‘Not fit for purpose’ – the secret history of a deadly phrase. 2 hours ago. Adam Fleming,Newscastand. Chris Mason,Political editor. AFP via Getty Images. “Our system is not fit for purpose.”. And with this description of parts of the Home Office in 2006, the then-Home Secretary John Reid minted a phrase that has lodged in the lexicon of British politics.. He was speaking a few months after thousands of foreign-born prisoners had been released from British jails without first being considered for deportation.. Lord Reid has previously attributed the four-word phrase to an unnamed senior civil servant. Now in a three-part series about the Home Office, the Newscast podcast can reveal the identity of its author.. It was the permanent secretary in the department at the time, Sir David Normington.. “It is my phrase, but it was written in a private memo to the Home Secretary, John Reid, just after he had arrived. [It was] me saying, ‘This is what the Home Office is like,'” he told us.. Sir David accompanied Lord Reid as he uttered the now infamous form of words to a House of Commons committee two decades ago.. “With me sat beside him, [I tried] to rearrange my face as he described all 70,000 civil servants in the Home Office as not fit for purpose,” he recalled.. “That was a difficult moment and the civil service said to me: ‘Well, why don’t you stand up and tell him it’s not true?’. “The trouble was… it was my phrase.”. House of Commons. In the 20 years since it was popularised, “not fit for purpose” has become an a universal by-word for state incompetence, something bureaucrats and their ministerial bosses reach for when they are trying to strike a tough, no-nonsense tone.. The Hansard record of parliamentary proceedings suggests it has been used nearly 3,000 times in the Commons and Lords since 2006. In the 20 years before that, the phrase was used just 37 times.. It has been deployed in debates ranging from conditions in armed forces housing to the sewerage system of a Cornish hospital.. In our interview with him, Sir David wanted to clear up some myths that have become attached to the term.. It was originally a reference to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, a unit within the Home Office, rather than the entire Home Office.. And it was a description of technology, management and processes in the unit and not the whole staff or the immigration rules.. To be fair to Lord Reid, he made those distinctions at the time but his caveats have been lost in Whitehall lore.. Proving that words can go on hurting for decades, the phrase was dismissed on Newscast as “dismissive and “generic” by Lord Reid’s immediate predecessor as Labour home secretary, Charles Clarke, who returned to the backbenches following the 2006 foreign prisoners debacle.. “Obviously, as in any organisation, there are things that are done well and things that are done badly,” Clarke told us.. “And the job of the leadership… is to review how the department is doing, where it’s
