Windrush Compensation Scheme

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, it hardly seems possible that this issue could have assumed greater significance now than when it first came to public attention in 2017, but this pandemic has highlighted the extraordinary contribution of the Windrush generation and their descendants to the UK and to vital public services such as health, social care and transport, making even more shameful the treatment they received as a result of the Windrush scandal. Some of them have answered government’s call and come out of retirement to help this country through our current crisis, echoing their response in 1948 when they boarded “Empire Windrush” to help rebuild a nation devastated by war.

This scheme is an important step towards redressing the considerable wrongs visited on those original pioneers and on other Commonwealth citizens, injustices powerfully articulated by the noble Baronesses, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon and Lady Benjamin. I want to address three points.

The first is on the importance of getting implementation right. I welcome the establishment of the cross-government working group and the £500,000 community fund for grassroots organisations to promote and advise. However, as I noted at Second Reading, grassroots organisations are effective because they are community-specific and, given the range of communities and locations involved, this funding may not be sufficient.

Concerns have also been raised about the complexity of the process and whether this contributes to the small number of applications having been received so far: around 1,000, despite the Home Office estimating that some 15,000 people could be eligible. Lack of access to legal aid may be a factor, and so might lack of trust. Is the Minister confident that the Home Office can earn the confidence of communities which have every reason to be nervous of engaging with it?

Secondly, I want to stress the importance of adopting the lessons of Wendy Williams’s review more widely across government. As she says, we must

“go further to right the wrongs”.

With that in mind, I urge the Government to address the growing risk that the EU settlement scheme becomes what some charities are already calling “this generation’s Windrush”. Does the Minister share my concerns that we risk creating once again a tier of second-class citizens and that the lessons of Windrush have not been learned?

Finally, we should not imagine that this scheme on its own will end the discrimination against BAME communities so clearly evident in relative rates of poverty, access to education, housing and employment and in social and health-related inequalities. This has been highlighted in the gravest of ways in the disproportionate numbers of BAME patients and NHS staff critically ill with, and dying from, Covid-19.

This scheme is welcome, but we would most effectively honour the legacy of the Windrush generation by a wholehearted commitment to eradicating, once and for all, the inequality, discrimination and denial of rights that gave rise to and perpetrated one of the most shameful episodes in our national life.