Home Office Not Fit for Purpose, Says Jenrick as He Calls for Border Reset

Summary: Robert Jenrick has said the Home Office is “not fit for purpose” and should be abolished in its current form, arguing that only a new borders department with real authority can stop small-boat crossings, enforce removals, and cut through the legal constraints that have paralysed border control.

Jenrick: “Tear down the Home Office and start over”

Robert Jenrick has launched a direct attack on the Home Office, describing it as structurally incapable of securing Britain’s borders. Speaking on The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, the former immigration minister said the department should be scrapped and rebuilt around a single, uncompromising objective.

“I think the Home Office is not fit for purpose, but one of its problems is that it’s just not got a team of people determined to fix our borders.”

Jenrick, who defected to Reform UK last week after serving on the Conservative frontbench, said his time inside the department convinced him that ministers inherit a system designed to manage failure rather than stop it.

A new borders department with real enforcement power

Jenrick said the next government should establish a standalone borders department, staffed by officials selected for delivery rather than process, and empowered to take decisions that have long been avoided.

“The next government needs to create a new borders department, staffed by people who are absolutely driven by the determination to secure our borders and willing to do whatever it takes.”

He said this must include the power to detain and deport illegal migrants, and an end to what he described as the “merry-go-round” of legal challenges that routinely block removals.

“[It should] detain and deport… end the merry-go-round of human rights laws… [and] put the Navy in the [English] Channel if necessary.”

Brexit, human rights law, and the limits of control

Jenrick’s intervention revives a central question in the post-Brexit debate: whether Britain can enforce its borders while remaining bound by European legal structures that continue to override domestic decisions.

As set out in why Britain never truly left the EU, successive governments removed the political branding of EU membership without dismantling the legal architecture that constrains migration enforcement.

Reform UK has made this contradiction a core campaign issue, arguing that control is impossible without structural and legal separation.

“Not fit for purpose” — history repeating itself

Jenrick’s language echoes a warning issued two decades ago by Labour’s former home secretary John Reid, who famously declared the Home Office’s immigration directorate “not fit for purpose”.

The difference, Jenrick argues, is that the problem is now systemic. Without tearing down and rebuilding the institutions responsible for border control, the same promises will continue to produce the same outcomes.