The Cabinet minister responsible for the department is the home secretary,[3] a post considered one of the Great Offices of State; it has been held by Yvette Cooper since July 2024.

Most subsequently created domestic departments (excluding, for instance, those dealing with education) have been formed by splitting responsibilities away from the Home Office.

[20] To meet the UK's five-year science and technology strategy,[21] the Home Office sponsors research in police sciences, including: Most front-line law and order policy areas, such as policing and criminal justice, are devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland (and only very partially in Wales), but the following reserved and excepted matters are handled by Westminster.

Reserved matters: The Windrush scandal resulted in some British citizens being wrongly deported, along with a further compensation scheme for those affected, and a wider debate on the Home Office hostile environment policy.

In 2019, the Home Office admitted to multiple breaches of data protection regulations in the handling of its Windrush compensation scheme.

[26] In April 2019, the Home Office admitted to revealing 240 personal email addresses of EU citizens applying for settled status in the UK.

The judges stated that the "general approach [by the home secretary, Sajid Javid] in all earnings discrepancy cases [has been] legally flawed".

Caroline Waters, the interim chair of the EHRC, described the treatment of Windrush immigrants by the Home Office as a "shameful stain on British history".

[33] On 8 August 2017, after a thirteen-year legal battle and after a new appeal from Apata was scheduled for late July, she was granted refugee status in the United Kingdom by the Home Office.

[36] In March 2019, it was reported that in two unrelated cases, the Home Office denied asylum to converted Christians by misrepresenting certain Bible quotes.

[39] Home Secretary Sajid Javid said that it was "totally unacceptable" for his department to quote the Bible to question an Iranian Christian convert's asylum application, and ordered an urgent investigation into what had happened.

[40] The treatment of Christian asylum-seekers chimes with other incidents in the past, such as the refusal to grant visas to the Archbishop of Mosul to attend the consecration of the UK's first Syriac Orthodox Cathedral.