A parliamentary report has concluded that the Home Office is making life-changing decisions based on incorrect data and, despite the Windrush scandal, remains complacent about its systemic and cultural problems.
According to the public accounts committee report, the department’s failure to monitor the impact of hostile policies on vulnerable members of society represented a dereliction of duty and showed a “lack of care” in ignoring repeated warnings that its policies were causing acute problems for older, undocumented long-term UK residents. The report is the fourth highly-critical investigation into the Home Office’s Windrush failures, following earlier equally-damning publications by the home affairs select committee, the joint committee on human rights and the National Audit Office.
Ten months after the government first apologised for the Windrush scandal, officials continued to display a lack of urgency in their response to the crisis, the report added. It took the Home Office eight months to set up an urgent hardship fund and, by the end of December, only one person had received a payment.
Officials are still unable to say when a full compensation scheme will be launched and meanwhile, many of those affected are in dire financial circumstances caused by periods of enforced unemployment, the removal of unemployment benefits, and debts run up trying to pay legal bills and Home Office fees. Some have been rendered homeless. The Home Office told the public accounts committee that it “cannot and will not announce” the compensation scheme until it is able to fund it.
Systemic failure
The report also found that the Home Office displayed a lack of concern for the impact of its immigration policies on undocumented people. This was compounded by a systemic failure by the department to keep accurate records, leaving many persons struggling to prove their right to be in the UK. There was also evidence that the Home Office was doing the bare minimum to identify and support everyone affected by the Windrush scandal and in particular greater attention should be given to large numbers of non-Caribbean victims from countries such as Nigeria.
Those from non-Caribbean countries were struggling to get help from the Windrush scheme because of a lack of awareness that it was relevant to them. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants told the committee that it knew of cases where people had assumed they could not be part of the Windrush generation because they were not from the Caribbean, or because they had not arrived in the UK in 1948 on the Empire Windrush itself. Officials have been complacent about promoting the existence of the Windrush scheme, which works to help affected people get their papers, particularly internationally.
A lack of accountability and responsibility
Although home secretary Sajid Javid announced in October that he wanted to review the structures of the immigration system to ensure that it operates in a fair and humane way, immigration lawyers and campaigners say there has been no discernible change in the department’s ethos. Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee has said the Home Office has failed to take ownership of the problems it created, including the urgent housing needs of many members of the Windrush generation and that the scandal did not appear to have shaken the Home Office out of its complacency about its systemic and cultural problems.
The report said it was vital that the Home Office acts on the lessons of the Windrush scandal to ensure that EU citizens are easily able to regularise their status to avoid a similar, but much larger, problem when around 3.5 million EU nationals begin to apply for settled status in the UK.
In response, it was noted that the home secretary and immigration minister have been resolute in their determination to right the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation and have commissioned a ‘lessons learned’ review with independent oversight and scrutiny to establish what went wrong and prevent it happening again. Further, through the Windrush scheme 3,400 people have obtained British citizenship. In addition, the taskforce has a dedicated vulnerable persons’ team, which has provided support to over 600 people including referrals to the Department for Work and Pensions for benefit claims and advice and support on housing.
