; good idea, that’ll work well.

The excellent reporting by Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian details what such breath-taking incompetence means for the traumatised war victims:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/ukrainian-refugees-frustration-grows-over-long-wait-times-for-uk-visas

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/09/anger-and-exhaustion-as-ukrainians-turned-away-by-uk-in-calais
 
Refugee families sleeping in cars at Calais, with little to eat. Being forced to go to Paris just to fill up a form. Some, God help us, leaving safety to return to Ukrainian cities under siege because their money has run out while waiting for dozy Home Office officials to process their applications or just to answer the question: how long?

The officials seem utterly without shame, and are – of course! - never held to account, never even named. Well, let’s make a start here:

Glynn Williams DG Migration and Borders
Amma Haddad DG Asylum protection
Tony Eastaugh Immigration Enforcement

(Since you ask: there are 10 ‘Director Generals’. And an unbelievably 68 Directors  - I’m quoting from the last official Home Office organisation chart. This from the Department that cut 20,000 police officers.)

The institutional incompetence of the British state, which is been growing this past decade or so, no doubt  has many causes, including the pathological hostility of ministers towards their own servants, their unwillingness to listen, consequent timidity of  civil servants, and a decline in the calibre of people who are willing to serve in such circumstances, so that third raters rise to the top. (I mean, which of us would choose to work for Priti Patel, rather quit and than do something useful – a dustman, for example.)

Yet the times are going to require much more of government, not less.

Expect more failure.