Another shameful Home Office bungle

to Caribbean leaders. The row has completely overshadowed the Commonwealth summit in London this week.

There is growing fury that many of those who came to Britain decades ago as children are now being wrongly identified as illegal immigrants because of a Home Office crackdown. Some have lost their right to work, rent property, receive pensions, access bank accounts or have NHS care. Others have been told they risk detention and deportation. As the scandal widened: Foreign leaders said Mrs May had been unable to tell them how many people had been wrongly deported;

Jamaica’s PM warned ‘hundreds’ of Windrush citizens had been affected;

Officials began trawling through Home Office files to establish whether anyone had been deported by mistake;

A Cabinet minister said: ‘It’s clear it’s been badly handled.’

Under the 1971 Immigration Act, all Commonwealth citizens already living in the UK were given indefinite leave to remain. However, the Home Office did not keep a record of those granted permission to stay or issue any documents confirming it.

Many individuals never applied for passports or became naturalised – meaning it is now difficult for them to prove they are in the UK legally.

Changes to immigration law – introduced under Labour in 200 , then toughened by the Coalition in 2014 – to weed out visa over-stayers and others made documentation necessary to access services.

But last night it emerged that thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival of migrants, including those of the Windrush generation, were destroyed in 2010.

A former Home Office employee told the Guardian the decision was taken despite warnings the cards might prove important in establishing citizenship. The source said: ‘Because it was no longer possible to search in the archive of landing cards, people would be sent a standard letter that would state: “We have searched our records, we can find no trace of you in our files”.’

David Lammy, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on race and community, said: ‘This reveals that the problems being faced by the Windrush generation are not down to one-off bureaucratic errors but as a direct result of systemic incompetence, callousness and cruelty.’

During talks with West Indian leaders at No 10, Mrs May said she was ‘genuinely sorry’. Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness said Mrs May had been unable to say how many people had been deported.

The Home Office said the Border Agency decided to destroy the landing cards on data protection grounds.

A spokesman said the slips did not provide any reliable evidence relating to ongoing residence in the UK or immigration status. Asked if Mrs May had been aware of the disposal when she was home secretary, he responded: ‘My belief, at this moment, is that it was an operational decision taken by the Border Agency.’

Cabinet Office minister David Lidington told Sky News: ‘It’s clear it’s been badly handled. This should not have happened.’

The man given a deportation reprieve yesterday was Mozi Haynes, 35, whose mother Ruth Williams, 74, left the Caribbean after the Second World War. He applied to regularise his status in 201 but was rejected, leaving his mother, who lives in Slough, heartbroken.

He is here illegally because he was born in the West Indies and had been using a succession of student visas.

FIRST the Home Office issues them with impossible demands for paperwork to prove their right to be in Britain, after decades of raising families and paying taxes in this country.

Now it emerges that this self- same department destroyed thousands of landing cards recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival in the UK – the very documents that would have helped prove their entitlement to stay! Indeed, the more we learn about officialdom’s betrayal of the older Caribbean-born residents who answered Britain’s call to help with our post-war reconstruction, the more spectacularly incompetent and insensitive it appears.

Extraordinarily, the 2010 destruction of landing cards took place even after Home Office staff had warned they were a vital resource for case workers examining claimants’ rights to residency.

Meanwhile, Windrush migrants and their children have faced appalling difficulties in gaining work, housing, benefits and NHS care – all for want of records such as decades-old wage slips and utility bills that few families bother to keep.

Truly, their treatment has been a monstrous injustice, which ministers are only beginning to redress.

How depressing, meanwhile – but how predictable – that Left-wingers have been quick to blame this fiasco on an upsurge in hostility to migrants.

Yes, polls show a majority in Britain – including huge numbers from all ethnic backgrounds – believe migration controls are too lax, with net arrivals of 240,000 a year putting immense strain on housing and public services.

But with countless illegal migrants reaching us via the EU’s porous borders, it affronts our sense of fairness to see officials giving a hard time to those like the Windrush generation who have contributed so much to our country for so long.

This is a classic case of bureaucratic bungling by the Home Office – nothing more, nothing less. And as so often, it is thanks only to media campaigning, from every side of the political spectrum (not least this paper), that it has been brought to light and action promised.

Isn’t this something the enemies of Press freedom might do well to bear in mind?