Home Office flayed for ‘lack of urgency’ in Windrush scandal

Large numbers of people of non-Caribbean heritage may have been badly affected by the Windrush scandal but the Home Office has shown a “lack of curiosity” about the adverse impact of its legislation on them, according to a critical report by the National Audit Office.

The report, titled Handling of the Windrush Situation, found the Home Office was failing in its duty “to be proactive in identifying people affected”.

“The department is taking steps to put things right for the Caribbean community, but it has shown a surprising lack of urgency to identify other groups that may have been affected,” said Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO.

The NAO’s conclusions in the report are comprehensively negative. It criticises the Home Office for poor-quality data that wrongly classified people as illegal immigrants, the risky use of deportation targets, poor value for money offered by hostile environment policies, failure to respond to numerous warnings that the policies would hurt people living in the UK legally, and its refusal to widen the scope of its search for victims of its policies.

Targets for removing illegal immigrants, in place since 2004, may have increased the likelihood that people living legitimately in the UK were deported in error, the study found. In 2017-18 immigration enforcement expected to achieve 12,800 enforced removals – around 230 to 250 a week. “These targets would have influenced how enforcement staff carried out their work, in a way that may have increased the risk of wrongful removals,” the NAO said.

In creating a policy that had few checks and balances, the Home Office did not “adequately prioritise the protection of those who suffered distress and damage through being wrongly penalised, and to whom they owed a duty of care. Instead it operated a target-driven environment for its enforcement teams,” the report states.

The Home Office has narrowly focused on analysing the detention and deportation files of 11,800 people from 12 Caribbean countries to calculate how many involved people born before 1973, who might therefore have been granted indefinite leave to remain under immigration legislation implemented that year.

But there are no plans to review the detention and deportation files of around 160,000 Commonwealth nationals from non-Caribbean countries to see who may also have been wrongfully detained or removed. The Home Office has said it would be disproportionate to undertake this work, but the National Audit Office said it found that approach “surprising” given there was an “onus on the department to use its own data to identify people affected”.

The Home Office still does not know how many members of the Windrush generation have been wrongly affected. Officials are unlikely ever to establish how many Windrush people were incorrectly denied a job or a home to rent, because there is no data to record those decisions, the report indicates.