There’s justice to a ‘hostile environment’

Home Office incompetence on Windrush should not lead us to abandon a vital tool against illegal migrants

The Home Office, like any organisation, makes mistakes. Home Office mistakes, however, can be existential for the people involved. It evidently made a big mistake in being unaware of the “Windrush anomaly” – children of first-wave Caribbean immigrants who had been granted permanent residence in 1971 but in many cases had never acquired proper documentation.

As the Government, rightly, tries to bear down on the corrosive, anti-social phenomenon of illegal immigration, many of those British Caribbeans got caught up in the “hostile environment” (better name, please) campaign against illegals and found themselves unable to prove their right to be here. The problem has now been acknowledged, but overnight much of the work that a Tory government has been doing to improve its standing with black Britons – the Race Disparity Audit, greater sensitivity on stop and search – has been jeopardised.

The oversight was probably down to an absence of institutional memory combined with a lack of people with relevant life experience at the top of the department. It seemed obvious that something was afoot when the first stories began to emerge at the end of last year, and to many black Britons it will confirm, rightly or wrongly, a sense of second-class citizenship.

But we should recall why the hostile environment was introduced and why it should not suffer collateral damage from this example of Whitehall’s tin ear.

Britain has an illegal immigration problem. It has been overshadowed by arguments about historically high levels of legal immigration. But there are probably close to 1 million people living in the UK illegally and they are being added to at the rate of 70,000 or 80,000 a year – a combination of visa over-stayers (40,000 to 50,000), people smuggled in on lorries (10,000) and people refused asylum who nevertheless stay (about 20,000).

They usually live in a limbo world, undermining social trust and decent standards in the job market, and are often themselves victims of exploitation. This is where the PM’S interest in a secure border intersects with her modern slavery agenda.

Recently, I spent a day with a Home Office enforcement team who, working from tip-offs from the public, raided shops and restaurants in the Croydon area to apprehend illegal immigrants. The dozen team members – half white and half black and Asian – rightly believe themselves to be performing an important public service. One of the team pointed out to me that “many migration offenders are also victims”.

But it is frustrating work because of the obstacles to removals. Although enforcement costs £500 million a year and employs 5,000, only about 12,000 people were removed against their will last year and half were criminals. Another 18,000 people left voluntarily but that is probably less than half the number that is being added to the illegal total each year.

Why is it so hard to remove people? Partly because human rights law gives people an incentive to spin out the asylum process in the hope that they can then qualify under the right to family life. There is now only one right of asylum appeal but many claimants will then put in for judicial review. Other problems include too few detention centres and non-cooperation of countries of origin.

It is partly for this reason that the Government introduced the hostile environment in 2014 as an alternative “nudge” policy to promote voluntary departure – requiring people to prove their status to open a bank account, rent a flat, use the NHS and so on.

Some of this goes against the grain for a country that has, historically, had a low level of personal documentation and many public-sector professionals do not like being turned into “border guards”. But if we want to have a high number of people flowing across our borders, and also want to control that flow, and access to jobs and public services, the border must come inland.

One lesson of the Windrush anomaly is that we need a swifter, more sensitive appeal process in the Home Office. Another lesson is that we need to reopen the debate about ID cards or digital citizen identity so that people who are legally here, including three million EU citizens, do not have to go on proving it.