A new report suggesting that the Home Office is “unfit for purpose” is “not remotely surprising”, it has been claimed.
Speaking to GB News, Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange Rakib Ehsan said the findings are “incredibly worrying” for the Government.
A damning report has concluded that the Home Office, which Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood took charge of last month, as having a “culture of defeatism” on immigration.
Reacting to the report, Ms Mahmood said the Home Office is “not yet fit for purpose” and has been “set up for failure”.
Rakib Ehsan has declared it is ‘not surprising’ that the Home Office has been branded ‘not fit for purpose’
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GB NEWS / PA
Delivering his verdict on the report, Mr Ehsan told GB News: “I don’t think these findings are remotely surprising, but they are incredibly worrying.
“I think what’s really interesting here, we had this report which was commissioned by the Home Secretary at the time, Suella Braverman, the last Conservative Government. And the report was authored by Nick Timothy, who is now a Conservative MP.”
He added: “And it seems like the findings, they’ve been accepted by the current Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
“So we have this very important cross-party support, or rather cross-party consensus, which is very much of the view that the Home Office is not fit for purpose.”
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Stressing that the findings are “remarkably worrying”, Mr Ehsan explained: “And that is remarkably worrying, because the Home Office is responsible for border security, public safety, and sensitive matters of policing.
“But if you look into the report, there’s some very interesting findings there where you have Home Office civil servants taking time out, for example holding listening circles where they talk about their feelings on a variety of social and political issues, which I wouldn’t consider to be a particularly good use of the public money, ultimately there to fund their salaries.”
He continued: “And I think that when you look at the kind of work that we’ve done at Policy Exchange, especially when it comes to non-crime hate incidents and stop and search, you have to be concerned over the degree to which racial and religious identity politics and sort of cultural sensitivities, they’ve ultimately feed into this cultural paralysis within the Home Office, and that needs to change.”
Asked by host Alex Armstrong if there is a “problem” in the civil service with servants being “deeply political”, Mr Ehsan agreed.
Mr Ehsan told GB News that Ms Mahmood should ‘set her expectations’ in the civil service
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He told GB News: “When you look at Home Office staff networks and also the connections that the Home Office has with the variety of activist groups who, in my view, certainly have very liberal views on matters of immigration, asylum, and also in some cases also quite liberal views on matters of counter-extremism as well.
“I think that it is very clear that the Home Office is not fit for purpose, and I think that there’s very serious concerns in terms of the organisational culture and of course, civil servants.”
Calling on the Home Secretary to “set her expectations” amongst civil servants, he concluded: “They have a right to provide ministers and indeed the Government overall advice, there’s no harm in that. But ultimately, they are there to execute the Government agenda.
“And I think that at the moment, there’s a real degree of confusion amongst civil servants in terms of what their responsibilities and duties actually are. But I think it’s very important that the Home Secretary, the current Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, makes it very clear to civil servants in the Home Office in terms of what her expectations are.”