» Monday, May 22, 2006

Home Office

Asked if the Prime Minister was set against the idea of breaking the Home Office up into smaller units, the PMOS said that the situation was precisely as we had set out in the past. We had already moved the criminal justice element to the DCA. There was a natural synergy about having issues such as immigration and policing in the same department. Nobody was pretending that the issues were anything other than complex, as recent events had shown. However we believed that the synergy between the different parts outweighed the problems of having such complex issues in the same department.

Asked if the Prime Minister was considering having two Home Office Cabinet positions instead of just one, the PMOS said that that sounded like a reshuffle question to him. Asked therefore if one man was enough to oversee all the issues of the Home Office, the PMOS said that the key point was that the Home Office got the leadership it needed and John Reid was there pushing the agenda and was very much addressing the issues of the balance of individual and communal human rights, which was very much part of the Prime Minister’s agenda as well. Put to him that the Prime Minister had said that the Home Office was getting the leadership it needed two days before sacking Charles Clarke, the PMOS said that he wasn’t going to go over the reshuffle again we had covered that ground sufficiently by now.

Asked about the Prime Minister’s assessment of how the Home Office was being run, the PMOS said that his assessment was the same as always in that he recognised that the Home Office faced many difficult tasks. The question was whether it was getting the leadership to tackle those tasks. We believed that despite the difficulties, the leadership within the Home Office was dealing with the highly complex issues. If you took something like IND, it had been underinvested in the past, it has had very difficult issues to tackle but it was making progress on those issues. As the Prime Minister had said, if you lifted the stone of certain problems you often discovered other issues beneath it.

Briefing took place at 14:00 | Search for related news

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Downing Street Says...

The unofficial site which lets you comment on the UK Prime Minister's official briefings. About us...

Search


May 2006
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
« Apr   Jun »
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

Supported by

mySociety.org

Disruptive Proactivity

Recent Briefings


Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries

Contact Sam Smith.

This site is powered by WordPress. Theme by Jag Singh