The Home Office demonstrated “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race” and some ministers still “do not accept the full extent of the injustice”, an independent inquiry into the Windrush scandal has found.
In a scathing report on the way British citizens were wrongly deported, dismissed from their jobs and deprived of services such as NHS care, the department is blamed for operating a “culture of disbelief and carelessness”. And the long-awaited investigation concludes that the failings are “consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism”.
The home secretary, Priti Patel, gave an official apology in the House of Commons on Thursday, saying: “There is nothing I can say today that will undo the suffering ... On behalf of this and successive governments I am truly sorry.”
The review, prompted by months of Guardian reporting on the consequences of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy, says the scandal was “foreseeable and avoidable”. It says warning signs of problems caused by the immigration policy – such as “racially insensitive” billboards telling people to “go home or face arrest” – were ignored.
There was a tendency to blame individuals caught up in the immigration regulations, the report says. They found themselves criticised for failing to obtain evidence of their status even though when they tried to do so they were not provided with the right documentation.
The report’s author, Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, said at its launch: “The Windrush generations has been poorly served by this country, a country to which they contributed so much and in which they had every right to make their lives. The many stories of injustice and hardships are heartbreaking, with jobs lost, lives uprooted and untold damage done to so many individuals and families.
“My report sets out how and why this happened and makes recommendations for change to ensure that the injustices this group of people suffered can never happen again. I urge ministers and officials to implement my recommendations in full.”
Williams said she had met about 800 people, and many of the interviews with those affected had been extremely upsetting. She said one man had been in tears when he told her how he had lost his job and his home “in tragic circumstances”. He told her: “I can’t believe I have been treated like this by my beloved England.”
Williams said: “There were a number of examples that were equally as upsetting. There was an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. They couldn’t understand how this had been allowed to happen.”
The 275-pagereport says the roots of the problem can be traced back to racially motivated legislation dating back to the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
One of the report’s recommendations is that ministers on behalf of the Home Office should provide “an unqualified apology to those affected and to the wider Afro-Caribbean community”.
Williams wrote: “While I am unable to make a definitive finding of institutional racism with the department, I have serious concerns that these failings demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation within the department which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.”
She added: “Despite the scandal taking the Home Office by surprise, my report sets out that what happened to those affected was foreseeable and avoidable … Over time those in power forgot about them and their circumstances, which meant that when successive governments wanted to demonstrate that they were being tough on immigration by tightening immigration controls and passing laws creating, then expanding, the hostile environment, this was done with a complete disregard for the Windrush generation.”
She also stated: “Warning signs from inside and outside the Home Office were simply not heeded by officials and ministers. Even when stories of members of the Windrush generation being affected by the immigration controls started to emerge in the media from 2017 onwards, the department was slow to react.”
The review examined 69,000 official documents. It defined the Windrush generation as those who came to the UK between 1948 – when the HMT Empire Windrush, a former liner and troopship, arrived with the first immigrants from the Caribbean invited to help rebuild postwar Britain – to 1973, when legislation ended the automatic “right of abode”.
Williams said many people “felt a strong sense of Britishness and had no reason to doubt their status or that they belonged in the UK. They could not have been expected to know the complexity of the law as it changed around them.”
She said: “The way members of the Windrush generation were treated was wrong. They had the right to be in the UK. The difficulties they have had in demonstrating this cannot be laid at their door. I have been provided with no positive justification for why they were treated in the way they were.”
The report notes that the Home Office does not have a large black and minority-ethnic workforce at senior level. “I think it is unfortunate that most of the policymakers were white and most of the people involved were black,” a senior official is quoted as saying in the report.
Other recommendations in the report include calls for a full review and evaluation of the “hostile environment” policy and the creation of a “migrants commissioner responsible for speaking up for migrants and those affected by the system”.
The report says some individual decision-makers within the Home Office operated an irrational and unreasonable approach towards individuals, requiring multiple documents for proof of presence in the UK for each year of residence. The department has accepted there was no basis for doing this.
Some of these criticisms have been made before. A series of parliamentary reports have already criticised the government and the Home Office for its handling of the scandal. A National Audit Office report in 2018 said the Home Office showed a “lack of urgency” in its approach. Historically, the immigration system was condemned in 2006 as “not fit for purpose” by the then home secretary, John Reid.
Williams was commissioned in June 2018 to write the Windrush Lessons Learned review by Sajid Javid, then home secretary, after the scandal came to public attention following months of coverage in the Guardian.
It had become clear that the Home Office had wrongly designated thousands of legal UK residents as being in the country illegally. Most had moved to the UK as children in the 1950s and 1960s with their parents, many of whom had been recruited to take up jobs in the health service and with London transport. People who had never naturalised or applied for a UK passport found themselves branded as immigration offenders in later life.
Some were wrongly deported to countries they had left as children half a century earlier, and others were mistakenly detained in immigration detention centres. Many were sacked by employers who were worried that they faced £20,000 fines for hiring people without the correct documentation. Some were then denied benefits, leaving them destitute. Many were made homeless, denied NHS treatment and prevented from travelling.
The scandal led to the resignation in April 2018 of the then home secretary, Amber Rudd, and put Theresa May’s drive to create a “really hostile environment for illegal migration” under the spotlight.
In the past two years the government’s Windrush taskforce, set up to assist those affected, has given documentation to more than 8,000 people confirming that they have the right to remain in the UK.
A compensation scheme was launched last April with an estimated budget of between £200m and £570m. The slowness and complexity of the scheme has been widely criticised and by February only £62,198 of compensation had been paid out, shared between 36 people.
source https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/19/windrush-report-condemns-home-office-ignorance-and-thoughtlessness
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