John Reid yesterday made a startling attack on the Home Office as he revealed that the department still did not know the whereabouts of hundreds of foreign prisoners who should have been considered for deportation.

The home secretary said the department was "not fit for the purpose... averse to a culture of personal responsibility, technologically ill-equipped for an era of mass migration and led by officials that are incapable of producing facts or figures that remain accurate for even a short period of time".

He said he was willing to sack senior civil servants responsible for the foreign prisoners fiasco.

And during a two-and-a-half hour grilling by the home affairs select committee, he said: "I'm almost always defending the indefensible here. I do not think I have been given a fact or a figure in the past fortnight that has not been revised quickly in a very short space of time."

Interviewed in the Mirror, Reid says: "I'll fucking well work 18 hours a day to sort this out... It's my mission to overhaul the whole system and I'll do whatever it takes.

"It can't be done in five minutes or five weeks. But I'll stop at nothing to make sure we get this right. I want to make the public feel safe again and I won't rest until the law and the justice system works for law-abiding people, not criminals."