What a surprise.  Another Home Office failure.

Those of us who are interested in politics and the mechanics of government know that the UK Home Office is a mess. It’s been eighteen years since former Labour Home Secretary John Reid described the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose and it seems that this continues to be the case. Since John, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, made his observation about the Home Office in 2006, the performance of this department has continued to decline.

Failure is the one word that I would describe the operation of the Home Office. There’s the ongoing failure by Home Office staff to properly protect Britain’s borders, the failure to properly act on various grooming gang reports and staff mutinies over the government’s Rwanda plan for dealing with the cross channel invaders. Now it seems there have been allegations and reports that the Home Office had on a group dealing with sexual exploitation, an MP who was on bail for sexual assault and who was later convicted of sex crimes.

The Guardian said:

An MP found guilty this month of molesting a 15-year-old boy advised the government on child sexual exploitation while under police caution, the Guardian can disclose.

Imran Ahmad Khan, the then Conservative MP for Wakefield, joined an expert panel offering advice on grooming gangs and went on to contribute to a policy paper entitled “Group-based child sexual exploitation characteristics of offending”.

He attended online meetings with the panel of sexual exploitation experts in July, September and November of 2020. Staffordshire police say he gave a written statement under caution in May 2020 addressing claims he had assaulted a minor.

The disclosures raise serious questions for the government and the Home Office over why he was appointed to a panel addressing child protection while under police investigation.

Whilst anyone who is arrested and charged should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, it strikes me as odd that an MP accused of sexual abuse should be serving on a government panel dealing with ‘group based sexual offending’. After all a person awaiting trial or under police caution for robbery would be an unlikely candidate for working as a security guard even if that person was innocent. Such an appointment would still look a little odd and maybe a little ‘off’.

If this MP was part of this investigation group prior to his arrest then it might have been better for him to step aside whilst the case was being dealt with. This case shows both the utter incompetence of the Home Office in believing that this situation would not come back to bite them and the double standards that exist in public life. No quality organisation worth its salt would put someone charged with sex offences into a group working with those concerned with stopping sex offending as it would be damaging to the organisation’s reputation if that decision was subsequently revealed. Also I cannot imagine anyone other than an MP, say for example a teacher being allowed to continue in post whilst under investigation for sex offences, yet this MP was allowed to continue working in a sensitive area whilst being the subject of a police inquiry.

It says a lot about the considerable levels of incompetence in the Home Office that they failed to carry out due diligence checks on this MP in order to ascertain whether he was a fit and proper person to take part in the work that he did. The Home Office is still unfit for purpose eighteen years since a Home Secretary pointed this out. This is a shameful and disgraceful state of affairs.