Home secretary urged to quit as she promises to ditch targets she told MPs had not been set

Amber Rudd has vowed to scrap Home Office targets for removing people from Britain, after a chaotic 24 hours where she was summoned to the House of Commons to admit officials did have targets for departures, having previously denied their existence.



The home secretary was hauled back in front of MPs on Thursday to answer an urgent question from Labour’s Diane Abbott, after documents revealed targets had previously been set for voluntary removals.

Rudd had told the home affairs select committee on Wednesday that her department did not set such targets.

Serious concerns have been raised repeatedly by MPs about the target-driven culture of the Home Office, which some said could have led enforcement officers to target “low-hanging fruit” – people living in the UK legally but without the correct documents, like many of the Windrush generation.

After a statement in parliament, where she faced fresh calls to resign, Rudd confirmed that the targets would be ditched. “I have not approved or seen or cleared any targets for removals looking ahead, and looking ahead I will not be doing that,” she told reporters.

Rudd said she felt “very serious and responsible” for tackling the Windrush scandal. “I can do this,” she insisted, saying she hoped to change the culture in the Home Office.

She said she had visited the Home Office’s immigration headquarters in Croydon, to ensure that officials working there were “going to approach it in the way that I would expect, which is trying to really lean in, to make sure that the Home Office in this case, is going to be much more proactive, than we’ve been reactive in the past”.

“I want to make sure we focus more on the individual … I’m confident that we will see a marked change in tone.”

Speaking in the Commons, Rudd admitted the Home Office had been “using local targets for internal performance management” having previously told the Home affairs select committee that this was “not how we operate”.

Rudd said she did not approve of “a target culture” and said it would change. “I have never agreed there should be specific removal targets and I would never support a policy that puts targets ahead of people,” she said.

An inspection report from 2015 seen by the Guardian reveals that the Home Office set a target of 12,000 voluntary departures of people regarded as having no right to stay in the UK. It is not clear whether the target is still in force. The figure was a 60% increase on the previous year.

Downing Street cautiously backed Rudd’s decision to drop the removals targets, but said the Home Office should still prioritise reducing migration. “It remains a government priority to tackle illegal immigration to ensure the rules are properly enforced, but how you choose to achieve that is a matter for individual home secretaries,” May’s spokesman said.

The spokesman said removal targets were a concept that went back over a number of decades, and cited those imposed by Labour governments from 1998 to 2010, although these were aimed at more specific areas such as asylum seekers and foreign prisoners.

Answering questions from reporters on Thursday, Rudd side-stepped a number of key issues on migration, putting some clear water between herself and Theresa May’s approach to the role of home secretary.

Rudd sounded a note of caution on the government’s target of reducing net immigration to tens of thousands and also said she did not like the phrase “hostile environment” to describe the crackdown on illegal immigration, a phrase the prime minister herself used while at the Home Office.

Asked if she still backed the net migration target, Rudd said “I’ll come back to you on that,” before adding that it was a long-term target. “It was in our manifesto,” she said.

She did however accept that the hostile environment had become a pillar of the Conservative approach. “I don’t like the phrase ‘hostile environment’. It was first used by Labour, but we have expanded on it and I’m not running away from that,” she said.

However, May’s spokesman later did not rule out continuing to use the phrase “hostile environment” to describe its strategy. “I can’t predict the phrases individuals ministers will use,” the spokesman said.

Rudd has faced mounting calls for her resignation as the scandal over the treatment of the Windrush generation has deepened over the past week. Abbott, the shadow home secretary, said it was time the home secretary “considered her honour and resigned”.

Tory MPs, however, including cabinet colleagues, have repeatedly expressed their backing for Rudd. Michael Gove and Sajid Javid sat beside her on the frontbench on Thursday morning, while backbencher Nicholas Soames said she had “the total support of this side of the house”, to cheers from other Tory MPs.

Pressed by Labour’s Paula Sherriff, Rudd said she did not intend to step aside. “I do think I am the person who can put it right,” she said.

Speaking later, Rudd was candid about the difficulty of her position. Asked if she still harboured ambitions to lead the Conservatives, she said: “I’m just thinking about staying in the game.”

She said she felt “very seriously responsible and involved for the Windrush crisis, fiasco, whatever people care to call it. I am committed to making sure that I deal with it.”







