Call to curb migration by splitting up ‘incapable’ Home Office

The Home Office should be split up because it is “incapable” of controlling immigration and securing Britain’s borders, two former Tory ministers have said in a report.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, and Neil O’Brien, the former housing minister, have called for a new Department of Border Security and Immigration Control which would focus on migration policy.

The rest of the Home Office’s responsibilities should be covered by a new Department for Policing and National Security.

Jenrick and O’Brien, writing in a Centre for Policy Studies report published on Wednesday, said that the overhaul would be an opportunity to “instil a totally different culture in the Home Office”, staffed with “new personnel and processes”.

They said immigration was consistently one of voters’ top concerns but the Home Office had “fallen short on this front” and while staffed by “many good, hard-working people,” it had proven itself “simply too unwieldy to function effectively”. It had been “undermined by high levels of churn and a lack of institutional knowledge”.

Jenrick and O’Brien argued that creating a separate department with a sole focus on immigration would ensure the UK had both a secretary of state and a bureaucracy “dedicated to delivering for the public on this vital issue”.

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New Home Office figures revealed that more than 2,000 migrants had arrived in the UK in small boats since Rishi Sunak’s Safety of Rwanda Act became law almost two weeks ago.

On Tuesday, a Syrian refugee named Suhaib Jaber said that some of his fellow migrants were “disappearing” in order to avoid being sent to Rwanda while others were trying to return to France. He told LBC that they were “trying to go to Dover to go again to Europe”.

The call to restructure the Home Office is one of 36 recommendations in the report. Jenrick and O’Brien argued that the scale and composition of recent levels of migration had failed to deliver the economic and fiscal benefits promised while putting enormous pressure on housing, public services and infrastructure.

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The report found discrepancies between different nationalities in their contribution to productivity. Migrants aged 25-64 from the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey were almost twice as likely to be economically inactive as someone born in the UK. This contrasted with the productivity of migrants overall, who tend to be economically more active than the average British citizen.

Earnings and tax contributions also varied. Spanish migrants typically earnt 40 per cent more than migrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, but 35 per cent less than migrants from France or America. Migrants from countries such as Canada, Singapore and Australia paid between four and nine times as much income tax as those from Somalia or Pakistan.

Jenrick and O’Brien argued for an annual cap on individual visa routes, voted upon by parliament as part of a “migration budget”. This would include capping health and care visas at 30,000, less than 10 per cent of last year’s total once family members had been taken into account.

The proportion of people in England and Wales born outside the UK increased from 9 per cent to 17 per cent between 2001 and 2021 and that rate was set to accelerate.

Jenrick, who quit as immigration minister in December after Sunak defied his calls to go further on tackling illegal and legal migration, said: “It would be unforgivable if the government did not use the time before the general election to undo the disastrous post-Brexit liberalisations that betrayed the express wishes of the British public for lower immigration.

“The changes we propose today would finally return numbers to the historical norm and deliver the highly-selective, highly-skilled immigration system voters were promised. These policies could be implemented immediately and would consign low-skilled mass migration to the past.”

The Home Office said it had no plans to break up the department.

The government said: “The prime minister and home secretary have been clear that current levels of migration are far too high. That is why the government announced a plan to cut the number of migrants that would have come last year to the UK by 300,000 — the largest reduction ever. This plan is working, with the latest statistics showing applications across three major visa categories are down by 24 per cent.

“Our approach is fair — reducing immigration and ensuring businesses invest in and recruit from the domestic workforce, whilst prioritising the overseas workers and students who will contribute significantly to our economy.”