Watchdog reviews Home Office ‘hostile environment’ policy

The official human rights watchdog is launching legal action to review the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy which led to the Windrush scandal.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is using its statutory powers to assess whether the Home Office complied with its public-sector equality duty.

The hostile environment strategy was devised under Theresa May when she was home secretary in the coalition government to deter illegal immigration and continued under successor Amber Rudd.

It resulted in thousands of Commonwealth immigrants from the so-called Windrush generation – who came to Britain in the decades after 1945 – being wrongly denied rights, losing jobs, and in some cases being deported to places they barely knew.

Ms Rudd was forced to resign in April 2018 after the scandal came to light after admitting that she had misled MPS.

The EHRC action follows a damning “lessons learned” review by Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, published in March, which found the Home Office had shown “ignorance and thoughtlessness” in dealing with race issues.

The EHRC said that its assessment – which will draw on the work of the Williams review – would in particular look at how the Home Office “understood, monitored and reviewed the impact of placing increasingly onerous documentation requirements” on the Windrush generation.

The EHRC said its assessment – under section 31 of the Equality Act 2006 – would be completed by September.