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I think everybody now agrees that the home office needs sorting out after this years list of cock ups- there is one thing in that piece that puzzled me though Nick:

'They'll "delineate responsibilities" - i.e. ministers will stop being involved in the day-to-day work of the immigration department, which cost first Beverley Hughes and then David Blunkett their jobs.'

Does this mean that the ministers of the home office office will even less responsible and accountable than they are already- just look at how long it took for Charles Clarke to go before and people were claiming there wasn't enough ministerial responsiblity then and this new system just means that anything that goes wrong with immigration can just be blamed on these unaccountable people and the minister can rightly say he had nothing to do with it- What do you think Nick?

Interestingly, although we rightly hold the politicians to account, it is really the senior civil servants who run the shop. "Yes Minister" was closer to the truth than most politicians would like us to know. When will these career, high-flying civil servants become accountable? They have high salaries, safe career paths, and fat, index-linked pensions. When was the last time that a senior civil servant's head rolled after a massive cock-up? Time for the old school civil service model to move into the 21st century with the rest of the world, and have proper oversight and accountability for incompetence.

I propose a three step solution to immigration:-

1. All illegal immigrants to register no later than 30 September and then granted leave to remain whilst there cases are considered.

2. All new illegal immigrants who manage to gain admission by bypassing border controls to register within 7 days of arrival in the UK.

3. Those who do not do so are to be regarded as enemy combatants subjected to military law and interned indefinitelly in accordance with the Geneva Conventions until repatriated or the war on terorism ends.

Very courageous of John Reid to vow to solve the problem of illegal immigrants within 5 years. I seem to recall a similar promise from him a couple of years ago to rid hospitals of MRSA. Of course, as appears to always be the case with this Prime Minister and his government, people are moved on and no one is there to be accountable. What is the likelihood of John Reid being in his current position in 5 years? No chance and he knows it.

YO ROBINSON !!!

Lets put it this way..to paraphrase
Gorson Browns alleged comments to Blair. I do not now believe any thing
you tell me.

Frankly my response to any new plan intiative or bright idea is that I do not belive any thing a Minister says any longer.

Doesn't this sound like 'we were at war with Eurasia, now we're at war with Eastasia' and the proles (and The Party) accept this without comment? What does it take for our Government to acknowledge any reponsibility for any of their many errors?

Did Michael Howard think that Agency Status for the Prison Service would make it "more difficult for ministers to get a grip on problems."

What he introduced it for Her Majesty's Prison Service in the 1993?

I'm confused as to how Mikes somewhat draconian suggestion would help us find those illegal immigrants we've already lost track of?

Which, silly little me, was i thought the problem that dominated the IND's recent history?

Secondly, why does this goverment insist on using a business model for things that clearly are non-business, and sometimes barely related? The IND, the home office, the NHS, for example.

What I mean by this is, how is downsizing the Home office, and saving £115 million in the process, hepful to the fact it doesn't do its job well enough?

The plans to be implemented by John Reid will be effective to a certain extent.

It would be a good idea if they do to the IND what Gordon Brown did to the treasury,ie,making the Bank of England independent.So making the IND autonomous will be the way forward to solve this problem that has been haunting the Home Office for decades and make it 'fit for purpose'

The workings of the Home Office,such as they are,continue to be hampered by well-meaning civil rights organ-isation, aided and abetted by the
legal profession who are making their
fortunes at the nation's expense.

We seem to be hamstrung by conflicting laws which prevent us from making any practical progress.

No one in Blair's Government is accountable for anything. How could they be? He'd have to resign over Iraq.

The 'home office' allow a serious immigration situation to drift into a state of chaos.
The chancellor creates a system of handing out cash credits in a manner which overspends by billions.
Education education education, pathetic.
Tough on crime! When? we are still waiting.
Ill equipped, near forgotten soldiers risk their lives in friendless Iraq.
Mr.P.Deputy Prime Minister, of the United Kingdom, really? They cannot be serious.
Eradicate sleaze, 'Cash for Honours'.
Vote Labour - I think not.

John Reid has made a career of moving into a job announcing plans then moving on.
I wonder where he will acknowledge reponsibility for previous wheezes which have not worked.
In 5 years time when this has failed
will he hold his hands up? No of course not. He'll probably be Lord Reid by then.

To paraphrase John Reid,
"It's back to square 1"
It must be really bad indeed and shows that successive Secretaries of state were incompetent.
John Reid is loving telling everyone how bad it is, it's reverse psychology, as it's meant to make you think that things will get better. The jury is out on that.
It would be most interesting to have all Govt Depts put under the same scrutiny, starting with the Dept for Rural Affairs.

This is just more of the same from the Home Office- and for anyone who knows what a mess immigration really is, it is an extremely depressing & predictable response. If this unknown backlog could be cleared in five years- why hs nobody done this before? And how will it be cleared when nobody has any clear idea of the numbers involved- or where people actually are?
The only way to identify people is by announcing an one-off amnesty as they did previously with families. Have a clear cut-off date, then put some proper border controls in place. Both Spaina nd the US have had to bite the bullet on this one.
Until they do this, they will never be able to introduce biometric pasports or ID cards. And they know it.

I'm bemused by John Reid's bold claim that the asylum backlog would be cleared within five years, despite a trawl of files finding between 400,000 and 450,000 case files.

We have only just reached the much anticipated "tipping point", removing more failed asylum seekers than those claims refused per month. To now announce that an additional 400,000 to 450,000 cases still considered to be in the UK are to be removed within a 5 year timeframe, is at least ambitious and in all likelyhood a foolish promise to announce, raising the publics expectations far beyond what can be delivered.

Aside from the matter of how to encounter all these people, there is simply nothing like the capacity required to effect that many removals within a 5 year timeframe, let alone address the additional claims and casework issues that would arise from detaining so many people.

It is clear to anyone close to IND that John Reid will be certainly not be the Home Secretary by the closure of this 5 year timeframe.

So the IND which has long been an out of control fiefdom unaccountable to the minister within the home office is to get yet more freedom. This is such a joke. These people are incompetent and should be sacked. They should become more accountable not less.

This reminds me of the almost perpetual management churn in my company which constantly overturns attempts by frontline staff to make any improvements. The man on high announces he has done the hard bit of reassuring customer confidence with the new organisational "vision" - and all that remains is the "easy" bit for the rest of us to fill in the detail.
We have now taken to calling any such counter-productive announcement in our company "a John Reid".
The only legacy of this Home Secretary will be a further slip towards a police state of summary justice - which Lord Levy may already appreciate.

What the government has failed to mention so far is that, there maybe 450 000 failed asylum seekers that they are aware of, but they have no idea how many other illegal entrants there are in the UK? They have instructed their immigration officers involved in enforcement and removals,to ignore anyone that they encounter on enforcement visits, who has arrived in the UK by clandestine means in order to prevent them claiming asylum and therefore, raising the number of asylum applicants. The Government claim they have " Tipped the balance" by removing more failed asylum seekers than there are new applicants
but his is just another lie. Tipping the Balance is nothing more than government propoganda designed to fool the general public into thinking that they are on top of the situation.They have no idea how many, or who the illegal immigrants are that are here.

The same people re-arranging the same chairs on the same Titanic!

So ministers are to stop being involved in the day-to-day work of the immigration department. When did they start being involved? Where ministers were involved, why did they not have the foggiest idea of what was going on? The answer, I suspect, is because the vast majority of the politicians 'running the country' never ran as much as a whelk stall before entering Parliament. They were lawyers, newspaper leader-writers and lecturers. Planning, setting targets, budgeting, motivation and leading by example, monitoring progress and the nitty-gritty of management is an alien world to them. It is unfair to accuse ministers of incompetence when they have previously never been in any position where they could demonstrate competence.

I've grown to have little faith in both the civil service and local government where good management is concerned. Both live lives with no real competition, comfortable terms of employment, and nobody holding them to account if or when things go wrong. I don't believe they even understand how far removed they are from the real world, and having a government filled with so many former lawyers and teachers is not going to help.

Malcolm (1.25pm, 19 July 2006) above obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. Several senior civil servants have lost their jobs or been demoted in the foray surrounding foreign national prisoners. (People that didn't deserve to when they are doing their jobs and following ministerial instructions/targets.) Their jobs aren't safe and their salaries are comparably lower than those who work in the Private Sector with the same responsibilities.

I'm bemused by John Reid's bold claim that the asylum backlog would be cleared within five years, despite a trawl of files finding between 400,000 and 450,000 case files.

We have only just reached the much anticipated "tipping point", removing more failed asylum seekers than those claims refused per month. To now announce that an additional 400,000 to 450,000 cases still considered to be in the UK are to be removed within a 5 year timeframe, is at least ambitious and in all likelyhood a foolish promise to announce, raising the publics expectations far beyond what can be delivered.

Aside from the matter of how to encounter all these people, there is simply nothing like the capacity required to effect that many removals within a 5 year timeframe, let alone address the additional claims and casework issues that would arise from detaining so many people.

It is clear to anyone close to IND that John Reid will be certainly not be the Home Secretary by the closure of this 5 year timeframe.

Things must be on the up for the Government/Ministers/Labour Party, its taken six days to come up with an anti weblog, this will not do.

'Delineating responsibilites' means that Reid can sanctimoniously stand back and point a finger at everyone's wrongdoings and say he has nothing to do with all that.
Neat and cool. The New Mr Home Sec can now pass the buck and accountability, not that any minister in this government ever has to fear being held accountable to anything.

If having a more "dynamic frontline" means not being strangled by red tape, inexhaustive appeals procedures, cash-hungry and selfish immigration solicitors and yes - political correctness, then I would welcome these reforms. One thing though - I can't help but agree with my fellow cynic (realist?), Mr Hornby - is this all just a ploy to make government mministers less accountable for what is fundamentally (a word I learned today!) their collective responsibility anyway?

If the Immigration Service were allowed to get on and do the business it knows best, rather than attempting to work to this Governments misguided policies and obsession with headlines, then it wouldn't be in the mess it now is. And as Government Departments work to the Government of the day, if they are considered to be "not fit for purpose" then, that can only mean the Government is not fit for purpose!

Help me understand this: the department was deemed not fit for purpose; so instead we will have a new department run by the same people albeit in different jobs and with a minister no longer directly responsible.
How simply new labour- the government can now stand back and point a finger when it becomes apparent that the reformed department also proves not fit for purpose; and tell us that it is not of their making. Probably blame the conservatives in the department.

One of the mystifying things about watching these spectacles unfold is how so much went so wrong for so long. I think most humble taxpayers (such as myself) will be interested/intrigued/shocked to learn that none of the 'directors' (I use the term advisedly) responsible will lose their jobs as a result of this farrago.

Clearly, there is always a degree to which, given ministerial oversight, successive ministers have not been asking the right questions, or perhaps have been too easily satisfied by the answers they have been getting. But the Civil Service must shoulder a lot of the blame for this. We rely, as a nation, on these people to provide continuity and sound management whatever the stripe of their political masters. Quite how the 15 'directors' can justify the endless series of disasters under their aegis would make quite an interesting tale, except that they will of course remain largely anonymous and unaccountable.

If John Reid claims to be able to expel the 'estimated' 480,000 failed asylum seekers surely his first and impossible task will be to find them. The scandalously lax and incompetent system over the past 10 years has firstly allowed entry into the country of tens of thousands of blatantly bogus claimants and then to compound this, issued many with National Insurance numbers and allowed them to dissapear into society at large. The Home office has been unable to trace most of the 1000 prisoners convicted of serious offences released but not deported after completing their sentences, what hope have they of finding all these others, many of whom have been here given the shambles of the system, for many years.
This all a smokescreen to mask the huge number of people entering the UK from the newly joined Eastern European states (Poland etc) that this Government estimated would be no more than 30,000 but has in fact become 320,000, with many thousands more to come if Bugaria and Turkey are allowed to join the EU.These would not be illegal entrants of course so would not add to Mr Reids totals.
I confidently predict that in 12 months or so this Goverment will abandon notions of expelling people they are unable (and not very willing) to trace and will start to talk the A word, Amnesty, with such talk as 'fresh start' 'clean sheet' etc.

Don't blame nick either - he's just doing his job - spinning the government line in return for juicy morsels

High time Labour started paying his salary instead of the licence payer !

Dear Nick,
Re:
'Don't blame me, I'm new here' - is this the Home Office mantra?"

I don't know if it is, but I do know that if we don't do something different in the way that we work, ie stop looking for people to blame when things get stuck, this country will not stand a chance in the global economy.

Here is an interesting perspective copied from "101 Zen Stories" site,on how to deal with this "blame culture" ..

"Eating the Blame

Circumstances arose one day which delayed preperation of the dinner of a Soto Zen master, Fukai, and his followers. In haste the cook went to the garden with his curved knife and cut off the tops of green vegetables, chopped them together and made soup, unaware that in his haste he had included a part of a snake in the vegetables.

The followers of Fugai thought they never tasted such good soup. But when the master himself found the snake's head in his bowl, he summoned the cook. "What is this?" he demanded, holding yo the head of the snake.

"Oh, thank you, master," replied the cook, taking the morsel and eating it quickly.

The Home Office may not know how many failed asylum seekers there are in the country, but I know how many failed ministers there are in the government.

I was in the Home Office yesterday while the Home Secretary was being interviewed, giggling away with the journalists. My dealings with HO staff are regular and I regularly come across staff who are unfocused at best and incompetent at least some of the time. Getting rid of a few directors is one thing, but what about the others. A chum yesterday said that all the brightest people in the department had been brought together to assist with this review, "what, both of them?" came the reply. How we both laughed

Whatever system Reid establishes will be doomed to failure because, quite simply, the Home Office doesn't have a Policy around which to operate.

The Ministers who are responsible for Policy have not come up with workable guidelines. This is to be expected as they are Politicians who deal with 'words' rather than 'action'.

One half of the hierachy think that removal of Illegals is the policy. The other half thinks that an Amnesty for Illegals is the policy. The latter would need a Referendum if NewLab propose changing the constitution of the population.

So, can Reid kindly clarify for staff and for the electorate what his Policies are ?

Then actions might be focused on meeting the Policy goals and staff might know which way they are kicking.

I really do feel in the midst of all this that even as someone who is implicitly supportive of the checks and balances’ the state can bring to society that smaller government is the only realistic alternative.

It is quite clear that there is no real sense in either government or the civil service of how to focus on their core business e.g. running the country efficiently. More of this, you must be joking!

It does seem to me that in the flood of initiatives that keep coming down the pipe, no-one seems to be focussed on the results, giving feedback, solving the problem or making improvements. It appears that all we need is more...initiatives!

Let's face facts;

The Home Office has been badly managed for years by Ministers & their mandarins .

All John Reid is saying is this is all going to change.

The proof of John Reids pudding has never been in the eating, he's usually long gone by the time dessert arrives and consequently never picks up the tab.

The 400,000 case log to be cleared in 5 years. AFAIK the Sec State John Reid only said that the 400k or so would be gone through to find duplications and basically to log them not to have them processed in 5 years. Maybe someone could clarify this.

Does anyone really believe that Labour can do anything. We have so many mistakes now it is becoming the norm.

Why is it so much easier to get into UK as an asylum seeker or an illegal immigrant than it is to get in legally?

I have migrated here legally. I work hard & am in the highest tax bracket. And yet, I am subjugated to more red tape and painfully slow immigration proceedures than I would be if I were to be here illegally.