The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, says she “shares the public’s anger” that Hadush Kebatu, a “vile child sex offender” as she describes him, was mistakenly released from prison and allowed to go on the run for a few days.
Presumably, Ms Mahmood is equally furious, if not more so, that it became necessary for officials to offer him £500 to go quietly. What had been a PR disaster – the initial discharge from prison – had been recovered as a PR coup, of immediate deportation, only to be ruined by a bung to a man an entire nation reviled. That would test anyone’s patience.
As Ms Mahmood put it, she had to “pull every lever” to dispatch him, and “our streets are safer because of it”. A forced deportation, such as this case, does not normally require a financial incentive, but here, the captive threatened to resist and pursue legal means to prevent him from being deported immediately. That would have meant unacceptable delay, lawyers’ bills and the possibility that the courts would oblige him. The pragmatic decision was taken to save the taxpayer money and get Kebatu out of the country as soon as possible.
Nonetheless, it feels terribly wrong that a man who was supposedly seeking shelter from persecution in this country and then went on to commit a sexual assault that caused widespread distress should have been paid anything.
Yet the incident, and intense public frustration about the wider immigration crisis, has prompted more questions about the Home Office’s competence. Ms Mahmood has already echoed the view of many of her predecessors in declaring that the department “is not yet fit for purpose”. The question is whether it can ever be, whether the time has come for a fresh start, and whether the sprawling responsibilities of the department should be split up.
There is no shortage of voices calling for this, and disparate ones at that. Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader would like to see responsibilities for skilled migration passed to the Department for Business, with asylum left to the Home Office. Nigel Farage wants a separate “migration department” altogether. Dame Karen Bradley, a former Conservative Home Office minister and chair of the home affairs select committee, wants two new departments, one for managing borders and the other for crime because they “need different skill sets”.
Indeed, Ms Bradley and her committee recently highlighted the “squandered” billions of pounds spent on so-called asylum hotels, blamed on “neglect” by ministers and officials. It is not difficult to find problems with this most accident-prone arm of the state. Yet it is not immediately obvious how and why things would be improved just by what is known in Whitehall as a “MoG” – a machinery of government – reform.
These generally make little difference to outcomes in any case; the department responsible for “business”, for example, has been renamed, broken up, merged and demerged seven times in the past half a century with no discernible impact on Britain’s well-publicised productivity problem.
Indeed, the Home Office itself was subject to major changes in 2007 when drugs, criminal justice, prisons and probation were hived off, mostly to the then new Ministry of Justice. That certainly didn’t stop the slow descent of the prison system towards near total collapse last year. Moving sentencing, prisons and probation back to the Home Office from the Ministry of Justice wouldn’t build a single extra prison cell. A new Department of Immigration would face the same intractable questions – but lose any existing synergies between policing, border control and national security.
For the time being, the Home Office has in Ms Mahmood the strongest leadership it has enjoyed for some time, with a thoughtfulness, dedication and feel for public opinion seldom seen in the role. The priorities of her department are clear in respect of migration policy, and Ms Mahmood has promised she will do whatever is necessary to restore public confidence in the system.
In that, and her other work, she has the full backing of No 10. She knows, as probably does the whole government now, that allowing the asylum hotels to operate until the end of the parliament, which was effectively Labour’s manifesto commitment, is hopelessly weak, and that they need to be emptied far more quickly.
The same goes for the backlog of asylum cases left behind by the Conservatives. Ms Mahmood has shown herself prepared to change the law on asylum to prevent abuse of the system, particularly by convicted criminals. There’s no doubt that it’s a huge job, a “bed of nails” as previous incumbents have called it, and a traditional graveyard of ministerial ambitions. That is all the more reason for the prime minister and the chancellor to provide their colleague with all the resources she needs to get the job done. The success of the Labour government depends on it.
