Watchdog denounces the Home Office

A devastating indictment of the running of the Home Office is made in a report by Commons spending watchdogs published today.

Although John Reid announced an action plan to remedy his department's failings on Wednesday, the all-party Public Accounts Committee suggests that its deep-seated problems will not be easily put right.

Edward Leigh, the committee's Tory chairman, said: "The significance of these failures can hardly be overstated. Together they constitute a severe indictment of the way in which the Home Office has been run."

In their report, the MPs say the Home Office "does not have a grip" on the issue of more than 1,000 foreign prisoners who were released without being considered for deportation.

The committee calls for a single, central electronic database covering both the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) and Prison Service.

The MPs are critical of the department's financial management, saying its new finance system "lost even the tenuous grip on its finances which previous outmoded systems had provided".

The Home Office failed to reconcile its in-house records with its bank statements and wrote off a £3m difference between them as "administration costs".