Priti Patel has been the “worst home secretary in living memory”, critics have said after she quit the cabinet ahead of a reshuffle by new prime minister Liz Truss.
While Conservatives became frustrated with her record of overpromising and underdelivering on immigration and crime, charities and legal groups accused Ms Patel of using unevidenced and “brutal” policies to court media headlines.
Morale inside the Home Office has been left in tatters by her three-year tenure, which was marred by Boris Johnson’s decision to keep Ms Patel as home secretary despite findings that she broke the ministerial code by bullying civil servants.
An official from the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents Home Office and Border Force staff, said Ms Patel had “cleared out anyone prepared to dissent”.
Head of bargaining Paul O’Connor told The Independent: “She is probably the worst home secretary I can recall in living memory.
“The mentality has seeped through into the way the Home Office workforce is governed and there’s a fairly repressive regime where people are told ‘do what I tell you to do’.”
Mr O’Connor said that staff needed to be free from “downwards political pressure and interference” to do their jobs properly, adding: “They are sick and tired of being used as a political football by politicians as they lurch from one political crisis to another.”
Ms Patel’s tenure became dominated by the rocketing number of small boat crossings in the English Channel – a route she vowed to make “unviable” in August 2020 after ignoring warnings over increasing numbers.
Two years later, arrivals have hit new record highs, as have the number of outstanding asylum applications awaiting a decision.
Home Office policy has become increasingly focused on the idea of reducing crossings with “deterrents”, but Ms Patel’s plan to force dinghies back to France did not come to fruition, and the Rwanda deal is under legal challenge in the High Court.
Lucy Moreton, a professional officer at the Immigration Services Union (ISU), said the push-back policy was announced in spite of “clear advice from officials that this was not legally possible in territorial waters, not safe in such a crowded waterway and not viable because of the nature of the vessels”.
She told The Independent that the failed focus on reducing small boat crossings caused under-investment in reception and accommodation facilities, which resulted in chaotic scenes detailed in a recent watchdog report.
“The emotional and physical toll on staff was extreme,” Ms Moreton said. “Staff concerns, at all levels, are not listened to or, at worse, actively penalised.”
The head of the FDA union, which also represents Home Office staff, warned that Ms Patel’s bullying scandal had left a “toxic legacy”.
“There’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for ministers around their conduct and there’s no sign that’s going to change. Civil servants feel unprotected,” general secretary Dave Penman said.
A series of punitive laws to criminalise crossings and jail asylum seekers who steer boats came into force earlier this year, but have not yet had any visible effect on crossing numbers.
On 1 January 2021, Ms Patel changed the UK’s immigration rules to mean the government could refuse to consider asylum claims if people had a “connection to a safe third country”, which can mean staying there for a few days while journeying to Britain.
But she failed to replicate an EU-wide returns agreement lost during Brexit or strike any bilateral agreements with European countries, meaning the UK had nowhere to send mounting numbers of “inadmissible” asylum seekers.
Priti Patel during a visit to the Border Force facility in Dover, Kent, in 2021
The self-inflicted conundrum caused the government to look outside Europe for a “safe third country” to send asylum seekers to, leading to the Rwanda deal.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) said Ms Patel had ramped up previous hostile environment policies “to the point of brutality, amounting to a sustained attack on refugees”.
Advocacy director Zehrah Hasan said: “She has made targeted attacks at different groups in order to sow division between communities in order to justify some of this extremely draconian and authoritarian policy.
“It’s just been a consistent ramping up and shifting the lines on what is considered to be some of the worst immigration policy we’ve seen. It’s completely unevidenced.”
Ms Hasan said recent polling indicated that immigration was no longer a political priority for many Britons, and that harsh policies had become a “way to divert attention from inaction on the issues that people really care about”.
Rudy Schulkind, the research and policy manager for Bail for Immigration Detainees, said that under Ms Patel the Home Office had become “less willing to work with and consult civil society”.
“It seems that as a bureaucratic machine, the Home Office has ground to a halt,” he added.
“I don’t know exactly what is causing it – if it’s to do with the mess and disorganisation at the Home Office and the failure to get asylum decisions right the first time, or a move towards trying wherever possible not to determine people’s asylum claims in the UK.”
Mr Schulkind characterised the Home Office under Ms Patel’s tenure as becoming “worse at policy and less effective at performing its functions”.
“It’s a pretty shameful legacy that Ms Patel leaves behind that will take a lot of work to undo,” he said.
The Home Office is also responsible for wider immigration and citizenship matters, and its duties increased hugely because of the effects of Brexit.
Problems and delays have developed in everyday operations like passport processing, and an independent review published in July found that hours-long queues for checks at Heathrow were a “visible manifestation” of systemic Border Force failures.
A report commissioned by Ms Patel found issues with long-term planning and ineffective recruitment, and hit out at the impact of “ill-conceived policy initiatives” thought up by the government without proper consultation.
The independent review found that time was being wasted “working through the implementation of ill-considered policy initiatives”, amid a “cycle of crisis management”.
Home Office insiders believe that Ms Patel focused disproportionately on asylum and immigration, at the expense of her other responsibilities in crime and policing.
The relationship between government and the police, damaged by a decade of austerity, was buoyed by Mr Johnson’s announcement that 20,000 extra officers would be recruited when he became prime minister in 2019.
Ms Patel was charged with implementing the policy but it looks set to fall short of the ambitious target, and the speed of recruitment has exacerbated vetting risks and created an inexperienced workforce.
Relations soured with police bodies over a pay freeze, and then a succession of laws and policies such as the “Beating Crime Plan” that senior officers felt were not properly consulted on.
At a Police Federation conference in May, rank-and-file officers told The Independent they felt the home secretary had been focused on “temporary crowd pleasers” rather than meaningful improvements.
“It’s a lot of headlines and not much behind it,” one officer remarked, while another accused Ms Patel of “gimmicks and soundbites”.
Despite declaring the Conservatives to be the “party of law and order”, Ms Patel left office with the number of crimes recorded by police at a record high, and the proportion prosecuted at a record low of under 6 per cent.
Ms Patel defended her record as home secretary in parliament hours before she quit as home secretary on Monday afternoon, saying she had “a record of delivering on the people’s priorities – a record of which I am very proud”.
In her resignation letter to Mr Johnson, she said it had been the “honour of my life” to serve as home secretary and urged the new regime to back her immigration policies.
Ms Patel blamed “political opponents, and left-wing activists, lawyers and campaigners” for trying to block some of her ambitions and said she would continue championing her causes from the back benches.
