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The Windrush scandal remains “a stain on British society”, Floella Benjamin has said at an emotional House of Lords event where campaigners called for the government to commission a statutory inquiry into continuing Home Office errors.
Despite seven years of promises from ministers to rectify the mistakes caused by the Home Office scandal, Lady Benjamin said the injustices remained unresolved, with many of those affected still caught up in an ongoing nightmare.
Several people gave powerful testimonies describing how their lives had been destroyed by Home Office errors that led to thousands of people from the Caribbean and Commonwealth being wrongly classified as illegal immigrants. Some participants in the event said they were exposed to a second wave of traumatising treatment when their claims for compensation were rejected by Home Office employees.
Campaigners highlighted the relative speed with which compensation had been paid out to victims of the Post Office scandal, and they called for urgent reform of the Windrush redress scheme. They expressed mounting frustration at the refusal by successive governments to launch a formal Hillsborough-style inquiry into the causes of the Home scandal.
In the absence of official action, campaigners said they planned to launch a “people’s inquiry” early next year, arguing that the need to examine the Home Office’s culture and ongoing failures of the compensation scheme had become so pressing that those affected could not wait for a formal inquiry.
The architect of the Windrush compensation scheme in 2018, Martin Forde, announced he was ready to help campaigners suggest a radical redesign of the way compensation payments are made, noting that he felt officials had displayed a “woeful lack of commitment” to his scheme.
“We have been too passive for too long,” he said, adding that it was time to “shame and embarrass” the Home Office into paying those affected the compensation they are owed.
Clive Foster, the Windrush commissioner, who started work earlier this year, said that in the first 100 days in his role he had met more than 700 people affected, in church halls and community centres across the UK, to listen to their experiences.
“I’ve also had the opportunity to address thousands of Home Office staff directly with a simple message: compassion and humanity must guide every policy and casework decision,” he said.
“Seven years on, sadly the Home Office Windrush scandal is not in the rear-view mirror. Every conversation I’ve had since taking up this role reinforces the need for urgency. Survivors shouldn’t have to be retraumatised by the very process that’s there to serve them justice.”
One Londoner described a 13-year period spent battling to persuade the Home Office that it had wrongly classified him as an illegal immigrant. He had moved from Nigeria as a young child in 1978, attended primary school, boarding school, got an undergraduate degree and an MBA in the UK and launched a successful career as a software engineer before being told he faced deportation.
“It’s so difficult living when you’re trying to tell the truth and nobody believes you,” he said, asking for his name not to be published.
Hetticia McIntosh travelled from Barbados as a young child to join her mother in the UK, who working here as a nurse, having been hired as part of Enoch Powell’s NHS recruitment drive. She was serving in the British army in the 1970s when her UK status was revoked because of a Home Office mistake. Her husband, Vanderbilt McIntosh, who had made a similar journey, also lost his UK status as a result of similar errors.
Despite both having attended school in the UK, worked in Britain for years and brought up three children here, they were classified as immigration offenders and obliged to relocate to St Lucia, away from their parents and siblings in the UK, and were stuck there for decades.
“We lived here, we grew here, we worked here. We got no answers,” she said. She and her husband were refused compensation three times between 2021 and this year. She said there was “no humanity in the process”. “We need systemic change,” she said, calling for legal aid to be allocated to applicants.
The Home Office minister David Hanson was unable to attend the meeting but sent a letter stating: “The government is determined that justice is delivered for the Windrush generation and their defendants.” He said the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was committed to embedding “cultural change within the Home Office”.
