Home Office to be split up 'after Blair's departure'

John Reid has admitted that the timetable for breaking up the Home Office is slipping and that the complete split will not take effect until after Tony Blair announces his resignation.

Transfer of responsibility for prisons, probation and sentencing to a new Ministry of Justice is to take place on 9 May, in the week that the Prime Minister is expected to confirm he is leaving Downing Street.

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Critics have accused Mr Blair and the Home Secretary of rushing through the changes without consultation or parliamentary debate in order to tie the hands of Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister's likely successor.

Their suspicions will be fuelled by the disclosure that the full handover is expected to take up to another eight weeks. A high-ranking Home Office source said: "It will take until the summer to complete the split of the department. It won't be done on 9 May."

Mr Reid told MPs yesterday that the move would "effectively take place" on 9 May. He added: "I hope it will be embedded ... by the end of June, certainly by July."

In the face of sustained criticism by members of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Reid insisted that the move would not create tensions within Whitehall. He said: "There is no reason to presuppose that the people who lead the Ministry of Justice by definition will be a caricature - a sort of bunch of liberal, lefty human-rights lawyers - while those who run the Home Office will be Cromwellian, right-wing, national security obsessives."

John Denham, the committee's chairman, voiced concern that the new Home Office's concentration on counterterrorism would damage its other functions, such as tackling crime and antisocial behaviour.

Mr Reid said: "I absolutely and utterly refute that." He repeated his view that in the long term the head of the new Ministry of Justice should be a member of the Commons, rather than an unelected peer. He also disclosed that beefing up his department's counter-terrorism work was expected to cost £15m as 150 extra staff were recruited.

Lord Woolf, the former lord chief justice, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the reforms raised "concerns about our liberty". He said: "We should work it out beforehand and not wait until we have created the change and then ... try to scramble to get it into place. This is a very big change for our constitution."