The Home Office and Race Relations Policy: Coordinator and Initiator?

This article attempts to analyse why, to quote a recent report from the Home Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons, ‘in the vacuum caused by the Home Office's reluctance to be seen to be interfering, ethnic minority concerns go by default’. It first examines the reasons for placing responsibility for race relations policy with the Home Office and then goes on to detail events within the Home Office in the two years following the introduction of the 1976 Race Relations Act. The article concludes by suggesting that a lack of preparedness for the implementation stage of the policy, together with a diminution of political commitment and the limitations on special funding, discouraged the Home Office from playing a more active and more effective role in coordinating and initiating within central government policies for racial disadvantage.