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, a damning parliamentary report has concluded.
The department’s failure to monitor the impact of hostile environment policies on vulnerable members of society represented a dereliction of duty, said the public accounts committee report. The department showed a “lack of care” in ignoring repeated warnings that its policies were causing acute problems for older long-term UK residents without documents.
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 compensation scheme will be launched; 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 remain homeless.
The report also found that:
The Home Office displayed a lack of concern for the impacts of its immigration policies on people without documents, compounding this with a systemic failure to keep accurate records, leaving many people who are British citizens struggling to prove their right to be in the UK.
There were numerous examples of the department doing “as little, rather than as much, as possible to find and help people affected by its actions”.
The Home Office was failing in its duty of care to identify and support everyone affected by the Windrush scandal. Greater attention should be given to large numbers of non-Caribbean victims.
Officials have been “woefully complacent” in promoting the existence of the Windrush scheme, which works to help affected people get their papers, particularly internationally.
British ethnic minorities remained vulnerable to being discriminated against by hostile environment policies that require landlords and employers to check documentation.
The Windrush failures had “major implications for the future as the UK prepares to leave the EU”.
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. It comes just a few days after a high court judge ruled that the government’s Right to Rent scheme, which requires private landlords to check the immigration status of tenants, caused racial discrimination against ethnic minorities.
“The human consequences of this appalling scandal are tragic and well documented. But there is a long way to go before the Home Office can credibly claim to have put things right,” Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, said.
“It is simply not taking ownership of the problems it created, not least the urgent housing needs of many members of the Windrush generation. It is deeply regrettable that a scandal of this magnitude, on the back of repeated and unheeded warnings, does not appear to have fully shaken the Home Office out of its complacency about its systemic and cultural problems.”
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.
The report said it was vital that the Home Office “acts on the lessons of Windrush” to ensure that EU citizens are easily able to regularise their status to avoid a similar, but much larger, scandal when around 3.5 million EU nationals begin to apply for settled status in the UK.
There was particular concern that people from non-Caribbean countries, such as Nigeria, were struggling to get help from the Windrush scheme because of a lack of awareness that it was relevant to their difficulties. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) told the committee that it knew of cases where people had assumed they could not be part of the Windrush generation because they were the “wrong nationality”, or because they did not arrive in the UK in 1948 on the Empire Windrush itself.
Judy Griffith, 64, who flew from Barbados when she was nine, was told by a Jobcentre employee that she was an illegal immigrant, despite having been in the UK for 52 years, working at times for the Metropolitan police and Camden council. She is still getting eviction notices on her flat because she remains in arrears as a result of the time she was unable to work and denied benefits.
“They have been harassing me and it has affected my health. People are suffering,” she said. She claimed to be in urgent need of compensation payments so she could pay back loans taken out when she was struggling to get documents, but added she was tired of having to campaign for her problems to be addressed. “Why are we being forced to fight for our rights? They did something wrong and they should make it right.”
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.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “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.
“The taskforce has helped thousands of people of different nationalities prove their status in the UK. 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.”
It said the home secretary was still considering what form a review of the immigration system would take, and wanted to take on board the findings of the lessons learned review, expected to be published later this year.
Chai Patel, legal policy director for the JCWI, said the report echoed last week’s high court ruling that the government is causing racism through landlord immigration checks.
“Yet the immigration minister confirmed they will appeal the ruling, wasting yet more public money, this time to argue that it is legal for the government to cause racial discrimination,” he said.
“This is an insult to all those who have been detained, deported and denied their rights because of Theresa May’s obsession with immigration. The hostile environment must go.”