The Home Office is a Ministerial department of the UK Government responsible for immigration, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service (MI5). It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs, counter-terrorism, and ID cards. It was formerly responsible for the Prison Service and Probation Service, but these are now under a newly created Ministry of Justice.

It continues to be known, especially in official papers and when referred to in Parliament, by the title, as the Home Department.

The Home Office is headed by the Home Secretary, a Cabinet minister, who is supported by the senior civil servant, the Permanent Secretary.

As of April 2012, the Home Office comprised the following agencies, inspectorates, and public bodies:

The Home Office Ministers are as follows:

Theresa May is also Minister for Women and Equalities and Lynne Featherstone Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Government Equalities Office. Nick Herbert works between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

Adam Whitney Savage (born July 15, 1967) is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters. His model work has appeared in major films, including Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. He is a prominent member of the skeptic community. He lives in San Francisco with his twin sons and wife, Julia.

Born in New York City, Savage was raised in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County New York. He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985. His father, Whitney Lee Savage (1928-1998), was a painter, filmmaker and animator known for his work on Sesame Street, and has a permanent exhibit in the Avampato Discovery Museum. His mother is a psychotherapist. His sister Kate Savage is also an artist. As a teenager in Sleepy Hollow, he routinely visited the local bike shop to have flat tires fixed. The shop showed him how to do the repairs himself. From this experience, Savage said, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard...I've been building and putting bicycles together since then."

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] ( listen); born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish Americansoftware engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git. He was honored (shared with Dr Shinya Yamanaka) with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel".

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".