BRITAIN: Dr John Reid has reshuffled his ministerial team as part of his promise to sort out the British Home Office after more damaging headlines prompted renewed calls for the restructuring of the troubled department.
Revelations about the numbers of offenders absconding from open prisons, allegations of an "asylum-for-sex" case and errors at the criminal records office wrongly branding hundreds of people as criminals fuelled opposition charges of incompetence in the Home Office, which Dr Reid inherited from the sacked Charles Clarke in the aftermath of the foreign prisoners release fiasco just over two weeks ago.
Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis said the latest series of alleged failings had led to the department being called "the ministry for injustice".
Meanwhile, amid fears that Dr Reid could find himself overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge facing him, Labour MP John Denham suggested a second cabinet minister might need to be appointed to deal with police and security issues alone.
Now chairman of the Commons Select Committee, which Dr Reid appears before later today, Mr Denham said splitting up the department would be a mistake, but that "bringing together law and order and terrorism ... with a more senior minister in their own right would make sense".
Downing Street appeared to resist this idea, with the prime minister's spokesman insisting: "The key thing is that the Home Office gets the leadership it needs, and John Reid is there. He is pushing the agenda and is very much addressing the issues of balance between individual human rights and community human rights, which is very much part of the prime minister's agenda as well."
As part of that agenda, Dr Reid yesterday announced plans to recruit special advocates to represent the victims of crime at parole hearings.
Many opposition politicians suspect that this initiative, like Mr Blair's reported readiness to review his own human rights legislation, is part of an effort to divert attention from damaging headlines about Labour infighting over the leadership and the timetable for Mr Blair's departure.
That suspicion was reflected by Mr Davis, who said the new initiative might be a good idea but would remain just "a headline grabber" if not made to work. He told the BBC's Today programme: "The Parole Board is supposed to take on board - in fact actually have as its priority - the interests of the victim, and particularly the safety of the victim, from many years ago, and they are clearly not doing that now."
Mr Davis said ministers "took their eye off the ball" after it emerged that 393 offenders had absconded from Leyhill open prison since 1999, including 22 convicted of murder and seven rapists.
The director of the prison service said three-quarters of absconders would have been rearrested and returned to custody, while absconder rates were now at their lowest level since 1999.
However Liberal Democrat spokesman David Laws asked if the prison service had been inappropriately transferring prisoners to open prisons to alleviate overcrowding in Britain's jails.