14 Facts About Home Office

Home Office, known as the Home Department, is a ministerial department of His Majesty's Government, responsible for immigration, security, and law and order.

The Home Office is managed from day to day by a civil servant, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State of the Home Office.

Expenditure, administration and policy of the Home Office are scrutinised by the Home Affairs Select Committee.

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

Home Office publishes progress against the plan on the 10 Downing Street website.

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Home Office retains a variety of functions that have not found a home elsewhere, and sit oddly with the main law-and-order focus of the department, such as regulation of British Summer Time.

Until 1978, the Home Office had its offices in what is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Main Building on King Charles Street, off Whitehall.

From 1978 to 2004, the Home Office was then located at 50 Queen Anne's Gate, a Brutalist office block in Westminster designed by Sir Basil Spence, close to St James's Park tube station.

In 2005, the Home Office moved to a new main office designed by Sir Terry Farrell at 2 Marsham Street, Westminster, on the site of the demolished Marsham Towers building of the Department of the Environment.

Department of Justice is accountable to the Northern Ireland Executive, whereas the Northern Ireland Home Office is a UK government department.

In March 2019, it was reported that in two unrelated cases, the Home Office denied asylum to converted Christians by misrepresenting certain Bible quotes.

The Home Office Secretary 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.

In 2019, the Home Office admitted to multiple breaches of data protection regulations in the handling of its Windrush compensation scheme.

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".