A Home Office shake-up is not enough. To tackle small boats, government must be radical
Small boat crossing the English Channel, 2020 (Credit: adp-news)
7 min read
Bold steps are needed to finally get a grip on illegal migration. Setting up an independent, cross-party commission would be just that.
Nick Timothy’s review of Home Office effectiveness has finally been published, following a two-year legal battle with The Times.
But, for clarity, if it wasn’t for The Times, Timothy’s review would likely still be internal. Or to put it another way: Shabana Mahmood, the current Home Secretary, and her Labour and Conservative predecessors – back to Suella Braverman (who commissioned the report) – appear to have had no intention of releasing it voluntarily.
Once confronted with the fact that the government would have to release the report, Mahmood seized the political opportunity to frame its findings as a mandate for a reset, promising tighter accountability and delivery.
The report’s core findings are stark: the Home Office has a culture of defeatism, muddled lines of accountability, and weak data and delivery across the immigration system. Current and future Home Office ministers now face a daunting delivery challenge.
The Timothy review also flagged issues that were known and widely understood by the establishment. Successive think-tank reports and the National Audit Office have highlighted a record of poor delivery on key departmental policies and strategies, acute leadership problems and workforce morale among the worst in Whitehall.
A range of calls to return to the drawing board have been made – including by this author - as Yvette Cooper took residence at 2 Marsham Street on Labour’s election victory. In this context, Mahmood’s commitment “to transform the Home Office so that it delivers for this country” is overdue.
How the Home Secretary will realise this commitment is far from clear. Current operational and political pressures are likely to make reform as hard, if not harder, than at any point previously. Meanwhile, the institutional failings reported by Timothy stand to continue to impact Labour’s efforts to deliver across critical areas from asylum policy to policing.
Nowhere are the issues more visible than in the handling of irregular migration. A sharp rise in irregular Channel crossings since 2018 continues to loom large as criminal business models evolve. In 2025, small boats remain the primary means of detected irregular entry. 36,734 people were reported to have arrived by small boat as of 21 October – 8,530 more than the same point the previous year, but slightly below that in 2022, the highest year on record.
Fatalities have increased as criminals have loaded boats with more people to maximise profits. The International Organisation for Migration has since declared 2024 the deadliest year for migrants crossing the Channel.
In this context, the review’s findings are concerning. While recognising the complexity of handling the issue, it concludes that there is “no systems approach to … tackling illegal immigration”, with “confused lines of accountability” across agencies.
It denounces the current model as a failure, highlighting a lack of strategic clarity and “contradictions in what different parts of the immigration system believe their purpose and objectives to be”. Gaps in internal coherence are reported, as are poor handovers across Immigration Enforcement, Border Force and other parts of the system.
Further issues are reported, from complacency among staff about high failure rates to a “defensive approach” among Home Office lawyers. Internal communication comes in for criticism, with a reported reluctance by senior officials to speak “difficult truths” to ministers.
All this comes as a newly released Home Affairs Committee report has pointed to billions squandered on asylum accommodation, attributing this to “inadequate oversight” and wider “Home Office mismanagement”.
Overall, little appears to have changed since the Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier’s 2020 depiction of the Home Office as having “frighteningly little grasp of the impact of its activities in managing immigration” and “no inclination to learn from its numerous mistakes”.
To address these issues, the Timothy review stresses the urgent need for end-to-end systems approaches. Yet it argues against the integration of Border Force and Immigration Enforcement, and dismisses calls to break up the Home Office to address the issues, citing the likely disruption and distraction from core business.
Two years on, these recommendations may need revisiting. With a problem catalogue this long and entrenched, how end-to-end approaches might be achieved across the existing set-up remains hard to discern. It is also unclear if Timothy’s recommended appointment of a Second Permanent Secretary to direct the whole of the immigration system is enough to overcome enduring structural and accountability challenges.
The UK is not the only European government struggling with both political polarisation and organisational incompetence. Many OECD countries are grappling with record immigration, including record numbers of asylum seekers. This has strained reception systems, housing and public services, prompting tighter asylum rules and, in some cases, limits on other legal routes – even as skills shortages and ageing populations force a parallel push to attract workers and students.
In the UK, immigration policy has rarely enjoyed sustained cross-party support. The Home Affairs Committee warned years ago that the debate is polarised, targets are chronically missed, and current party platforms on asylum and borders remain far apart.
Unlike other countries, the UK has no standing statutory mechanism to facilitate cross-party agreement on immigration. This is ironic, as this is often not seen as a national problem, but rather a party-political issue. Policy swings with the churn of ministers; targets appear disconnected to housing stock, school places and NHS capacity; and the same ‘not yet fit’ department is asked to both police borders and run a service for visas and asylum.
Yet the Home Secretary’s opportunism has fared her well – at least until the next crisis. For this reason, the government should now consider the unthinkable: not hive off immigration to a new department – which, while a good idea, is not a quick fix – but pursue something more radical.
The small boats crisis now offers an opportunity to address a system Timothy describes as “confused and conflicting” and find some political consensus on an issue that will likely be at the heart of the next election. To leverage the opportunity, Labour should consider creating an independent cross-party commission – drawing nominees from government and all opposition parties to report before the next election.
Should a way forward be agreed, this could form the basis of a permanent commission reporting to Parliament on annual planning ranges and integration outcomes. This could at least have the benefit of stabilising policy, restoring delivery discipline and reducing incentives to use immigration as a political weapon rather than a problem to solve.
Amid the recent cluster of crises – not least the accidental release of Hadush Kebatu, recently jailed for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in Essex after arriving by small boat – all options must be on the table. Long considered a great office of state, the Home Office is now seen by many as a department to avoid.
The Timothy review exposes failures that must be fixed before progress is possible across borders, asylum, policing and crime. It is welcome that Mahmood has signalled her intent to tackle the issues, but this will require clear ownership, deadlines and public metrics.
To deliver on her policy agenda, she must urgently grip the extent of the task; she would do well to set out her plans for a statutory, cross-party commission and invite other parties to help shape it.
Over a decade ago, a former Labour adviser argued that “most politicians are too tactical. They confuse being on the news … with setting an agenda”. Ceding a measure of control to an independent body comes with some political risk. But it would strengthen ministerial authority by locking in shared facts and targets, and might cool the politics of immigration, creating space – if done well – for both enforcement and targeted legal routes that reduce irregular flows.
Cathy Haenlein is Director of Organised Crime and Policing Studies at RUSI.
