Downing Street Says » 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.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(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.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Monday, May 22, 2006

Home Office

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries