Rudd is finally forced to quit over scandal
Clamour was growing after Windrush saga
AMBER RUDD last night resigned as Home Secretary as the furore over the Windrush generation scandal reached a critical mass amid claims she misled Parliament over targets for removing illegal migrants.
Ms Rudd telephoned Prime Minister Theresa May to tell her of the decision amid growing opposition demands for her to quit.
A Number 10 spokesman said: “The Prime Minister has tonight accepted the resignation of the Home Secretary.”
Ms Rudd was thought to be preparing to tough it out, insisting she genuinely did not know about the targets when she gave evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Committee last week.
However, having seen mounting evidence in the paperwork about the extent of the knowledge within the Home Office about the targets, she decided that she should take responsibility and go.
Senior Labour MPs had yesterday stepped up calls for Ms Rudd to resign after her former deputy confirmed she did set an “ambition” for the Home Office to increase the number of illegal immigrants it was deporting.
The Home Secretary was due to face Parliament today with opposition MPs accusing her of having misled Parliament after she told a Commons committee last week that the Government did not have targets for removals.
Her position weakened significantly after former Immigration Minister Brandon Lewis disclosed he had weekly discussions with her about how they could get the numbers up when he was in the Home Office.
However, appearing yesterday on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr
Show, Mr Lewis, the current Conservative Party chairman, insisted they had not talked about specific targets.
He was accused by Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott of “hiding behind semantics”, saying his disclosure made it clear she knew what was going on in the department.
“Beneath the spin, he let the truth slip and sealed her fate. Amber Rudd knew of the targets she pretended didn’t exist. It’s time for Rudd to go,” she said.
Ms Rudd’s difficulties began on Wednesday last week when she told the Commons Home Affairs Committee that the Home Office did not have targets for removals.
The following day, however, she returned to the Commons to admit that Immigration Enforcement managers did use “local targets” but she said they were “not published targets against which performance was assessed”.
The pressure then ratcheted up on Friday with the leak of a Home Office memo, which referred to a target of 2,800 enforced returns for 2017-18, and the progress that had been made towards a “10 per cent increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the Home Secretary earlier this year”.
In a series of tweets on Friday evening, Ms Rudd said she had not seen the memo – even though it was copied to her office – but admitted that she should have been aware of the targets.
Mr Lewis said while he had worked with her “on a weekly basis” about efforts to increase the numbers of illegal immigrants being removed, they had never discussed “particular numbers” .
Mr Lewis added: “What the Home Secretary was very aware of was her ambition to see an increase in the number of people who were being here illegally that we were removing, particularly those foreign national offenders. Those internal targets were not in the memo and not figures that she was aware of.”
Labour has said the targets contributed to the Government’s “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants that led to members of the Windrush generation who were entitled to be in the UK being wrongly threatened with deportation.
The cruise ship Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex on June 22, 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands, as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK.
More than 200 MPs have written to Mrs May, in a letter co-ordinated by Labour backbencher David Lammy, urging her to enshrine in law the promises made to those affected – including a commitment to resolve their immigration status as quickly as possible. The Home Office said the commitments could all be carried through under existing immigration laws.
THE FURORE over the scandalous treatment of the Windrush generation shows no sign of abating after a torrid fortnight in which the Government has signally failed to get a grip on a scandal that should never have happened.
Despite the contrition expressed by the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, her resignation last night was inevitable, with relentless calls from Labour for her to go, and unease in Conservative ranks over the way in which the issue continues to be so badly mishandled.
Yet amid the continuing uncertainty over exactly what Ms Rudd knew, and when, about the mistreatment of Commonwealth citizens, certain things are clear.
One is the need to enshrine new protections in law to ensure that such a scandal can never happen again. Another is that an independent inquiry takes place to establish precisely where accountability should sit.
That inquiry must scrutinise both Ms Rudd and her predecessor as Home Secretary, Theresa May, as well as civil servants. Those officials, it has been suggested, failed to adequately brief Ms Rudd on the matter of the removal of citizens classed as illegal immigrants.
Nevertheless, civil servants act at the behest of Ministers, and ultimately accountability must lie with their political masters.
Yet it is not political careers that should be at the forefront of the Government’s efforts to right this wrong, but the people who have suffered by it. Honest, hard-working people, many now in retirement, who after a lifetime of paying their taxes and helping Britain prosper have found themselves deported or refused NHS treatment.
They are the real victims, and their plight risks being overlooked amid the political point-scoring. The Government’s immediate priority should be to ensure that they and their families, who have suffered such heartache over unjust and shameful treatment, receive every possible assistance without delay.