“Our system is not fit for purpose.”
And with this description of parts of the Home Office in 2006, the then-Home Secretary John Reid minted a phrase that has lodged in the lexicon of British politics.
He was speaking a few months after thousands of foreign-born prisoners had been released from British jails without first being considered for deportation.
Lord Reid has previously attributed the four-word phrase to an unnamed senior civil servant. Now in a three-part series about the Home Office, the Newscast podcast can reveal the identity of its author.
It was the permanent secretary in the department at the time, Sir David Normington.
“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 told us.
Sir David accompanied Lord Reid as he uttered the now infamous form of 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 recalled.
