Home Office ‘complacent’ over scandal
THE HOME Office has been accused of shirking its responsibility to put right the wrongs suffered by victims of the Windrush scandal.
A scathing Commons report claimed the department has been complacent in its response and failed to “take ownership” for resolving issues caused by its own mistakes.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) also criticised the decision to exclude up to 160,000 non-Caribbean Commonwealth cases from a review carried out to identify how many people may have been affected.
PAC chairwoman Meg Hillier said: “The human consequences of this appalling scandal are tragic and well-documented.
“But there is a long way to go before the Home Office can credibly claim to have put things right.
“It is deeply regrettable that a scandal of this magnitude, on the back of repeated and unheeded warnings, does not appear to have fully shaken the Home Office out of its complacency about its systemic and cultural problems.”
Ministers faced a backlash over the treatment of the Windrush Generation – named after a ship that brought migrants to Britain from the Caribbean in 1948.
Commonwealth citizens who arrived before 1973 were automatically granted indefinite leave to remain but many were not issued with any documents confirming their status. An outcry erupted after it emerged that long-term UK residents had been denied access to services, held in detention or removed despite living in the country for decades.
The PAC said the scandal exposed a lack of concern about the “real-world impact” of immigration policies, compounded by a “systemic failure” to keep accurate records, meaning British citizens or people with leave to remain in the UK did not have the paperwork to prove it.
The report said: “The Home Office was aware of this through case inquiries from citizens and their MPs.
“Yet, the department failed in its duty to protect the rights of people to live, work and access services and benefits in the UK when designing and implementing its immigration policies.”
Instead of “taking ownership” for resolving individual cases, the Home Office is interpreting its role narrowly and using other departments’ remits as a “poor excuse for inaction”, the PAC claimed.
In response, the Government set up a dedicated taskforce to help those affected obtain paperwork confirming their right to be in the country. The Home Office has apologised over 18 cases in which it considers it is most likely to have acted wrongfully. A Home Office spokeswoman said: “The Home Secretary and Immigration Minister have been resolute in their determination to right the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation and have commissioned a lessons learned review with independent oversight and scrutiny to establish what went wrong and prevent it happening again.”