Half a million foreigners have apparently entered the UK since 2007 without proper passport checks. Anyone who thinks this posed a major threat to national security is mad. There has been no crime wave, no jihadist uprising, no outbreak of suicide bombing. One wonders what immigration control is for. Yet the words foreigner and border control trigger such hysteria that Tuesday's Daily Mail could profess itself "terrified". So the home secretary, Theresa May, had to indulge in Westminster's favourite blood sport: departmental reorganisation. She took her courage in both hands and "split the UK border agency in two". That should do the trick.
There is no way of knowing how many illegal immigrants find their way into Britain because they cunningly decline to tell the home secretary. The number is believed to run to thousands. Any self-respecting crook or terrorist can find papers or smugglers to let him in. It is the hapless tourists and students who must queue for hours, and hapless immigration officials who must bend rules and use discretion to stop airports becoming long-term detention centres.
The whole edifice is a charade. It is pretend ruthless security repelling pretend fiends and fanatics set on killing us all in our beds. When the pretence occasionally drops, with a minor rules slip-up or child asylum outrage, the organs of public opinion go berserk. When normality returns, the charade resumes in the hope that a few desperadoes are deterred by the sheer tedium of queues.
Following an outrage in 2006 the then home secretary, John Reid, famously declared that immigration control was "not fit for purpose". He set up a 23,000-strong borders "force" with a "new management culture". It was subjected to a flurry of instructions and top-down initiatives. One was a pilot relaxation of control at some airports so officials could use their "sixth sense" to concentrate on suspicious entrants. Some 8 million children checked against the "warning index" had resulted in not one illegal being caught.
The pilot was regarded as a success but became confused with a discretion to ease controls in the case of "unsafe" crowds. This led to a bad-publicity event for Theresa May last November, and her sacking of the border force boss, Brodie Clark. He had done what officials do all the time: act "without ministerial authority" in judging how to cope with occasional frontline pressure. The sacking left a nasty taste of a line manager blamed for chaos ordained from above.
Now a Home Office inquiry has confirmed the chaos, and the home secretary is unleashing the other barrel of the ministerial gun: not another sacking, but another reorganisation. As in the NHS, defence procurement, the railways, childcare, legal aid – wherever central government is under pressure – reorganisation is the answer to every crisis. It is essentially a consultancy-driven delaying mechanism. Attention is deflected from delivery to process. Turf wars break out. Service improvement is inevitably suspended for the duration.
Worst of all, management becomes risk-averse. After the death of Baby P, the sacking of Sharon Shoesmith as head of Haringey children's services by Ed Balls led to an epidemic of children taken into care by local councils. The cost in money and family anguish must have been appalling. But Balls, like May, had a political career to consider. The fate of vulnerable children, or the tourists and students repelled from visiting Britain, was neither here nor there.
British administration used to be admired worldwide. It was regarded as selfless and incorrupt, sustained by a public-service tradition that exercised judgment under the shelter of ministerial accountability. Ministers took credit for success and shouldered blame for failure, even if neither were to do with them.
As central government has burgeoned, ministers have been content with success but find blame ever harder to accept. They respond to failure not by streamlining their departments and directing resources to the frontline, but by the opposite. They hire consultants, reorganise departments and agencies and spend billions on computers. Well-publicised fiascos over the NHS computer, the ID card computer, the passports computer, the farm payments computer and innumerable defence computers make the postwar groundnuts scandal look small beer. One report last year suggested that computer failure had wasted taxpayers £26bn since 2000. The incompetence is stupendous, yet there has been no audit, no accountability, no halt to crazy procurement.
A classic was the fate of the Home Office's "e-Borders" computer, sold by Raytheon to a gullible Jacqui Smith as home secretary in 2007. A billion pounds was blown, scanning took up to 80% longer, and there were doubts about legality. The government "lost confidence" and axed the contract in 2010, with a £500m dispute about fees. Again, there has been no apparent audit of the loss. If this was Greece we would have Germans crawling all over us.
Computer Weekly reported in 2009 that under a third of government computers are completed to anything like the original form. Yet ministers continue to buy them. Computers are the utopian answer to the ambitions of centralising ministers. No matter that they cannot deliver the subtleties of human discretion required of public servants in the "post-digital" age.
Borders can't be made impermeable by computer. Efficient control must rely on the judgment of frontline staff, and supervisors who can permit risk. They will not permit risk if being sacked, reorganised and second-guessed by distant ministers when things go wrong. Airport queues will just get longer.
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