The Home Office is not fit for purpose. That's the verdict of the Home Secretary. And for those of us who've been around in Whitehall and Westminster for a while, it does sound rather familiar. I'm Hannah White and this is Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for

Government. So the Home Office regularly tops the league tables for the most complicated and challenging

of government departments. So the emergence of a damning 2023 report by a former special

advisor and now Conservative MP, Nick Timothy, which tears into the way the Home Office

functions feels like bad timing, when the government is desperately trying to get a grip on small

boat numbers. Today we'll explore why things go wrong and what could be done to ensure that

they don't. Because Kirstama and his government do need some good news with the latest polls

showing Labour at historic lows.

We'll take a look at some eye-catching numbers.

And then we'll assess one party's proposed solutions.

Reform UK has been setting out its plans for government reform.

Outlandish or workable.

We've been weighing it up.

Back in the studio is Alex Thomas, who is, I think, Alex just on something of a victory lap. Hi, Hannah. Yeah, thank you. Victory lap, yeah, maybe, sort of partial victory lap. Three-quarters victory lap. We had some good news last week on the campaign that we've been running, and we've talked about on this podcast before, to get the government to change the rules that they introduced a while ago about gagging civil servants and stopping them from participating in public events and stakeholder events.

So we had an exchange of letters.

It's on our website for anyone who's interested between you and Nick Thomas Simmons, who's the minister in the cabinet office, which sets out clarifications saying that, yes, absolutely civil

servants should be able to talk in public for areas for which they have responsibility.

He reaffirms the importance of civil servants talking to stakeholders when they're making policy

or doing other activity.

It's not a sort of complete victory from where we were at because there's still some

potentially onerous clearance requirements around these sorts of things, which I do

get from the number 10 and sort of control of the grid perspective, but I think there is still

...