The chief executive of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is battling to keep her job after a group of MPs said they had little confidence in her abilities following a "catastrophic leadership failure" in her former role in charge of Britain's immigration system.
The Commons home affairs select committee said Lin Homer repeatedly misled them for years when she was chief executive of the UK Border Agency over the size of the backlogs in asylum and immigration, which now top more than 310,000 cases. Describing the system as "chaotic", the MPs said the backlog would take 24 years to clear at the current rate of progress.
In one of the most severe attacks by a Commons committee on a named Whitehall senior civil servant, the MPs said they were "astounded" when they learned that Homer had been promoted to become the £180,000-a-year chief executive and permanent secretary at HMRC.
A report by the committee published on Monday demands that parliament should in future be given a veto over leading civil service appointments to ensure there is no repeat of the Homer case.
"The status quo, in which catastrophic leadership failure is no obstacle to promotion, is totally unacceptable," the MPs say. "We recommend that in future any failures of this nature should have serious consequences for the individual's career."
"The whole episode raises serious concerns about the accountability of the most senior civil servant to parliament. It is shocking that after five years under Lin Homer's leadership an organisation that was described at the beginning of the period as not being fit for purpose should have improved its performance so little," they conclude.
Homer said she denied the allegations in the strongest possible terms. "The suggestion that I deliberately misled the committee and refused to apologise are both untrue and unfair," she wrote in a letter to Keith Vaz, the committee's chairman.
She said the committee's report on the UKBA's record covered the period from July to September last year, 18 months after she left in January 2011.
"It is therefore wholly inaccurate and unfair to seek to ascribe responsibility to me for matters of concern that occurred long after I had left the agency," she wrote in the letter, which was copied to the chancellor, George Osborne, and the head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake.
The accusation of misleading parliament could threaten Homer's position. The Treasury minister responsible for HMRC, David Gauke, rallied to her defence, saying that while she had been in charge of HMRC it had become increasingly effective, had improved its customer service and delivered efficiencies. "She is a highly effective chief executive and the right person to lead HMRC," Gauke said.
Homer had a distinguished career in local government, including as chief executive of Birmingham city council, before becoming head of the Home Office immigration and nationality directorate in 2005. She became the first UKBA chief executive in 2008 on a salary of up to £210,000 a year.
She was the top civil servant at the Department of Transport for less than 12 months before becoming HMRC chief executive last year.
The MPs' report says that for six years the border agency supplied it with incorrect information about the size of the asylum backlog and the checks being carried out to try to trace applicants whose cases had been parked in an archive. The MPs estimate the current combined backlogs in immigration and asylum cases total 312,726 but add that they cannot be sure this is the whole picture as UKBA has not been open with them about the true scale.
The MPs say their inquiry shows UKBA has wrongly concluded that not being able to trace an applicant means they are not in the UK.
"Regular checks to try to find applicants were not carried out over a significant time period and the final tracing programme was rushed," the report says. "There could therefore be thousands of people in the UK whose applications remain in the closed archives but whom the agency has not been able to trace."
Vaz said successive chief executives had presided over chaos including 150 boxes of unopened mail, 100,000 unopened letters and yet another effective amnesty for thousands due to calamitous inefficiency.
"For six years the committee was misled by UKBA chiefs about the agency's unacceptable performance. It appears more like the scene of a Whitehall farce than a government agency operating in the 21st century," he said. "No sooner is one backlog closed, than four more are discovered. At this rate it will take 24 years to clear the backlog which still stands at the size of the population of Iceland."
Vaz said the MPs were worried that given UKBA's poor record of being transparent with them, the delays they knew about could be only the tip of the iceberg. "UKBA must publish a definitive list of all its backlogs and senior staff should not receive any bonuses until the backlog is cleared."
The MPs cite further evidence from Homer's record at HMRC, saying that 1 million letters were left unanswered at the tax authority throughout 2012 and 100,000 of them remained unanswered when Homer appeared before the Commons public accounts committee in January.
Lin Homer's CV
Lin Homer left local for national government in 2005, giving up a £170,000 post as chief executive of Birmingham city council after just three years in post, to head the Immigration Service. Homer, born in 1957, qualified as a solicitor and rose rapidly through the ranks of local government, working at Reading, Hertfordshire and Suffolk. Her time at Birmingham ended in controversy, with sharp criticism in an official report of her handling of a postal vote rigging scandal, in which six councillors were found guilty. When the Immigration Agency was reorganised and became the UK Border Agency, she was its first chief executive, and then moved in 2010 to become permanent secretary at the Department for Transport. She was appointed chief executive at HM Revenue and Customs in January 2012. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Birmingham University in 2010. She is married with three daughters, and lists her hobbies in Who's Who as ski-ing, alpine walking and gardening.
Maev Kennedy
