Welcome to the Home Office Watch blog, a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office and Ministry of Justice compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team.
The Home Office briefly believed it owned all the money in the UK, world, and presumably the rest of the universe, a report by the Commons Public Accounts Committee has shown.
The report on the department’s accounts for 2004 to 2005 details a financial shambles at the department which have still not been signed off by an auditor nearly 18 months after year-end.
The summary of the report unsurprisingly adds that one factor behind the fiasco were problems with its new accounting system.
One paper submitted by the Home Office mistakenly suggested its gross transactions were £26,527,108,436,994 - or £27 trillion. This is not just 2,000 times the department’s 2004-2005 expenditure, but one and a half times the GDP of the entire planet.
The Home Office has been sitting on its internal report into the backlog of offences committed by British citizens abroad for over a week, the Lib Dem Home Affairs team has discovered today.
A letter from Jack Straw to Nick Clegg confirms the report was submitted to permanent secretary David Normington on Wednesday 21st February - surely the Home Office isn’t waiting for a busy news day to release it?
You’ll remember that 27,500 case files were submitted to the Home Office by foreign governments and then studiously ignored for as many as eight years - and the whole affair only came to light when the files were sent over to the Association of Chief Police Officers to process.
ACPO sent a series of letters to the Home Office about this - and it is alleged asked for more money. We submitted a Freedom of Information request for these letters, dealt with by Tony McNulty and Joan Ryan, which the Home Office has ignored for 34 working days, despite a legal obligation to respond within 20.
Nothing like casual disregard for the law from the ministry responsible for making it…
