“Our system is not fit for purpose.”
With this stark assessment of elements within the Home Office in 2006, then-Home Secretary John Reid coined a phrase that has since become a fixture in British political discourse.
His remarks came months after the release of thousands of foreign-born prisoners from British jails without due consideration for deportation.
Lord Reid has previously attributed the now-famous four-word phrase to an unnamed senior civil servant. Now, in a three-part series examining the Home Office, the Newscast podcast reveals the originator of the expression.
The author was Sir David Normington, the department’s permanent secretary at the time.
“It is my phrase, but it was written in a private memo to the Home Secretary, John Reid, just after he had arrived. [It was] me saying, ‘This is what the Home Office is like,'” he disclosed.
Sir David was present when Lord Reid articulated the now-infamous words to a House of Commons committee two decades ago.
“With me sat beside him, [I tried] to rearrange my face as he described all 70,000 civil servants in the Home Office as not fit for purpose,” he recounted.
“That was a difficult moment, and the civil service said to me: ‘Well, why don’t you stand up and tell him it’s not true?'”
“The trouble was… it was my phrase.”
In the 20 years since its popularization, “not fit for purpose” has become a universal euphemism for governmental incompetence, a term frequently invoked by bureaucrats and their ministerial superiors when adopting a stern, no-nonsense stance.
According to the Hansard record of parliamentary proceedings, the phrase has been used nearly 3,000 times in the Commons and Lords since 2006. In the two decades preceding that, it appeared just 37 times.
It has been deployed in debates ranging from the conditions of armed forces housing to the sewerage system of a Cornish hospital.
During our interview, Sir David sought to clarify certain misconceptions surrounding the term.
The phrase originally pertained to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, a specific unit within the Home Office, rather than the entire department.
Furthermore, it was a critique of the unit’s technology, management, and processes, not an indictment of the staff or the immigration regulations as a whole.
In fairness to Lord Reid, he did make these distinctions at the time, but these nuances have been lost in Whitehall’s collective memory.
Demonstrating the enduring sting of words, the phrase was dismissed on Newscast as “dismissive” and “generic” by Charles Clarke, Lord Reid’s immediate predecessor as Labour home secretary, who returned to the backbenches following the 2006 foreign prisoners debacle.
“Obviously, as in any organization, there are things that are done well and things that are done badly,” Clarke stated.
“And the job of the leadership… is to review how the department is doing, where it’s doing badly, where it’s going well, and what you have to do to rectify or learn from those things.”
Nonetheless, those four words – not fit for purpose – were followed by significant repercussions.
Prime Minister Tony Blair transferred responsibility for prisons from the Home Office to a newly established Ministry of Justice (MOJ).
The MOJ and its affiliated agencies now employ 90,000 individuals, making it the largest government department, according to the Institute for Government think tank.
And “not fit for purpose” has become the go-to phrase for reform-minded politicians.
Even the current Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood resurrected it in response to a critical report on the department commissioned by her Conservative predecessor, Suella Braverman. Both Mahmood and Braverman were invited to contribute to the podcast series, but neither was available.
“The Home Office is not yet fit for purpose and has been set up for failure,” Mahmood stated last October.
Hannah Guerin, former special adviser and co-author of the Conservative government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, told Newscast that improving the department’s fitness can seem almost unattainable from its headquarters in Westminster’s Marsham Street:
“You don’t have time to think. There is a lack of focus on the long term, because if you don’t deal with the next 10, 15, 20, 24 hours, you’re not going to survive.”
“The amount of risk that people are carrying in there makes it incredibly, incredibly difficult.”
And Danny Shaw, a former adviser to Labour on home affairs, acknowledged that the party also failed to plan for the long term while in opposition.
“I think the focus was winning the election. And that was where most of the energy went,” he said.
“There hadn’t been enough time given to thinking police reform, for example. When I was there working with [then shadow home secretary] Yvette Cooper and her team, we had a few meetings about it. There were a few papers circulating, but no decisions were made.”
However, there is cross-party consensus that one area of the Home Office excels: counter-terrorism.
Former Conservative Home Secretary Amber Rudd told Newscast: “You are phoned at 3am and you are whisked in to chair these meetings where the real heroes have to work out what to do.”
Listen to the full Newscast mini-series on BBC Sounds now.
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