This article is about the British interior ministry. For a working room or study in a domestic dwelling, see Study (room). For small businesses operated from home, see Small office/home office.
A Home Office Immigration Enforcement vehicle in north London
The Home Office (HO), also known (especially in official papers and when referred to in Parliament) as the Home Department,[2] is the United Kingdom's interior ministry. It is responsible for public safety and policing, border security, immigration, passports, and civil registration.
On 27March 1782;243 years ago(1782-03-27), the Home Office was formed by renaming the existing Southern Department, with all existing staff transferring. On the same day, the Northern Department was renamed the Foreign Office.
To match the new names, there was a transferring of responsibilities between the two Departments of State. All domestic responsibilities (including colonies, previously administered under the Board of Trade) were moved to the Home Office, and all foreign matters (including the administration of British protectorates) became the concern of the Foreign Office.
Most subsequently created domestic departments (excluding, for instance, those dealing with education) have been formed by splitting responsibilities away from the Home Office.
The initial responsibilities were:
Answering petitions and addresses sent to the King
Migration and Borders Group – responsible for immigration policymaking.
Public services and policing
Public Safety Group – responsible for policy areas including fire, policing, and crime reduction. Also responsible for implementing the Emergency Services Network.
Overall responsibility for all Home Office business, including: overarching responsibility for the departmental portfolio and oversight of the ministerial team; cabinet; National Security Council (NSC); public appointments; oversight of the Security Service[12]
Counter terrorism and extremism; state threats; cyber security and crime; serious and organised crime; oversight of the National Crime Agency; anti-corruption; economic crime (excluding fraud)[13]
Fraud; departmental finance; Home Office business in the Lords; Overseas Territories; public appointments and sponsorship; inquiries; union and devolution[14]
Policing standards and governance, neighbourhood policing, public order, major events, and civil contingencies, criminal justice system, Young Futures, Safer Streets
Violence against women and girls; safeguarding; rape and serious sexual offences; violent crime and domestic abuse; child sexual abuse and exploitation; modern slavery; spiking
Legal migration policy; Immigration Rules and visa policy; Windrush Compensation Scheme; Future Borders and Immigration System; HM Passport Office; General Register Office; Border Force operation; safe and legal routes and resettlement[16]
This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. Last update: 2012(April 2025)
The department outlined its aims for this Parliament in its Business Plan, which was published in May 2011, and superseded its Structural Reform Plan.[17] The plan said the department will:
Empower the public to hold the police to account for their role in cutting crime–Introduce directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners and make police actions to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour more transparent.
Free up the police to fight crime more effectively and efficiently–Cut police bureaucracy, end unnecessary central interference and overhaul police powers in order to cut crime, reduce costs and improve police value for money. Simplify national institutional structures and establish a National Crime Agency to strengthen the fight against organised crime (and replace the Serious Organised Crime Agency).
Create a more integrated criminal justice system–Help the police and other public services work together across the criminal justice system.
Secure our borders and reduce immigration–Deliver an improved migration system that commands public confidence and serves our economic interests. Limit non-EU economic migrants, and introduce new measures to reduce inflow and minimise abuse of all migration routes, for example the student route. Process asylum applications more quickly, and end the detention of children for immigration purposes.
Protect people's freedoms and civil liberties–Reverse state interference to ensure there is not disproportionate intrusion into people's lives.
Protect our citizens from terrorism–Keep people safe through the Government's approach to Counter Terrorism Policing.
Build a fairer and more equal society (through the Government Equalities Office)–Help create a fair and flexible labour market. Change culture and attitudes. Empower individuals and communities. Improve equality structures, frontline services and support; and help Government departments and others to consider equality as a matter of course.
The Home Office publishes progress against the plan on the 10 Downing Street website.[18]
CONTEST, a strategy written as early as 2003 by which to deradicalize individuals who are at risk. CONTEST is composed of the "four Ps" – Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare – which aim to reduce terrorism at all levels through: Preventing more people from being radicalised; Pursuing suspects operationally and legally; Protecting the public through security measures, and Preparing to manage the response to mitigate the impact of an inevitable attack.
Fixated Threat Assessment Centre: a UK police/mental health unit, whose function is to manage the risk to public figures from stalkers and individuals who are fixated on high profile public figures or prominent protected sites.
For external shots of its fictional Home Office, the TV series Spooks uses an aerial shot of the Government Offices Great George Street instead, serving as stand-in to match the distinctly less modern appearance of the fictitious accommodation interiors the series uses.[20]
Research
To meet the UK's five-year science and technology strategy,[21] the Home Office sponsors research in police sciences, including:
DNA – identifying offender characteristics from DNA
Improved profiling – of illicit drugs to help identify their source
Raman Spectroscopy – to provide more sensitive drugs and explosives detectors (e.g. roadside drug detection)
Terahertz imaging methods and technologies – e.g. image analysis and new cameras, to detect crime, enhance images and support anti-terrorism
Devolution
Most front-line law and order policy areas, such as policing and criminal justice, are devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland (and only very partially in Wales), but the following reserved and excepted matters are handled by Westminster.
Extradition legislation, but the Scottish Ministers (working with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service) have executive responsibility for extradition operations and policy responsibility for mutual legal assistance
Most aspects of firearms legislation, but Scottish Ministers have some executive responsibilities for the licensing of firearms; further powers are transferred under the Scotland Act 2012
The first allegations about the targeting of pre-1973 Caribbean migrants started in 2013.[citation needed] In 2018, the allegations were put to the home secretary in the House of Commons, and resulted in the resignation of the then home secretary. In 2019, the Home Office admitted to multiple breaches of data protection regulations in the handling of its Windrush compensation scheme. The department sent emails to Windrush migrants which revealed the email address of other Windrush migrants to whom the email was sent. The data breach concerned five different emails, each of which was sent to 100 recipients.[26] In April 2019, the Home Office admitted to revealing 240 personal email addresses of EU citizens applying for settled status in the UK. The email addresses of applicants were incorrectly sent to other applicants to the scheme.[27] In response to these incidents, the Home Office pledged to launch an independent review of its data protection compliance.[28]
In 2019, the Court of Appeal issued a judgement which criticised the Home Office's handling of immigration cases. The judges stated that the "general approach [by the home secretary, Sajid Javid] in all earnings discrepancy cases [has been] legally flawed". The judgement relates to the Home Office's interpretation of Section 322(5) of the Immigration Rules.[29]
In November 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a statutory body that investigates breaches of the Equality Act 2010 published a report concluding that the Home Office had a "lack of organisation-wide commitment, including by senior leadership, to the importance of equality and the Home Office's obligations under the equality duty placed on government departments". The report noted that the Home Office's pursuit of the "hostile environment" policy from 2012 onwards "accelerated the impact of decades of complex policy and practice based on a history of white and black immigrants being treated differently". Caroline Waters, the interim chair of the EHRC, described the treatment of Windrush immigrants by the Home Office as a "shameful stain on British history".[30]
Aderonke Apata
Aderonke Apata, a NigerianLGBT activist, made two asylum claims that were both rejected by the Home Office in 2014 and on 1 April 2015 respectively, due to her previously having been in a relationship with a man and having children with that man.[31][32][33][34][35] In 2014, Apata said that she would send an explicit video of herself to the Home Office to prove her sexuality.[31] This resulted in her asylum bid gaining widespread support, with multiple petitions created in response, which gained hundreds of thousands of signatures combined.[33] On 8 August 2017, after a thirteen-year legal battle and after a new appeal from Apata was scheduled for late July, she was granted refugee status in the United Kingdom by the Home Office.[36]
Use of the Bible for rejecting asylum claims
In March 2019, it was reported that in two unrelated cases, the Home Office denied asylum to converted Christians by misrepresenting certain Bible quotes. In one case, it quoted selected excerpts from the Bible to imply that Christianity is not more peaceful than Islam, the asylum-seeker's original religion.[37] In another incident, an Iranian Christian application for asylum was rejected because her faith was judged as "half-hearted", for she did not believe that Jesus could protect her from the Iranian regime.[38] As criticism grew on social media, the Home Office distanced itself from the decision, though it confirmed the letter was authentic.[39] Home Secretary Sajid Javid said that it was "totally unacceptable" for his department to quote the Bible to question an Iranian Christian convert's asylum application, and ordered an urgent investigation into what had happened.[40]
The treatment of Christian asylum-seekers chimes with other incidents in the past, such as the refusal to grant visas to the Archbishop of Mosul to attend the consecration of the UK's first Syriac Orthodox Cathedral.[41][bettersourceneeded] In a 2017 study, the Christian Barnabas Fund found that only 0.2% of all Syrian refugees accepted by the UK were Christians, although Christians accounted for approximately 10% of Syria's pre-war population.[42]
↑ "Role - Home Affairs Committee". parliament.uk. Retrieved 28 February 2022. The House of Commons appoints the Committee with the task of examining the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Home Office and its associated public bodies.
Bailey, Victor. "The Metropolitan Police, the Home Office and the threat of outcast London." in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (Routledge, 2015) pp.94–125.
Bartrip, Peter W.J. The Home Office and the dangerous trades: regulating occupational disease in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Rodopi, 2002).
Chadwick, George Roger. "Bureaucratic mercy: the home office and the treatment of capital cases in Victorian England" (PhD dissertation, Rice University; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 1989. 9110955.).
Emsley, Clive. "The home office and its sources of information and investigation 1791-1801." English Historical Review 94.372 (1979): 532-561.
Gibson, Bryan. The New Home Office: An Introduction (2nd ed. Waterside Press, 2008) online
Newsam, Frank. The Home Office (Routledge, 2024).
Pellew, Jill. "The home office and the aliens act, 1905." The Historical Journal 32.2 (1989): 369-385.
Pellew, Jill. The Home Office, 1848-1914, from Clerks to Bureaucrats (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1982) online.
Petrow, Stefan. Policing morals: The metropolitan police and the Home Office 1870–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1994) online.
Roberts, David. "Lord Palmerston at the Home Office," The Historian (1958) 21#1 pp. 63-81 JSTOR24437747
Smith, David. "Sir George Grey at the Mid-Victorian Home Office." Canadian Journal of History 19.3 (1984): 361-386.
Smith, Melissa. "Architects of armageddon: the home office scientific advisers' branch and civil defence in Britain, 1945–68." The British Journal for the History of Science 43.2 (2010): 149-180.
York, Sheona. "The ‘hostile environment’: How Home Office immigration policies and practices create and perpetuate illegality." Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law 32.4 (2018).
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