In 2000 the British Home Office launched a major programme of research on immigration and asylum, under the new Immigration Research and Statistics Service (IRSS). At a high-profile conference organized to launch the programme, the Minister for Immigration, Barbara Roche, suggested that this research would contribute to understanding ‘what drives these migratory forces, what are the consequences, and how we can deal with the situation’. This and other pronouncements around the time clearly implied that the new programme was intended to play an instrumental role, informing migration policy.

The instrumentalist explanation for the new research programme certainly seems to tally with developments in the Home Office over this period. The new Labour government's policy on asylum and migration control was the object of fairly sustained media attention over this period, creating strong pressure to meet public expectations about output. The onus on measuring and assessing output was reinforced by the new administration's emphasis on performance targets and delivery, as codified in a series of Public Service Agreements. The Home Office was therefore quite intensively engaged in responding to signals from politics and public opinion about the need to adjust its societal impacts. So we could expect it to conform to the behaviour of an action organization, using research instrumentally to help ensure the delivery of specified targets.

There was a second important shift over this period, in terms of the government's political agenda.