The House | “Critical Friend”: Chief Inspector John Tuckett Resets Role Of Borders Watchdog

New independent chief inspector of borders and immigration John Tuckett

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John Tuckett spent much of his career in the Royal Navy, but witnessing the rescue of 60 migrants crammed into a rubber dinghy from one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes brought home the stakes at play in his new job.

“When you see things at first hand, it obviously hits you more so than when you read about it in the newspapers or see pictures,” explains the new independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI). “Seeing the kind of conditions they’re in, it really strikes you very forcibly what they’re experiencing.”

Since starting the ICIBI job in October, the 74-year-old has been busily visiting frontline outposts: aboard a rescue boat going out from Ramsgate; to Manston, where small boat arrivals are first processed; to asylum accommodation sites such as Wethersfield; and to detention centres where foreign national offenders are kept.

It has been particularly intense over the last few weeks: “I haven’t spent two consecutive nights in the same bed. It’s been all over the place.”

Born to research chemist parents, Yorkshire-bred Tuckett read natural sciences, later narrowed down to chemical engineering, at Cambridge, before enlisting.

Entering as a welfare executive officer, he spent 17 years in the Royal Navy and rose to the rank of submarine commander – which required passing the famous ‘Perisher’ course, one of the toughest military tests in the world.

There are documentaries from the 80s showing young men who look twice their age, sweating under the pressure of it, fag in hand (yes, in the submarine). Its name is both a play on ‘periscope’ and because if an applicant fails, their submarine career ends that day, and they never go aboard again.

“I can still remember it vividly,” Tuckett recalls. “I’d say it was probably the most challenging course, intellectually, physically and mentally, that I’ve ever done…

“You were organised into teams of six students, and you then had a senior officer called your teacher, and teacher’s role, frankly, was to put you under pressure to see whether you could make it or not. And if he thought you could take more pressure, he applied more pressure, and he went on applying it.”

Some could bear it; others would quit or be thrown off the course. “It taught me a huge amount and about planning, managing people, managing yourself,” he says. On the ‘Hunter Killers’, nuclear-powered subs not carrying Trident missiles, he would be away for two or three months at a time.

Did he have to manage dangerous situations? “Oh, yes, lots and lots. Someone used to say that being a submariner was 95 per cent sheer boredom, four per cent interesting, and one per cent sheer bloody terrifying when everything went wrong. And it’s not a bad analysis.”

The House suggests it sounds a bit like the Home Office, and Tuckett laughs.

“I’m my own person. I’m John Tuckett. I’m not David Bolt. I’m not David Neal. And I’ve made it my job to try and build a new relationship”

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The inspector says the Home Office is currently trying to drive “a very complex day-to-day operation”, which is “overlaid by an awful lot of change”, while “it is itself suffering, experiencing, financial cutbacks as part of the Spending Review settlement”.

“It’s a classic change challenge,” he summarises. “There is a natural bandwidth to what any organisation can do in both doing the day job, the operation side of it, and undertaking major change as well.”

“But it is particularly challenging given the size and political sensitivity of the whole immigration agenda,” Tuckett continues. “People use the word toxic. It is a toxic environment. It only takes one little thing to go wrong, and suddenly it becomes headline news.”

Implementing the rule change that will see asylum claimants have their cases reviewed every 30 months, for example, “will be a challenge” – and one that the ICIBI expects to look at.

But with no reports published under Tuckett so far, the press attention around him has focused on the revelation at his appointment that he was resident in Finland with his wife and children, and believed he could work partly from home. Keir Starmer was forced to clarify that Tuckett had to do the job here.

“I do the job full-time in the UK, and I’m speaking to you now from my UK base, my UK home. I still have a family home in Finland, and my wife is out there, and I meet her there as and when I can. But I do this job here totally from within the UK,” Tuckett tells The House today.

Three-quarters of his staff – about 26 currently – are home-based, including some who go to the London office when required. “The vast majority of our work is done like we’re doing now – on Teams. Absolutely the vast majority of it, whether that’s internal or external work. Though, when we’re doing inspections, the teams will physically go out to a site and talk with people face-to-face, and that’s very, very valuable.”

And are the costs of commuting from Finland and the UK accommodation being paid out of his own pocket, rather than expenses? “Absolutely, yes.”

Notably, Tuckett reveals that his first six months in this role have not included a meeting with Shabana Mahmood. He is not fussed, however.

“The Home Secretary is a very, very busy person indeed,” he says. “I’m quite comfortable with not meeting her at the very, very early stage. In some respects, it’d be much more valuable if I met her at this stage now, when I’ve got some understanding of the system and I can feed back.”

“The word inspection is a bit of an unfortunate one. It immediately gets people on the defensive”

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Instead, Tuckett says he has developed a “delightful” relationship with her two relevant deputies – migration minister Mike Tapp and border security and asylum minister Alex Norris.

“Both of them have been highly supportive,” Tuckett reports. “One of the things I’ve tried to do right from the start is to build relationships with the Home Office at the senior levels, not only with the politicians but with the permanent secretary and the second permanent secretary and all the director generals.”

This approach is all part of his mission to overhaul the relationship between the body he now leads – the only one officially tasked with scrutinising the UK’s border and immigration functions – and the Home Office, after it blew up under the Conservatives.

David Neal, the ICIBI appointed by Priti Patel in 2021, took such a critical approach that it got him the sack. He described the conditions at Manston as “wretched”, slammed the Bibby Stockholm barge failure as a “shambles”, and openly complained when Patel and Robert Jenrick neglected to meet him.

David Bolt, who preceded Neal and also served as interim chief following his departure, was candid too: he said last year he did not think the government’s ambition to end the use of asylum hotels by the next election would be achieved, and was not optimistic about its “smash the gangs” goal either.

“There has been some degree of not so… how do I put it? Not-so-positive relationships in the past, and there is a bit of legacy from those still around. But I’m my own person. I’m John Tuckett. I’m not David Bolt. I’m not David Neal. And I’ve made it my job to try and build a new relationship based on: how do we work together?”

Tuckett sees his role as one of a critical friend: “I don’t see any problem with the phrase.” He even baulks slightly at the term “inspection”: “The word inspection is a bit of an unfortunate one. It immediately gets people on the defensive.”

Neal, who was critical of Home Office redactions to his reports supposedly on grounds of national security, has called for the ICIBI to be able to publish reports independently – as other inspectorates are empowered to do.

Although five completed inspections are still awaiting publication, including one from May 2025, Tuckett does not make the same demand. “That’s how the system works. There are arguments for it. There are arguments against it.” Redactions for security reasons are “a very sensible measure”, he adds.

Tuckett “can’t really comment” on why relations broke down under Neal but insists he is going to follow exactly how his role is described in the UK Borders Act that created it.

“My role is very clearly laid down in statute, which is to bring about an increase in the efficiency and effectiveness and the consistency of the functions carried out by the Home Office teams,” he says. “Sounds an awful phrase, doesn’t it? ‘Efficiency, effectiveness and consistency.’ But that’s what the act says.”

As part of this reset, he will produce shorter reports and speed up their delivery. “Rather than have long inspections that would last upwards of six, seven months at a time before a report was produced, I’m trying to shorten that.” His predecessors, he says, “selected a fairly broad range of a subject and then let the inspection go wherever the evidence took them” but “I’m not doing that”. This will make the inspectorate “agile and versatile”.

The ICIBI’s “prime customer” is clearly no longer the immigration advisers, think tanks and journalists who lap up reams of data and pounce on criticisms of government, but Home Office teams.

Yet even Tuckett does not sound particularly optimistic about the chances of smashing the gangs. Small boat arrivals to Britain are, he says, “a bit like a mutating Covid virus”.

“You don’t quite know where it’s going to come up next, in what kind of variant. At some stage, I’m sure, the gangs behind the migrant boats – there will be ways and means found of thwarting their efforts. But then the illegal migrants will just find other ways of coming across.

“We’ve seen that in previous years – the shift from whether they were coming across in lorries, that went down, and now they’re coming across in boats. And what will happen after that? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”