Suspending UK border security checks: how chronic capacity stress becomes crisis

For those who have followed the public spat in recent months between the Home Secretary and the former chief of the UK Border Force, Brodie Clark, the publication of the Independent Chief Inspector’s report last week helped to shed a degree of light on the underlying complexities of it all. The report, argues Simon Bastow, gives an insight into tension between political priorities and operational imperatives, and how actors at all levels in large policy systems generally adapt to and do their best despite being constrained by the systems in which they work.