The Politics of Immigration is Broken and Fixing the UK Home Office Will Not Help

31 Oct 2025 12:02 PM

The long-delayed release of Nick Timothy’s 2023 review of Home Office effectiveness points to ongoing institutional dysfunctions. The creation of an independent cross-party commission could restore delivery discipline and reduce incentives to use immigration as a political weapon.

Nick Timothy’s review of Home Office effectiveness has finally been published, following a two-year legal battle with The Times. But, for clarity, if it was not for The Times, Timothy’s review would likely still be internal. Or to put it another way: Shabana Mahmood, the current Home Secretary, and her Labour and Conservative predecessors – back to Suella Braverman (who commissioned the report) – appear to have had no intention of releasing it voluntarily.

Once confronted with the fact that the government would have to release the report, Mahmood seized the political opportunity to frame its findings as a mandate for a reset, promising tighter accountability and delivery. The report’s core findings are stark: the Home Office has a culture of defeatism, muddled lines of accountability, and weak data and delivery across the immigration system. Current and future Home Office Ministers now face a daunting delivery challenge. Mahmood’s opportunism has fared her well – at least until the next crisis. For this reason, the Labour government should now consider the unthinkable – not hive off immigration to a new department (which while a good idea is not a quick fix) but something more radical.

The Timothy review flagged issues that were known – and widely understood by the establishment. Successive think-tank reports and the National Audit Office have highlighted a record of poor delivery on key departmental policies and strategies, acute leadership problems and workforce morale among the worst in Whitehall. A range of calls to return to the drawing board have been made – including by this author, as Yvette Cooper took residence at 2 Marsham Street on Labour’s election victory. In this context, Mahmood’s commitment ‘to transform the Home Office so that it delivers for this country’ is overdue.

How the Home Secretary will realise this commitment is far from clear. Current operational and political pressures are likely to make reform as hard if not harder than at any point previously. Meanwhile, the institutional failings reported by Timothy stand to continue to impact Labour’s efforts to deliver across critical areas from asylum policy to policing.

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