Windrush generation get apology over treatment

Immigration: ‘Appalling’ government response to people who came to UK in 40s

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has offered an apology in the Commons to members of the so-called Windrush generation who have been subjected to what she described as “appalling” treatment by the government.

Ms Rudd announced the creation of a new taskforce in the Home Office to speed up the regularisation of the immigration status of people who arrived in the UK as long ago as the 1940s.

Her announcement came after Downing Street said

“No one with the right to be here will be made to leave”

Prime Minister Theresa May wanted to ensure that “no one with the right to be here will be made to leave”.

And Communities Secretary Sajid Javid said he was “deeply concerned” at challenges to the immigration status of people who were “long-standing pillars of our community”.

Immigration minister Caroline Nokes appeared to suggest that some individuals may already have been deported in error.

But Ms Rudd told the House of Commons she was not aware of “any specific cases” and would raise the matter with high commissioners at a meeting this week.

Answering an urgent question from Labour’s David Lammy, the home secretary told MPs: “I am concerned that the Home Office has become too concerned with policy and strategy, and sometimes loses sight of the individual.

“This is about individuals, and we have seen the individual stories, and they have been, some of them, terrible to hear, and that is why I have acted.”

Mrs May is to meet her counterparts from Caribbean states in the margins of the Commonwealth summit in London today amid growing anger about individuals facing the threat of deportation and being denied access to healthcare due to UK paperwork issues.

Ms Rudd was challenged in the Commons over an interview in which Ms Nokes appeared to con- firm that some Windrush migrants had been wrongly deported.

“There have been some horrendous situations which as a minister have appalled me,” Ms Nokes told ITV News in response to a question about deportations.

Announcing the new taskforce, Ms Rudd said: “I do not want any of the Commonwealth citizens who are here legally to be impacted in the way they have.

“Frankly, some of the ways they have been treated has been wrong, has been appalling and I am sorry.”

Ms Rudd said fees for sorting out the paperwork of those affected would be waived so they can have their status confirmed free of charge.

NEW WORLD: Jamaican immigrants being welcomed by RAF officials after the ex-troopship HMT ‘Empire Windrush’ landed them at Tilbury