Home Office

The Home Office (HO), also known in official usage and in Parliament as the Home Department, is the United Kingdom's interior ministry. It is responsible for public safety and policing, border security, immigration, passports, and civil registration.

The department oversees key areas of domestic policy including policing, drugs policy, counterterrorism, border security, and immigration. Bodies operating within or alongside the Home Office system include Border Force, UK Visas and Immigration, and the Security Service (MI5). It was formerly responsible for His Majesty's Prison Service and the National Probation Service, both of which were transferred to the Ministry of Justice.

The department is headed by the home secretary, one of the Great Offices of State. The office has been held by Shabana Mahmood since 5 September 2025, and the department is managed on a day-to-day basis by its permanent secretary.

The Home Office's expenditure, administration, and policy are scrutinised by the Home Affairs Select Committee.

History

The Home Office was established on 27 March 1782(1782-03-27) following the reorganisation of the Southern Department, with domestic responsibilities transferred to the new department and foreign affairs assigned to the Foreign Office. From its creation, the Home Office was responsible for a wide range of internal matters, including law and order, royal prerogative functions, and aspects of colonial administration.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of the Home Office's functions were gradually transferred to newly created government departments as the scope of the state expanded. Responsibilities relating to health, local government, labour, and agriculture were moved to specialised departments, while the Home Office retained core functions relating to policing, internal security, and immigration.

In 1829, the Home Office oversaw the creation of the Metropolitan Police Service, marking a major development in the organisation of policing in England and Wales. The department also took on responsibilities for prisons, civil registration, and the regulation of explosives and firearms during this period.

Further restructuring took place throughout the 20th century, with responsibilities for areas such as aviation, broadcasting, and local government transferred to other departments. In 2007, significant criminal justice functions, including prisons, probation, and legal affairs, were transferred to the newly created Ministry of Justice.

In the 21st century, the Home Office has focused primarily on policing, border security, immigration, and national security. Responsibilities have continued to evolve, including the transfer of fire and rescue services into and subsequently out of the department, and the expansion of its role in counter-terrorism policy.

Responsibilities

The Home Office is responsible for domestic policy in England and Wales in areas including policing, public safety, immigration and border control. It also oversees passports, civil registration, and policy relating to counter-terrorism, serious and organised crime, and drugs.

Current responsibilities include:

• policing and crime reduction
• border security and immigration control
• visas, asylum and citizenship
• passports and civil registration
• counter-terrorism and national security policy
• serious and organised crime
• drugs policy
• safeguarding and related public protection policy

Organisation

The Home Office is headed by the home secretary, a Cabinet minister, supported by the department's senior civil servant, the permanent secretary.

The Home Office comprises eleven directorates and is supported by a number of agencies and public bodies, along with independent statutory officeholders who provide oversight of its functions.

Public bodies

Independent officeholders

• Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration
• Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner
• Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation

Budget and spending

In the financial year 2022–2023, the Home Office had a total budget of £20.3 billion.

Ministers

The Home Office ministers are as follows, with cabinet ministers in bold.

Research

To meet the UK's five-year science and technology strategy, the Home Office sponsors research in police sciences, including:

• Biometrics – including face and voice recognition
• Cell type analysis – to determine the origin of cells (e.g. hair, skin)
• Chemistry – new techniques to recover latent fingerprints
• 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 devolved in Wales. However, a number of reserved and excepted matters remain the responsibility of Westminster, including the following:

• Drug classification and the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971
• Extradition
• Most aspects of firearms legislation
• Immigration and nationality
• Scientific procedures on live animals
• Data protection and access to information
• Elections
• Film classification
• National security and counter-terrorism
• Emergency Powers
• Lieutenancies
• Charities
• Parades (Northern Ireland)
• Security of explosives (Northern Ireland)
• National Crime Agency (Northern Ireland)

In Scotland, the Scottish Government's Justice and Safer Communities Directorates are responsible for devolved justice and home affairs policy, although Scottish Ministers retain some executive responsibilities in areas such as extradition operations, mutual legal assistance, and firearms licensing.

In Northern Ireland, policing and justice are largely devolved to the Department of Justice, while national security remains the responsibility of the Northern Ireland Office.

Criticism

Windrush scandal

The Windrush scandal resulted in some British citizens being wrongly deported, along with a further compensation scheme for those affected, and a wider debate on the Home Office hostile environment policy.[citation needed]

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. 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. In response to these incidents, the Home Office pledged to launch an independent review of its data protection compliance.

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.

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".

Aderonke Apata

Aderonke Apata, a Nigerian LGBT 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. In 2014, Apata said that she would send an explicit video of herself to the Home Office to prove her sexuality. This resulted in her asylum bid gaining widespread support, with multiple petitions created in response, which gained hundreds of thousands of signatures combined. 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.

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. 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. As criticism grew on social media, the Home Office distanced itself from the decision, though it confirmed the letter was authentic. 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.

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.[better source needed] 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.

Proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000

In 2025, the Home Office proscribed the group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000, placing it in the same legal category as organisations such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The decision was made following organized protests by Palestine Action, including a high-profile breach at RAF Brize Norton in which activists entered the base and damaged military aircraft, prompting a wider security review by the government. Reports at the time also stated that officials were examining possible links to Iranian support, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which Palestine Action denied. Following the proscription, it became a criminal offence to belong to or express support for the group, and, according to The Guardian and the BBC, "thousands" of activists were arrested by police under the new measures, although an exact figure was not publicly specified.

In February 2026, the High Court ruled that the proscription by the Home Office had been "unlawful" and "disproportionate", and the government subsequently indicated that it would appeal the decision on national security grounds, with the ban remaining in force pending the outcome of that appeal.

See also

• Home Office Large Major Enquiry System 2 (HOLMES 2)
• Law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Home Secretary
• Ministry of Home Security
• Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department
• Permanent Under-Secretary of State of the Home Office
• UK Immigration Service

Further reading

• 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)
• 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) .
• Petrow, Stefan. Policing morals: The metropolitan police and the Home Office 1870–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1994) .
• Roberts, David. "Lord Palmerston at the Home Office," The Historian (1958) 21#1 pp. 63-81 JSTOR

• 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).

External links

• — gives a history of responsibilities of the Home Office, including which functions were merged into or transferred away from the Home Office