How can a Government so callous be trusted with Brexit?

The Windrush scandal is appalling – but it is typical of the alarming mess in all departments at the moment

The red flags are going up everywhere. Departments are in chaos. Ministers are despairing – and resigning. And the stories keep coming. Our Government hasn’t decided. Ministers are deflecting and shifting blame. And the stories keep coming.

There was Dexter Bristol, here for 51 years, who died a year after being pushed out of his job as a cleaner and forced into penury for lack of a passport. There’s Gretal Gocan, an 81-year-old NHS nurse and granny who made her life here over decades and is now living in Jamaica, in poverty and isolation from her family, after being refused re-entry in 2010. There’s Winston Jones, a former railway worker evicted from his house shortly after having brain surgery and then presented with a £5,000 bill for his care. All of these people came here legally and lived here for decades. They were British, until they weren’t.

In such a situation, “computer says no” simply isn’t an excuse. The Government is showing signs catastrophic myopia, of unacceptable, dangerous incompetence. It is running a chaotic policymaking operation and a malignant bureaucracy. If mistakes of this magnitude can result from one preposterous policy – the net migration target – just imagine what we are in for when the implementation of Brexit moves from the Cabinet table to the docks, tax collectors and immigration enforcement offices. The “Windrush saga”, as the now-former Home Secretary Amber Rudd called it before stuttering and correcting herself to “the Windrush sadness”, is the ugliest tip of a big iceberg.

What makes the scandal so ugly is its inhumanity. People who came here as children and grew up British, who trusted their futures to this country, its government and its courts, have been cast out of the community, detained, threatened, made homeless by being unable to rent, thrown into poverty by losing their right to work and asked to pay for medical treatment despite dutifully paying taxes for decades. Worst of all, when the cases started coming to light, the Government didn’t seem to care. Was this simply a case of inattention, a failure to spot the pattern? Undoubtedly that was a factor, but there’s that other sneaking suspicion too – that the faces didn’t fit, their stories didn’t resonate. Perhaps many of the people affected don’t vote or don’t vote Conservative. Perhaps some bureaucrats or ministers glanced at their pictures and assumed, without thinking, that they were troublemakers or unreliable witnesses.

If so, this would certainly reflect formal Home Office policy. Its system deems any personal testimony inadmissible as evidence, even if it comes from a multitude of law-abiding citizens. Even some official documents – tax returns, pension and medical records – aren’t enough. In one case, highlighted by a forensic Yvette Cooper MP during last week’s Home Affairs Select Committee hearing, a man was asked for four pieces of evidence to account for every single year of his several decades in Britain. He had managed to dig up records for most of the years, but there were a few missing. “Can you provide four pieces of evidence proving where you were in 1989?” Ms Cooper demanded of Ms Rudd, who gulped. Later in the hearing, the frowning Home Secretary declared: “I’m as appalled as everyone else.” As appalled as everyone else? She should be infinitely more appalled.

The Windrush scandal is different from most other government mistakes because the injustice it inflicted is so grave. But in other ways, it is absolutely typical of the Government’s administrative performance. This bodes very ill for Brexit.

This week, the Brexit subcommittee of Cabinet will gather to discuss its position on Britain’s customs arrangements. The Prime Minister is still clinging to an idea dreamt up by her chief Brexit adviser, which would involve Britain introducing and administering a complex double customs system so that it could perform regulatory checks and collect duties on the EU’S behalf, avoiding the need for an EU-UK border. Along with the Government’s abandoned proposal to register EU migrants during the Brexit transition, Mrs May’s “customs partnership” is an idea wildly out of sync with the Government’s ability to implement it. This is part of a pattern.

Last week, for example, the Public Accounts Committee published its assessment of the Brexit preparations done by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). The verdict was not encouraging. BEIS needs to introduce 12 new IT systems to replace shared EU-UK systems, it said, and has not started the procurement process for any of them. It has 68 work streams related to Brexit and still needs to pass 150 statutory instruments. It has still not agreed with the Treasury what extra Brexit-related funding it will receive for the current tax year. Every stone you turn over reveals another problem. The Government has only managed to pass one of 11 pieces of Brexit legislation so far. It’s not communicating internally, such that officials in Geneva, fighting our corner in the WTO, barely seem to get a nod from the agricultural experts in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), despite the intimate connections between their policy areas. A parliamentary report on the Home Office’s delivery of Brexit projects in February, concluded that the department is woefully unready and already has a processing backlog related to the rights of EU citizens. “Mistakes are being made that have life-changing consequences,” it noted. The department was “struggling with a lack of resources, high turnover of staff and unrealistic workloads”. It was unable to learn from its mistakes and was instead restricting legal access for those who need it. “This is an unacceptable way to run an immigration system,” it concluded.

The Government’s ambitions seem to grow greater by the day, even as its incapacity becomes more and more apparent. The Windrush scandal shows how devastating the consequences can be and it should set alarm bells ringing. It’s a result of not thinking through the effects of policy, of ignoring the signs when things go wrong, failing to administer competently and dismissing the plight of the people affected. Brexit is a challenge on an even greater scale and I can’t say I’m filled with confidence. Coming up with the policy aims is the easy part – and look what a mess they’re making of that.