Home Office
Immigration, policing, counter terrorism. Famously the toughest brief in government — every Home Secretary will tell you so, often.
The Home Office exists to perform some of the most fundamental functions of government: border security, immigration, policing, public safety and national security. Citizens may disagree about how these responsibilities should be exercised, but there is broad agreement about the desired outcome. The public expects borders to be controlled, laws to be enforced and immigration systems to operate fairly and efficiently. Judged against those basic expectations, the numbers are damning.
From 2018 to March 2026, a total of 197,000 people were detected arriving in the UK on small boats across the English Channel. A route that was almost never used before 2018 now accounts for 42 percent of all asylum claims. In 2025 there were 82,100 asylum applications, the third highest annual total on record. The asylum backlog peaked at 134,000 cases in June 2023. It has since fallen to 35,700, a 73 percent reduction, but the total asylum "work in progress" caseload, including appeals and people subject to removal, stood at 224,700 as of June 2024. The system processes faster than it did. It has not caught up with itself.
Hotel accommodation for asylum seekers cost £5.77 million per day in 2024/25, down from £8.3 million per day the previous year. The government says it will end the use of hotels entirely and save £1 billion a year by 2028/29. That promise has been made in various forms by successive Home Secretaries. None has yet delivered on it.
The turnover at the top is itself part of the problem. Since 2010 there have been at least nine different Home Secretaries: Theresa May, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Grant Shapps (for six days), James Cleverly, Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood. Braverman was sacked, reinstated and sacked again within 14 months. Rudd resigned over the Windrush scandal. Javid lasted a year. No other great office of state has experienced such instability. Each new Home Secretary arrives, announces a new approach, promises control and then leaves before the approach has time to succeed or fail. The permanent officials provide continuity. The political direction lurches.
The department's difficulties did not begin with small boats. For decades governments have pledged to create an immigration system that is orderly, efficient and trusted. Net migration repeatedly exceeded expectations and targets. The Conservative government promised to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. It never came close. Net migration peaked at over 900,000 in the year to June 2023 before falling. Targets were introduced, revised, abandoned and replaced with new targets. Application backlogs expanded. Asylum claims accumulated faster than they were processed. Hotel accommodation, originally presented as temporary, became a long term and expensive feature of the system.
The result is a department trapped in a cycle of reaction rather than control. Problems emerge, emergency measures are introduced, targets are announced and fresh backlogs appear elsewhere. The Rwanda deportation scheme, estimated to have cost over £700 million before a single flight departed, was the most expensive illustration of policy announcement substituting for policy delivery. The current government scrapped it and replaced it with new enforcement measures. Nearly 60,000 people with no right to be in the UK have been removed or deported since the July 2024 election, a 41 percent increase. Deportations of foreign national offenders are up 32 percent. Those are real numbers. Whether they change the trajectory of small boat arrivals remains to be seen.
Policing presents a similar pattern. The Home Office measures success through officer recruitment numbers and funding announcements. The public judges performance differently: whether crimes are investigated, whether antisocial behaviour is addressed and whether communities feel safe. In many parts of the country confidence in visible policing has weakened despite repeated reforms and restructuring.
The Windrush scandal exposed the department's worst instincts. Individuals with every right to live in Britain were wrongly caught up in enforcement processes, denied jobs, housing, healthcare and benefits, and in some cases deported. The compensation scheme has been running for seven years and has paid out £127 million. That figure sounds large until set against the scale of the harm. The scandal was not an isolated error. It revealed weaknesses in decision making, record keeping and accountability within an institution responsible for decisions that can destroy lives.
The Home Office can point to genuine achievements. Britain remains one of the safest countries in Europe by many measures. Counter terrorism operations have disrupted serious threats. Organised crime groups are regularly targeted. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill gives law enforcement new counter terror style powers to disrupt smuggling gangs. A landmark deal with France has put 40 percent more enforcement officers on French beaches. Over 42,000 crossings have been stopped since the 2024 election. These are not trivial.
Yet the department's broader problem is that public confidence is shaped by visible outcomes. Citizens hear promises of secure borders and then see 197,000 small boat arrivals over eight years. They hear promises of faster asylum decisions and see hotel bills of £5.77 million a day. They hear nine Home Secretaries in 16 years promise to fix the system and watch each one leave before the fix arrives.
The Home Office's greatest weakness is not a lack of legislation, funding or political attention. Few departments receive more of all three. Its weakness is delivery. The defining image of the department remains one that suggests control has not yet been achieved. Until the gap between what ministers promise and what voters experience visibly narrows, no amount of enforcement statistics, legislative packages or landmark deals will close the credibility deficit that has defined this department for a generation.