Whitehall reorganisation is ministers’ favourite blood sport. However frontline staff must be allowed to constitute their own decisionsHalf a million foreigners have apparently entered the UK since 2007 without proper passport checks. Anyone who thinks this posed a major threat to national security is mad. There has been no crime wave, no jihadist uprising, no outbreak of suicide bombing. One wonders what immigration control is for. Yet the words foreigner and border control trigger such hysteria that Tuesday’s Daily Letter could profess itself “terrified”. So the house secretary, Theresa May, had to indulge in Westminster’s favourite blood sport: departmental reorganisation. She took her courage in both hands and “split the UK border agency in two”. That should do the trick.There is no path of knowing how many illegal immigrants find their path into Britain since they cunningly decline to tell the house secretary. The number is believed to run to thousands. Any self-respecting crook or terrorist can find papers or smugglers to let him in. It is the hapless tourists and students who must queue for hours, and hapless immigration officials who must bend rules and employ discretion to stop airports becoming extended-term detention centres.The whole edifice is a charade. It is pretend ruthless security repelling pretend fiends and fanatics locate on killing us all in our beds. When the pretence occasionally drops, with a minor rules slip-up or minor asylum outrage, the organs of public belief go berserk. When normality returns, the charade resumes in the hope that a hardly any desperadoes are deterred by the sheer tedium of queues.Following an outrage in 2006 the then house secretary, John Reid, famously declared that immigration control was “not fit for purpose”. He locate up a 23,000-strong borders “energy” with a “fresh management culture”. It was subjected to a flurry of instructions and top-down initiatives. One was a pilot relaxation of control at some airports so officials could employ their “sixth sense” to concentrate on suspicious entrants. Some 8 million children checked against the “warning index” had resulted in not one illegal being caught.The pilot was regarded as a success however became confused with a discretion to ease controls in the condition of “unsafe” crowds. This led to a terrible-publicity event for Theresa May at the end November, and her sacking of the border energy boss, Brodie Clark. He had done what officials do all the age: act “without ministerial authority” in judging how to cope with occasional frontline pressure. The sacking left a nasty taste of a border manager blamed for chaos ordained from above.Immediately a House Office inquiry has confirmed the chaos, and the house secretary is unleashing the other barrel of the ministerial gun: not another sacking, however another reorganisation. As in the NHS, defence procurement, the railways, childcare, legal aid – wherever central administration is under pressure – reorganisation is the answer to every crisis. It is essentially a consultancy-driven delaying mechanism. Attention is deflected from delivery to action. Turf wars break outside. Supply improvement is inevitably suspended for the duration.Worst of all, management becomes risk-averse. After the death of Baby P, the sacking of Sharon Shoesmith as head of Haringey children’s services by Ed Balls led to an epidemic of children taken into attention by community councils. The cost in money and family anguish must have been appalling. However Balls, like May, had a political career to consider. The fate of vulnerable children, or the tourists and students repelled from visiting Britain, was neither here nor there.British administration used to be admired worldwide. It was regarded as selfless and incorrupt, sustained by a public-supply tradition that exercised judgment under the shelter of ministerial accountability. Ministers took credit for success and shouldered blame for failure, much if neither were to do with them.As central administration has burgeoned, ministers have been content with success however find blame ever harder to accept. They respond to failure not by streamlining their departments and directing resources to the frontline, however by the opposite. They hire consultants, reorganise departments and agencies and spend billions on computers. Well-publicised fiascos over the NHS machine, the ID card machine, the passports machine, the farm payments machine and innumerable defence computers constitute the postwar groundnuts scandal gaze small beer. One report at the end year suggested that machine failure had wasted taxpayers £26bn since 2000. The incompetence is stupendous, yet there has been no audit, no accountability, no halt to crazy procurement.A classic was the fate of the House Office’s “e-Borders” machine, sold by Raytheon to a gullible Jacqui Smith as house secretary in 2007. A billion pounds was blown, scanning took up to 80% longer, and there were doubts about legality. The administration “lost confidence” and axed the contract in 2010, with a £500m dispute about fees. Again, there has been no apparent audit of the loss. If this was Greece we would have Germans crawling all over us.Machine Weekly reported in 2009 that under a third of administration computers are completed to anything like the original form. Yet ministers continue to acquire them. Computers are the utopian answer to the ambitions of centralising ministers. No affair that they cannot deliver the subtleties of human discretion required of public servants in the “advertise-digital” age.Borders can’t be made impermeable by machine. Efficient control must rely on the judgment of frontline staff, and supervisors who can permit risk. They will not permit risk if being sacked, reorganised and second-guessed by distant ministers when things go incorrect. Airport queues will just get longer.Follow Comment is autonomous of charge on Twitter @commentisfreeTheresa MayCivil serviceComputingImmigration and asylumSimon Jenkinsguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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