Home Office must abandon ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies, say MPS

A committee of MPS has demanded “root and branch reform” of the Home Office’s culture, policies and approach to immigration following the Windrush scandal.

A report by the Commons home affairs select committee blamed the “appalling” treatment of long-standing UK residents of Caribbean heritage on political decisions which created a “hostile environment”, and warned that, unless lessons are learnt, the Home Office may repeat the same mistakes with the three million EU nationals in the UK after Brexit.

Some 8,000 people who arrived in the UK as long ago as the 1950s have now contacted the Windrush task force set up by the Home Office, with more than 2,000 receiving documents confirming their right to stay in Britain.

But the committee said it was “unacceptable” that the government was still unable to say how many people were unlawfully detained, ordered to report to Home Office centres, lost their jobs or were denied access to healthcare or other services.

Processes were put in place which appeared designed to set people up to fail, independent checks and balances were removed and there were repeated failures in oversight mechanisms at senior levels of the Home Office, the cross-party committee said. Enforcement targets for immigration officers may have led removal teams to focus on people like the Windrush generation because they were “easier to detain and remove”.

The report called for an immediate re-evaluation of the “hostile environment”, which tries to deter illegal migrants by requiring people to prove their right to be in the UK in order to access work, healthcare and housing.

Other recommendations included an overhaul of the casework culture at UK Visas and Immigration, the restoration of immigration appeals and legal aid and the ditching of the government’s flagship goal to cut net migration below 100,000 a year.

SNP MP Stuart Mcdonald, who sits on the committee, said the report underlined his party’s case for immigration powers to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

“This report lays bare how a series of toxic Home Office policies – all championed by Theresa May – were directly responsible for the outrageous treatment faced by the Windrush generation,” he said. “It’s time for the Home Office to completely rethink its approach to immigration, and to ditch the nasty culture and practices that have dogged the department for decades.”