The Windrush scandal was a British political scandal that began in 2018 concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries, as members of the "Windrush generation" (so named after the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of West Indian migrants to the UK in 1948).
As well as those who were deported, an unknown number were detained, lost their jobs or homes, or were denied benefits or medical care to which they were entitled. A number of long-term UK residents were refused re-entry to the UK; a larger number were threatened with immediate deportation by the Home Office. Linked by commentators to the "hostile environment policy" instituted by Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary, the scandal led to the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary in April 2018 and the appointment of Sajid Javid as her successor. The scandal also prompted a wider debate about British immigration policy and Home Office practice.
The March 2020 independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review, conducted by the inspector of constabulary Wendy Williams, concluded that the Home Office had shown "ignorance and thoughtlessness" and that what had happened had been "foreseeable and avoidable". It further found that immigration regulations were tightened "with complete disregard for the Windrush generation" and that officials had made "irrational" demands for multiple documents to establish residency rights.
Despite a compensation scheme being announced in December 2018, by November 2021, only an estimated 5 per cent of victims had received any compensation and 23 of those eligible had died before receiving payments. Three separate Parliamentary committees had issued reports during 2021 criticising Home Office slowness and ineffectiveness in providing redress to victims and calling for the scheme to be taken out of the hands of the Home Office.
Background
The British Nationality Act 1948 gave Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC) status and the consequent right of settlement in the UK to everyone who was at that time a British subject by virtue of having been born in a British colony.National Archives. Citizenship 1906–2003. Retrieved 6 November 2006 The act and encouragement from British government campaigns in Caribbean countries led to a wave of immigration. Between 1948 and 1970, nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain, which in 1948 faced severe labour shortages in the wake of the Second World War. Those who came to the UK around this time were later referred to as "the Windrush generation". Working age adults and many children travelled from the Caribbean to join parents or grandparents in the UK or travelled with their parents without their own passports.
Having a legal right to come to the UK, they neither needed nor were given any documents upon entry to the UK, nor following changes in immigration laws in the early 1970s. Many worked or attended schools in the UK without any official documentary record of their having done so, other than the same records as any UK-born citizen.
Many of the countries from which the migrants had come became independent of the UK after 1948, thereby making those migrants citizens of the countries they formerly resided in. Legislative measures in the 1960s and early 1970s limited the rights of citizens of these former colonies, now members of the Commonwealth, to come to or work in the UK. Anyone who had arrived in the UK from a Commonwealth country before 1973 was granted an automatic right permanently to remain, unless they left the UK for more than two years. Since the right was automatic, many people in this category were never given, or asked to provide, documentary evidence of their right to remain at the time or over the next forty years, during which many continued to live and work in the UK, believing themselves to be British.
The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 specifically protected long-standing residents of the UK from Commonwealth countries from enforced removal. This provision was not transferred to 2014 immigration legislation because Commonwealth citizens living in the UK before 1 January 1973 were "adequately protected from removal", according to a Home Office spokesperson.
Hostile environment policy
The hostile environment policy, which came into effect in October 2012, comprises administrative and legislative measures to make staying in the United Kingdom as difficult as possible for people without leave to remain in the hope that they may "voluntarily leave". In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May said the aim was to create "a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". The policy was widely seen as part of a strategy of reducing UK immigration to the levels promised in the 2010 Conservative Party Election Manifesto. It introduced measures including a legal requirement for landlords, employers, the NHS, charities, community interest companies and banks to carry out ID checks and to refuse services to individuals unable to prove legal residence in the UK. Landlords, employers and others are liable to fines of up to £10,000 if they fail to comply with these measures.
The policy led to a more complicated application process for "leave to remain" and encouraged voluntary deportation. The policy coincided with sharp increases in Home Office fees for processing leave to remain, naturalisation and registration of citizenship applications. The BBC reported that the Home Office had made a profit of more than £800 million from nationality services between 2011 and 2017.
The term "hostile environment" had first been used under the Brown Government. On 25 April 2018, in answer to questions in Parliament during the Windrush scandal, then Prime Minister Theresa May said the hostile-environment policy would remain government policy.
In June 2020, Britain's human rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), launched a legal action to review the "hostile environment" immigration policy and to assess whether the Home Office had complied with its equality duties (as outlined in the Equality Act 2010). The EHRC planned to develop recommendations by September 2020. In November 2020, the EHRC said that the Home Office had broken the law by failing to obey public-sector equality duties by not considering how its policies affected black members of the Windrush generation.
In August 2023, May stated in her memoirs that she did regret using the term 'hostile environment' but laid the blame for the Windrush scandal itself on the failure of "successive governments".
Initial warnings The Home Office received warnings from 2013 onwards that many Windrush generation residents were being treated as illegal immigrants and that older Caribbean-born people were being targeted. The Refugee and Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton said their caseworkers were seeing hundreds of people receiving letters from Capita, the Home Office's contractor, telling them that they had no right to be in the UK, some of whom were told to arrange to leave the UK at once. Roughly half the letters went to people who already had leave to remain or were in the process of formalising their immigration status. Caseworkers had warned the Home Office directly and also through local MPs of these cases since 2013. People considered illegal were sometimes losing their jobs or homes as a consequence of having benefits cut off and some had been refused medical care under the National Health Service, some placed in detention centres as preparation for their deportation, some deported or refused the right to return to the UK from abroad.
In 2013 Caribbean leaders had put the deportations on the agenda at the Commonwealth meeting in Sri Lanka and in April 2016 Caribbean governments told Philip Hammond, the UK Foreign Secretary, that people who had spent most of their lives in the UK were facing deportation and their concerns were passed on at the time to the Home Office. Shortly before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in April 2018, twelve Caribbean countries made a formal request for a meeting with the British Prime Minister to discuss the issue, which was rejected by Downing Street.
Home Affairs Select Committee report In January 2018, the Home Affairs Select Committee issued a report that said the hostile environment policies were "unclear" and had seen too many people threatened with deportation based on "inaccurate and untested" information. The report warned that the errors being made, in one instance 10 per cent, threatened to undermine the "credibility of the system". A major concern voiced in the report was that the Home Office did not have means to evaluate the effectiveness of its hostile environment provisions and commented that there had been a "failure" to understand the effects of the policy. The report also noted that a shortage of accurate data about the scale of illegal immigration had allowed public anxiety about the issue to "grow unchecked", which, the report said, showed government "indifference" towards an issue of "high public interest".
A month before the report was published, more than 60 MPs, academics and campaign groups wrote an open letter to Amber Rudd urging the Government to halt the "inhumane" policy, citing the Home Office's "poor track record" of dealing with complaints and appeals in a timely manner.
Press reports From November 2017, newspapers reported that the British government had threatened to deport people from Commonwealth territories who had arrived in the UK before 1973 if they could not prove their right to remain in the UK. Although they were primarily identified as the "Windrush generation" and mainly from the Caribbean, it was estimated in April 2018 on figures provided by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford that up to 57,000 Commonwealth migrants could be affected, of whom 15,000 were from Jamaica. In addition to those from the Caribbean, cases of people affected who had been born in Kenya, Cyprus, Canada and Sierra Leone were identified in the press.
The press coverage accused Home Office agencies of operating a "guilty until proven innocent" and "deport first, appeal later" regime; of targeting the weakest groups, particularly those from the Caribbean; of inhumanely applying regulations by cutting off access to jobs, services and bank accounts while cases were still being investigated; of losing large numbers of original documents that proved right to remain; of making unreasonable demands for documentary proof – in some instances, elderly people had been asked for four documents for each year they had lived in the UK; and of leaving people stranded outside the UK because of British administrative errors or intransigence and denial of medical treatment. Other cases covered in the press involved adults born in the UK, whose parents were "Windrush" immigrants and who had been threatened with deportation and had their rights removed, because they were unable to prove that their parents were legally in the UK at the time of their birth.
The Home Office and British government were further accused of having known about the negative impacts that the "hostile environment policy" was having on Windrush immigrants since as early as 2013 and of having done nothing to remedy them.