Priti’s apology for Windrush scandal

Report damns ‘elements of racism’ at Home Office

HOME Secretary Priti Patel was forced to apologise yesterday after a major report concluded ‘elements of institutional racism’ were behind the Windrush scandal.

An official inquiry ripped into the Home Office over ‘appalling’ failures that led to legal British residents being deported and made destitute.

Report author Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, rejected civil servants’ claims that the Windrush scandal had been impossible to predict.

Miss Patel told MPs: ‘There is nothing I can say which will undo the pain, the suffering and the misery inflicted on the Windrush generation. What I can do is say that, on behalf of this and successive governments, I am truly sorry.’ Miss Williams did not brand the Home Office ‘institutionally racist’, as the Metropolitan Police was described over its probe into the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

She said that to be ‘institutionally racist’ the Home Office would have to have been guilty of six different racist elements set out by the official inquiry into the Lawrence case. She cleared it of two.

‘I found evidence of some, but not all, of these features to be present in Windrush,’ her 270-page report said.

The report singled out for criticism the Government’s ‘hostile-environment’ policy, which was brought in by the then home secretary, Theresa May, in 2012.

It was meant to crack down on illegal migrants but caused ‘profound’ problems for legal migrants from the Windrush generation, who arrived in Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The report found that Mrs May’s policy was based on ‘ incorrect assumptions’ about migrants already legally living here and ‘warning signs... were not heeded’.

Miss Williams said the Home Office showed ‘insti

‘I am truly sorry’

tutional ignorance and thoughtlessness’ towards race and the history of the Windrush generation.

The report made 30 recommendations including that ministers should make an ‘unqualified apology to those affected and the wider black African-Caribbean community as soon as possible’.

It also said the Home Office should appoint a Migrants Commissioner.

Mrs May endorsed Miss Patel’s apology, and told MPs: ‘This generation came here, they were British, they were here legally, they worked to build our country and they should not have been treated in this way.’

Labour MP David Lammy said the report showed the Home Office needed to be rebuilt ‘brick by brick’.