So finally, the Home Office is to be split into two. Great news; we’ve been calling for it for years, and though we’d prefer the Cabinet Office to co-ordinate counter-terrorism efforts, the Ministry of Justice is welcome.

One big caveat, though: why the rush? The whole thing is to be completed by May 9th - just 41 days away.

There couldn’t be a link to the upcoming departure of one Tony Blair, could there? A desire to have the split set in stone before Gordon can get his feet under the table?

There may be other reasons, too, that we can’t talk about yet. But remember over the next week or so just how eager John Reid was to have set the ball rolling on his counter-terrorism reforms.

Is it too much to ask for the government to understand their own policies?

Given the number of UK businesses who employ migrant workers, you would think it was important for, say, the Department for Trade and Industry to understand employment rules. How then, can we explain this:

Mr. Clegg: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many work permits were applied for by his Department and its agencies in each of the last five years. [127712]

Jim Fitzpatrick: The Department of Trade and Industry and its agencies do not apply for work permits. However, it is part of our standard pre-employment checks at recruitment stage to ensure that staff applying to be employed within the Department and its agencies have a work permit, where appropriate, before they are employed. Information on how many staff may have work permits is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

Shocked? No? Well, remind yourself of the Home Office explanation of work permits: (more…)

Worth a read:

John Lettice explains in The Register why the new chip-enabled passports could, for the moment at least, give people a quick and easy way to cross borders with a forged passport.

So much for extra security.

Spiralling self-harm, overcrowding, hunger strikes, wrongful detention - sadly just another day in the prison service thanks to the government’s mishandling of last year’s foreign prisoners crisis.

The whole sorry affair is exposed today by Ann Owers, chief inspector of prisons, in a report cheerily entitled:

Foreign National Prisoners – Ineffective Systems, Rising Self-Harm And Population Pressure

Basically, after the Home Office revealed 1,000 foreign national prisoners had been released without being considered for deportation (if you’ve forgotten, the BBC explains it here) they panicked and started locking up everyone they could think of, including some British people who, it is to be supposed, looked a bit foreign.

We think there are now about 1,300 foreign nationals who have finished their sentence but are still locked up. It costs about £150,000 a night to keep them there - and many are actually desperate to go home. All in all, a sorry state of affairs.

Joan Ryan today announced that 10,000 fraudulent passport applicants were granted passports in the last year. Dhiren Barot, serving 40 years in prison, apparently had 7 fraudulent passports.

Of course, they’re telling us this to convince the British public that ID cards are necessary. Is this the first time the government has boasted about its own failures just to sell another policy?

The thing that really troubles me, however, is that Joan Ryan’s ministerial statement says:

0.25% of applications (equivalent to 16,500 fraudulent passport applications a year) were believed to be from people attempting to obtain a passport fraudulently. Almost half of these applications were stopped.

But the press release says:

IPS detected some 6,500 attempted frauds last year.

In what world is 6,500 half of 16,500?

Mr. Clegg: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what databases are controlled by his Department and its agencies; and what percentage of the data in each database he estimates is inaccurate or out of date.
John Reid: The information requested is not readily available and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost.

So: they don’t really know how many databases they have, and they don’t really know how accurate they are. And they expect us to trust them to run the National Identity Register, potentially the most complex citizen database in the world?

Thanks, but no thanks.

The government could be seeking new powers for the police to fingerprint people who break parking rules or drop litter.

A consultation paper is today published on a review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which sets the boundaries for most police powers, though it’s been subject to a lot of amendments and revisions since then. Currently fingerprints can be taken compulsarily only from those suspected of recordable offences. The document states (see p11):

The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending and protecting the public.

We all want to cut crime, but these days almost all offences are recordable, and only the most minor still count as non-recordable - mostly littering, parking and the like. Do the police need to check litterers against a national database? If the inability to take fingerprints for specific offences is causing problems, those offences could be made “recordable” so that prints can be demanded.

The onus must be on police and the government to show these powers are necessary. Too often the debate is set so that those opposed to extension of powers have to prove why they aren’t needed. Let us hope that doesn’t happen here.

There’s something of a prison staff crisis in many of our prisons, figures released this morning show. Belmarsh is 57 officers short - meaning more than 1 in 10 posts is vacant.

Other prisons facing problems are Manchester, Woodhill, Chelmsford, Wakefield and Frankland, all with over 30 vacancies.  For Chelmsford that’s 13% of the staff.

This comes on top of serious problems with staff recruitment for the proposed new prison in Kennet, Merseyside. John Reid tells us they’ve only recruited 30 staff so far. At the end of January, the Home Office took the Prison Officers’ Association to court for apparently encouraging industrial action prompted in part by the Kennet proposals, which the POA believe (and here) could make staffing shortages worse.

It’s all getting pretty messy, that’s for sure.

The Identity and Passport Service has paid out £350,000 in compensation to travellers who have had to cancel their holidays because of delays in getting hold of a passport. The story - which came out thanks to a Freedom of Information request by the Press Association - is here.

OK, so it’s only half a percent of all applications, and OK, so there weren’t as many mishaps last year than the year before. But the IPS’s reputation is so frequently burnished with ministerial praise (better customer satisfaction than Tesco, don’t you know) that it’s worth pointing out that the agency isn’t in fact perfect.

Let’s not forget these revelations that 1,000 passports are lost in the post every year. Or last year’s revelations that IPS staff have been detected hacking into internal computer systems on four separate occasions. Need I go on?

With prisons bursting at the seams, and prisoners spending nights in poilce or court cells, it’s no surprise people have been wondering if the government is desperate enough to put higher risk prisoners in low security prisons.

They can, however, only put prisoners in the right category of prison, or higher - so a Category A prisoner cannot be put into a Category D (or Open) prison. Only if a prisoner has been recategorised can he (or she) be moved. So the question is really whether the government has been tweaking the categorisation rules to make it easier to downgrade people, and make space in High Security prisons.
The Home Office now says categorically it has done nothing of the sort and Prison Service Order 0900 which governs categorisation is still in force, and hasn’t been changed in the last two years. So why does the Prison Officers Association disagree? They issued a press release in January claiming:

The POA have exposed the scam of continually changing the allocation criteria to shoe horn prisoners into open conditions to crisis manage an ever increasing population.

The prison service, have disposed of their Prison Service Order 0900 outlining specifically the criteria for categorisation and allocation in favour of a more easily changed IT based process.

More investigation needed, it seems.