A bonus of course. £22 million has been paid out in bonuses to Home Office staff in the last five years according to figures dug up by Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne.

Chris Huhne said, “How on earth can the Home Office justify these huge bonuses given its lamentable performance in recent years? Immigration is in chaos, asylum cases are falling behind again and violent crime has risen sharply.” Quite.

We learn, via the Daily Express, that the Office for Criminal Justice Reform (”Who are they?” we hear you perfectly reasonably cry) has advertised for some media staff. Six, in fact.

We’ll let the Criminal Justice System website (yes, the system has a website) explain about the OCJR:

The Office for Criminal Justice Reform (OCJR) is the cross-departmental team that supports all criminal justice agencies in working together to provide an improved service to the public.

As a cross-departmental organisation, OCJR reports to Ministers in the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Attorney General’s Office.

One might innocently ask why there’s a quango for this, rather than just the Ministry of Justice itself. And why they need six new media staff.

The OCJR also spent £29 million last year on consultancy fees, but we dare not suggest that this might have been anything other than an excellent use of taxpayers’ money.

The Express quotes Liberal Democrat MP Jeremy Browne, to whom we’ll give the last word:

With prisons bursting at the seams, employing armies of new spin doctors is the wrong priority.

Another missing disc case from the Government, this time from our friends at the Home Office.

An IT repair firm in Lancashire was repairing a computer for a customer, who said they bought it on eBay, and discovered an optical disc marked “Home Office” and “Confidential” in the machine. It had been hidden under the keyboard.

The good news, in this case, is that the data on the disc appears to have been encrypted and the disc has been returned. The Home Office has said that the laptop was encrypted too, which suggests it was an official machine but makes us wonder what it was doing on eBay.

The Home Office hasn’t revealed what sort of data was on the disc, but, as The Register wryly suggests, “all the data may have already been lost in other massive governmant data blunders of recent times.”

Ok, we know they’re not very good at things like counting immigrants or keeping track of offenders, but this week brings news of a new failure to count.

The Home Office can’t even work out how many people it’s made redundant. Good news for the department though. The MoD can’t either. Other government departments can mind you, but at least they’ve got a fellow department in the same mess as them this time round.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott had this to say:

“The Home Office and MoD are totally incompetent for failing to give answers, when other big departments can give us these vital figures. No wonder the Home Office loses track of who to deport if it can’t even count its own redundancies,” he said.

It’s a case of ‘hip hip hooray’ for the Home Office today. It’s no longer the worst performing government department. Might be nicer if they’d moved off the bottom of the list because they’d got better rather than because 25 million records had been lost by another department, but hey - you can’t have everything, can you?

So here at Home Office Watch we’re off to the newsagents to get a “Congratulations” card for the Home Secretary, which we’ll be shortly popping into the post to the Home Secretary, 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF. Hope you can find the time to post one too.

The saga of the Assets Recovery Agency seems to me like an episode of The Apprentice.

On the TV show, SirAlan gives the teams a few hundred pounds, sends them out with a task, and expects them to come back with a profit.

But usually one (or even both) of the teams screws up, and comes back with 8p and a half-chewed biscuit, or something.

Sadly, with the Assets Recovery Agency, it was £65m the team was given - and they came back with a rather paltry £23m, meaning they spent about £2.80 for every £1 they took off the criminals.

That £23m would have been impressive if they’d been selling canned goods in a supermarket carpark for a television show - but less impressive given they were supposed, in David Blunkett’s words, to be

“hitting organised criminals where it hurts”.

Best of all, though, it has emerged that about half of the £23m came from just one “client” who handed over some assets after a process of “negotiation” - he got to keep the rest of his potentially ill-gotten gains, apparently.

And that reminded me of the Comic Relief episode of the Apprentice where Cheryl Tweedy just phoned up her fiance (Ashley Cole) and got him to donate £20,000 or something. It seemed a bit like cheating…

We all know that the Labour Government doesn’t have the best track record of delivering IT projects on budget and on time (and we’re not even going to mention ID cards). So it’s with a heavy heart that I bring you news of another Whitehall computer-related farce, this time from the shiny new Ministry of Justice.

The National Offender Management System was supposed to keep tabs on the country’s 300,000 prisoners and probationers. The budget for the system of £234 million has, according to The Guardian, “proved to be optimistic” - with the current estimate for the project reaching four times that, well on its way to £1 billion. Consequently, the Government has now frozen the whole project and cancelled the rollout to thirty more prisons that was supposed to happen by the end of the year.

The Ministry of Justice last night confirmed that a “rapid review” of the custody-Noms information system, officially known as C-Nomis, is under way. Ministers are to decide in mid-September how much of the project can be salvaged. It is expected that it will be adopted in a scaled-down form for the 140 prisons in England and Wales but is unlikely to be rolled out across the probation service. Cancellation could involve paying the contractors, EDS, a £50m penalty.

The Government has spent £155m so far on the project. Value for money, as ever.

Read the full story here.

OK, this is petty.

But what is up with the Border and Immigration Agency’s website?

Is the banner section a logo? Is the white line supposed to be representing Britain’s border? If so - why are there two big gaps in it? Are they trying to tell us something about the state of our border control?

I wonder if they paid anyone to design this…

Update: They didn’t. Phew.

The Times, among others, reports the news that:

The details of journeys taken by millions of motorists are to be handed to police under a government “Big Brother” plan to use road pricing technology in the fight against crime.

The proposal is to introduce new legislation to give police routine, open door access to all number plate recognition data collected by third parties - Transport for London initially, but in the long run any council or transport authority that runs these cameras.

There will be extensive debate about the merits and disadvantages of these proposals, so instead of that I thought I’d recount the more amusing story of how the story got out.

The government tabled a Written Ministerial Statement explaining about the new arrangement between TfL and the Metropolitan Police. They sent it to Hansard and to the House of Commons Library, who forwarded it to interested MPs.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to turn off “track changes”.

The statement had been written over a wholly separate internal document marked “Policy - Restricted” which set out details of:

- the plans to roll out the London scheme nationally with legislation in the autumn
- the split with the Department for Transport over the proposals
- the government’s “handling strategy” for proposals they themselves dub “Big Brother”

Good to see the department in charge of Identity Cards has such a grasp of modern technology.

Hold the presses. The Ministry of Justice has an official Morris Dancing troupe.

Surely the Home Office can’t be outdone by its erstwhile colleagues? Surely a hobby is just what they need to keep them busy and stop them messing so many things up!

Suggestions please: what hobby should the Home Office take up? Tiddlywinks? Cheese-rolling?