Home Office

This article is about the British interior ministry. For a working room or study in a domestic dwelling, see Study (room). For small businesses operated from home, see Small office/home office.
"Home Department" redirects here. For other uses, see Ministry of home affairs.

A Home Office Immigration Enforcement vehicle in north London

The Home Office (HO), also known (especially in official papers and when referred to in Parliament) as the Home Department, is the United Kingdom's interior ministry. It is responsible for public safety and policing, border security, immigration, passports, and civil registration.

Agencies under its purview include police in England and Wales, Border Force, the Visas and Immigration authority, and the Security Service (MI5). It also manage policy on drugs, counterterrorism, and immigration. It was formerly responsible for His Majesty's Prison Service and the National Probation Service, but these have been transferred to the Ministry of Justice.

The Cabinet minister responsible for the department is the home secretary, a post considered one of the Great Offices of State; it has been held by Yvette Cooper since July 2024. The Home Office is managed from day to day by a civil servant, the permanent under-secretary of state of the Home Office.

The expenditure, administration, and policy of the Home Office are scrutinised by the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Organisation

The Home Office is headed by the home secretary, a Cabinet minister, supported by the department's senior civil servant, the permanent secretary.

Organisational structure

The Home Office comprises eleven directorates that help fulfil the department's responsibilities.

Immigration

Public services and policing

Other

  • Corporate and Delivery – fulfils corporate duties such as human resources, project management, finance, and IT.
  • Communications Directorate – delivers communications to the wider public to achieve the Home Office's objectives.
  • STARS (Science, Technology, Analysis, Research, and Strategy) – performs data and evidence analysis to maximise organisational effectiveness.

As of April 2024, the Home Office works with the following agencies and public bodies:

Executive non-departmental public bodies

Advisory non-departmental public bodies

Tribunals

Independent monitoring bodies

Others

Budget and spending

In the financial year 2022–2023, the Home Office had a total budget of £20.3 billion.

Ministers

The Home Office ministers are as follows, with cabinet ministers in bold.

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Priorities

The department outlined its aims for this Parliament in its Business Plan, which was published in May 2011, and superseded its Structural Reform Plan. The plan said the department will:

  1. Empower the public to hold the police to account for their role in cutting crime – Introduce directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners and make police actions to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour more transparent.
  2. Free up the police to fight crime more effectively and efficiently – Cut police bureaucracy, end unnecessary central interference and overhaul police powers in order to cut crime, reduce costs and improve police value for money. Simplify national institutional structures and establish a National Crime Agency to strengthen the fight against organised crime (and replace the Serious Organised Crime Agency).
  3. Create a more integrated criminal justice system – Help the police and other public services work together across the criminal justice system.
  4. Secure our borders and reduce immigration – Deliver an improved migration system that commands public confidence and serves our economic interests. Limit non-EU economic migrants, and introduce new measures to reduce inflow and minimise abuse of all migration routes, for example the student route. Process asylum applications more quickly, and end the detention of children for immigration purposes.
  5. Protect people's freedoms and civil liberties – Reverse state interference to ensure there is not disproportionate intrusion into people's lives.
  6. Protect our citizens from terrorism – Keep people safe through the Government's approach to counter-terrorism.
  7. Build a fairer and more equal society (through the Government Equalities Office) – Help create a fair and flexible labour market. Change culture and attitudes. Empower individuals and communities. Improve equality structures, frontline services and support; and help Government departments and others to consider equality as a matter of course.

The Home Office publishes progress against the plan on the 10 Downing Street website.

History

On 27 March 1782; 243 years ago (1782-03-27), the Home Office was formed by renaming the existing Southern Department, with all existing staff transferring. On the same day, the Northern Department was renamed the Foreign Office.

To match the new names, there was a transferring of responsibilities between the two Departments of State. All domestic responsibilities (including colonies, previously administered under the Board of Trade) were moved to the Home Office, and all foreign matters (including the administration of British protectorates) became the concern of the Foreign Office.

Most subsequently created domestic departments (excluding, for instance, those dealing with education) have been formed by splitting responsibilities away from the Home Office.

The initial responsibilities were:

  • Answering petitions and addresses sent to the King
  • Advising the King on
  • Issuing instructions on behalf of the King to officers of The Crown, lords-lieutenant and magistrates, mainly concerning law and order
  • Operation of the secret service within the UK
  • Protecting the public
  • Safeguarding the rights and liberties of individuals
  • Colonial matters

Responsibilities were subsequently changed over the years that followed:

Location

The former Home Office building at 50 Queen Anne's Gate, London
Lunar House in Croydon, which holds the headquarters of UK Visas and Immigration

Until 1978, the Home Office had its offices in what is now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Main Building on King Charles Street, off Whitehall. From 1978 to 2004, the Home Office was then located at 50 Queen Anne's Gate, a Brutalist office block in Westminster designed by Sir Basil Spence, close to St James's Park tube station. Many functions, however, were devolved to offices in other parts of London, and the country, notably the headquarters of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon.

In 2005, the Home Office moved to a new main office designed by Sir Terry Farrell at 2 Marsham Street, Westminster, on the site of the demolished Marsham Towers building of the Department of the Environment.

For external shots of its fictional Home Office, the TV series Spooks uses an aerial shot of the Government Offices Great George Street instead, serving as stand-in to match the distinctly less modern appearance of the fictitious accommodation interiors the series uses.

Research

To meet the UK's five-year science and technology strategy, the Home Office sponsors research in police sciences, including:

  • Biometrics – including face and voice recognition
  • Cell type analysis – to determine the origin of cells (e.g. hair, skin)
  • Chemistry – new techniques to recover latent fingerprints
  • DNA – identifying offender characteristics from DNA
  • Improved profiling – of illicit drugs to help identify their source
  • Raman Spectroscopy – to provide more sensitive drugs and explosives detectors (e.g. roadside drug detection)
  • Terahertz imaging methods and technologies – e.g. image analysis and new cameras, to detect crime, enhance images and support anti-terrorism

Devolution

Most front-line law and order policy areas, such as policing and criminal justice, are devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland (and only very partially in Wales), but the following reserved and excepted matters are handled by Westminster.

Northern Ireland

Excepted matters:

The following matters were not transferred at the devolution of policing and justice on 12 April 2010, and remain reserved:

The Home Office's main counterparts in Northern Ireland are:

The Department of Justice is accountable to the Northern Ireland Executive, whereas the Northern Ireland Office is a UK government department.

Scotland

Reserved matters:

The Scottish Government Justice and Safer Communities Directorates are responsible for devolved justice and home affairs policy.

Wales

Reserved matters:

Criticism

Windrush scandal

See also: Home Office hostile environment policy

The Windrush scandal resulted in some British citizens being wrongly deported, along with a further compensation scheme for those affected, and a wider debate on the Home Office hostile environment policy.

The first allegations about the targeting of pre-1973 Caribbean migrants started in 2013. In 2018, the allegations were put to the home secretary in the House of Commons, and resulted in the resignation of the then home secretary. In 2019, the Home Office admitted to multiple breaches of data protection regulations in the handling of its Windrush compensation scheme. The department sent emails to Windrush migrants which revealed the email address of other Windrush migrants to whom the email was sent. The data breach concerned five different emails, each of which was sent to 100 recipients. In April 2019, the Home Office admitted to revealing 240 personal email addresses of EU citizens applying for settled status in the UK. The email addresses of applicants were incorrectly sent to other applicants to the scheme. In response to these incidents, the Home Office pledged to launch an independent review of its data protection compliance.

In 2019, the Court of Appeal issued a judgement which criticised the Home Office's handling of immigration cases. The judges stated that the "general approach [by the home secretary, Sajid Javid] in all earnings discrepancy cases [has been] legally flawed". The judgement relates to the Home Office's interpretation of Section 322(5) of the Immigration Rules.

In November 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a statutory body that investigates breaches of the Equality Act 2010 published a report concluding that the Home Office had a "lack of organisation-wide commitment, including by senior leadership, to the importance of equality and the Home Office's obligations under the equality duty placed on government departments". The report noted that the Home Office's pursuit of the "hostile environment" policy from 2012 onwards "accelerated the impact of decades of complex policy and practice based on a history of white and black immigrants being treated differently". Caroline Waters, the interim chair of the EHRC, described the treatment of Windrush immigrants by the Home Office as a "shameful stain on British history".

Aderonke Apata

Aderonke Apata, a Nigerian LGBT activist, made two asylum claims that were both rejected by the Home Office in 2014 and on 1 April 2015 respectively, due to her previously having been in a relationship with a man and having children with that man. In 2014, Apata said that she would send an explicit video of herself to the Home Office to prove her sexuality. This resulted in her asylum bid gaining widespread support, with multiple petitions created in response, which gained hundreds of thousands of signatures combined. On 8 August 2017, after a thirteen-year legal battle and after a new appeal from Apata was scheduled for late July, she was granted refugee status in the United Kingdom by the Home Office.

Use of the Bible for rejecting asylum claims

In March 2019, it was reported that in two unrelated cases, the Home Office denied asylum to converted Christians by misrepresenting certain Bible quotes. In one case, it quoted selected excerpts from the Bible to imply that Christianity is not more peaceful than Islam, the asylum-seeker's original religion. In another incident, an Iranian Christian application for asylum was rejected because her faith was judged as "half-hearted", for she did not believe that Jesus could protect her from the Iranian regime. As criticism grew on social media, the Home Office distanced itself from the decision, though it confirmed the letter was authentic. Home Secretary Sajid Javid said that it was "totally unacceptable" for his department to quote the Bible to question an Iranian Christian convert's asylum application, and ordered an urgent investigation into what had happened.

The treatment of Christian asylum-seekers chimes with other incidents in the past, such as the refusal to grant visas to the Archbishop of Mosul to attend the consecration of the UK's first Syriac Orthodox Cathedral. In a 2017 study, the Christian Barnabas Fund found that only 0.2% of all Syrian refugees accepted by the UK were Christians, although Christians accounted for approximately 10% of Syria's pre-war population.

See also

References

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