Tim Loughton: The Home Secretary loves to talk about action, but is loathe to take it

Tim Loughton was a Conservative MP from 1997 to 2024. He served as Children’s Minister, and was deputy chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee from 2014 to 2024.

Minutes before Parliament broke for the Easter recess last week, and two days after Safeguarding Minister Jess Philipps disgracefully sneaked out the announcement about watering down the Pakistani grooming gang enquiries, Yvette Cooper was wheeled out to defend the indefensible on the breakfast media rounds.

According to the Home Secretary, the media had fallen for party political misinformation and in fact the Government is “increasing the action.” There are to be “new actions” as part of “increasing and strengthening the action”, and the Government is committed to taking “action not taken before” no less.

The action mantra was wheeled out endlessly until at last one BBC journalist piped up with the obvious question “what does action mean?” – to which answer came there none. For this Government, and this home secretary in particular, excessively repeating the word action has become a substitute for taking it.

In Opposition, Labour was hyperactive in wasting no opportunity to undermine everything the Government was trying to do to deter small boats coming across the Channel and tackle the asylum backlog crisis. It sided with ECHR-milking appeal lawyers, shamed airlines into disembarking deportees (who turned out to be convicted sex offenders), and voted against the Rwanda deterrent at every chance.

Instead, we were told what was really required was proper action to smash the criminal gangs operating the small boats: to scrap the Rwanda scheme and reverse the deterrent legislation in the 2023 Illegal Migration Act, end the use of asylum hotels, and put the money into better enforcement and processing.

Quite a lot to act on. So how has that translated into results?

As of this week, 8064 irregular migrants had crossed the Channel, an increase of 46 per cent on the previous year; all the fault of the weather according to Cooper, rather than their complete removal of deterrents.

So far only five people have been convicted of piloting the 130-plus boats making the crossing, and the gangs remain resolutely unsmashed even though they face ‘counter-terrorism style powers.’ Meanwhile the asylum hotel closure programme has been put into reverse.

At the time time, as so-called ‘irregular’ migrants are no longer automatically illegal, appeal queues are growing – and with the opaque appeal tribunals unreformed, we can expect yet more bizarre decisions like the Pakistani paedophile spared deportation because he was an alcoholic, and would be treated ‘inhumanely’ if sent back to Pakistan.

The Government’s main and only repost on what successful action actually looks like appears to be the claimed removal of 24,000 overseas nationals since coming to power. But no detailed breakdown was made available, and closer scrutiny reveals why.

Iit turns out that almost 74 per cent of these were voluntary returns (courtesy of the British taxpayer) and very few were recent arrivals in small boats, many of whom will be from countries whose governments will physically not allow them to be returned.

As this government has quickly found out, calling for action in opposition is very different from enacting it in office. Denigrating and then deconstructing everything your predecessors did is only a viable idea if you have something better with which to replace it.

Instead they are now desperately looking at a Rwanda-type scheme with alternative countries in the Balkans whilst other European nations look to pick up where we did all the expensive groundwork in Rwanda. Those entering the UK illegally will no longer qualify for British citizenship – which is what we had already put in place before the legislation was reversed.

Alas, the Home Secretary’s preference for promising action rather than delivering it has been just as evident in most other areas of her departmental responsibility.

We have now learnt that the 13,000 promised new police officers will be barely 3000. Most of them will be tied up arresting recalcitrant parents sounding off in WhatsApp groups, and in West Yorkshire, of course, don’t bothering applying to join the blue line if you are white.

What is particularly unforgiveable about Labour’s watering down of action on Pakistani grooming gangs is that it smacks of a nakedly partisan fear of alienating the Muslim vote in marginal areas, including Philipp’s own constituency. It was a similarly misguided mentality that previously led police and local authorities to value maintaining community cultural cohesion over protecting teenage girls from being raped by British Pakistani men.

That toxic attitude was challenged when the high-profile Operation Retriever saw mass convictions in 2010, and we published the Government’s first Child Sexual Exploitation Action Plan to blow the lid off this appalling practice. Regulations and police procedures changed, public awareness was transformed, victims were no longer treated as having ‘asked for it’ – and many perpetrators were brought to justice.

That these crimes are still going on is inexcusable and smacks of cover-up, that impression reinforced by the fact that no political or community leaders have been prosecuted.

It also fuels a dangerous perception of two-tier justice. If the Government won’t allow an even watered-down investigation to pick up where the expensive and long-winded ICSA historic enquiry failed to tread, then at the very least we need urgently to investigate why some constabularies are worse than others at prosecuting the criminals, and hold to account those officials who have let this vile practice go on under their watch.

That would be the action of a home secretary for whom action is more than just a word.