Windrush Compensation Scheme

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, in 2017 I was honoured to be asked by the Government to chair the Windrush Commemoration Committee, to create a Windrush monument in recognition of the contribution that Caribbean people have made to Britain. In 2022, the monument will be erected at Waterloo station, where thousands of West Indians like myself arrived in Britain before dispersing across the whole of the UK. However, the committee is finding it hard to make this a joyful experience, because of the Windrush scandal and the shame hanging over the country. This needs to be solved urgently.

Like many West Indians, I have dedicated my life to serving this country. We were brought up in the Caribbean to believe that we were British—part of the motherland—and taught at school to celebrate British history. In 1960, I was one of the lucky children who arrived in Britain with my own passport, but the Windrush scandal has shown that it could have been so different for me had I not had one.

Life during those early years in Britain was harsh, brutal and cruel. My whole family, all eight of us, lived in one room, as there was little accommodation available for Caribbean people. I saw those signs saying, “no Irish, no dogs, no coloureds”. I had people spit at me. Grown men lifted my skirt and said, “Where’s your tail, monkey?” I was not served in shops; I was even turned away from the church. These were the indignities that we had to suffer, with resilience and determination. We were made to feel as though we did not belong. We felt a sense of betrayal, as the general public knew nothing about us, but we were too proud to return or tell families back in the Caribbean about the hardship, discrimination and rejection we were facing. Besides, there was little money, because the jobs available were low paid. My mother had three jobs in a day to try to make ends meet.

All this meant that culturally, people from that generation did not go on holiday, travel abroad, register for a passport or take part in any national register. This partly explains why so many people did not have the necessary documents and became caught up in the Windrush scandal, facing unbelievable hostility with little compassion, consideration or cultural understanding, some dying due to the stress and trauma.

Thanks to much campaigning, the Windrush compensation scheme was meant to help correct the injustice, but little progress has been made. Minimal funds have been paid out and faith in the Home Office is at an all-time low. To move forward, trust in the Home Office needs to be restored, as it is still associated with the hostile environment, complicated forms and deportation flights. Trust is also needed in the appeals system, especially when cultural decisions are to be made, and in those in the Caribbean who are part of the scandal.

How does the Home Office intend to restore that trust? One suggestion is for the Government, in order to restore confidence, to establish an independent advisory group and chair, reporting directly to the Cabinet Office, on the implementation of all 30 vital recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review by Wendy Williams. The Windrush monument will be a way to define and celebrate black British history. Let it not be the Windrush scandal.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

Lord Woolf? We cannot hear the noble and learned Lord; we will perhaps come back to him. Lord Sheikh.

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[The Deputy Speaker]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh. Do we now have the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf? No? Then I call the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport.

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[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)]

My Lords, this scheme is an attempt to compensate a generation of people who found themselves with a genuine and terrible injustice. It is a real stain on this country’s recent history, highlighted by that moving speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. I draw to the attention of the Government another injustice that will not be addressed by this measure yet affects many of the Windrush generation and many others, too, throughout the world.

Monica Philip was one of the Windrush generation who accepted the invitation from the British Government to emigrate from the Caribbean to help fill the employment gap in the UK. She arrived in the UK shortly before her 21st birthday in 1959 and worked tirelessly in a variety of jobs, including as a courier for 15 years in the Ministry of Defence. Her mother’s illness and failing eyesight forced Monica to leave the UK and return to Antigua in 1996, two years before her due retirement age.

In 1998, Monica was advised that she was entitled to a UK state pension, payment of which commenced in October 1998 at a rate of £74.11 per week; but it has remained at that level ever since. It is extremely unfair that this hard-working lady, who is now of course elderly, accepted the UK Government’s call to work here and, after paying for 37 years the same contributions as everybody else and then accepting the responsibility of returning to Antigua to look after her ailing mother, was effectively cheated out of her rightful pension. Her younger sister, who also emigrated to the UK but remains here, received a full pension which, with annual increases, is roughly double that of her elder sister.

I should like to highlight another Antiguan, Harold Williams, who left the island in 1955 aged 20. He worked hard and was always employed; he did his National Service here in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers regiment. For 40 years, Harold contributed diligently to the national insurance scheme. When he returned to Antigua, he was at no time informed that his pension would be frozen on his return. These frozen pensioners never have an increase in the basic pension, and this iniquity exists for the majority of Commonwealth countries. Strangely, in the Caribbean only Barbados and Jamaica do not have frozen pensions.

In my years in the other place, I consistently heard Ministers of all Governments give their excuses for this state of affairs. It can be resolved without a huge cost to the Treasury. I know that the measure we are discussing cannot address this; indeed, the Minister is not from the relevant department. However, this is indeed another stain on our country’s much vaunted sense of fairness and equality. I urge the Government to think again and I will return to this until we right this wrong. I thank noble Lords for their indulgence in letting me raise this issue today.

[The Deputy Speaker]

I hope that we can now hear from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. Do we have him?

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[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Lab)]

My Lords, given the time limit we have today, I want to make three specific points. First, the Windrush scandal has touched every part of Britain. In Lewisham Deptford where I live, my local Member of Parliament, Vicky Foxcroft, recently noted that she is now handling cases for 22 people who are part of the Windrush scandal. I pay tribute to her and her team and to the excellent but underfunded Lewisham Refugee and Migrant Network, which works with local people on these issues. Sadly, in one of the cases, a constituent’s father died while awaiting a decision on his Windrush application. I want therefore to ask the Minister: where an applicant dies before a decision on their application is made, would a relative still be eligible to claim under the deceased person’s estate claim? It seems that parental status needs to be settled before an application can be considered.

Secondly, community confidence in the scheme is low. It is deeply disappointing that the scheme has paid out so little to so few. An independent system managed outside the Home Office has, sadly, been ruled out by the Government, yet some of the recommendations from Wendy Williams’s review are about changing the culture in the Home Office. For example, she states that staff should learn about,

“the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons.”

Have the staff working on Windrush taskforce and scheme gone through this type of learning? If not, why not, and will they?

Finally, we need to learn from decisions already taken continually to improve the scheme. The latest figures show that fewer than one in 20 Windrush claimants have received compensation. Knowing the reasons given for negative outcomes would allow for an assessment of whether any part of the process, such as the need to gather a large amount of evidence, are barriers to successful claims. Will the Minister commit to a review of negative outcomes to inform our understanding of the scheme and how it works in practice?

[The Deputy Speaker]

The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, is having IT problems, so we will now go to the noble Baroness, Lady Bull.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for giving us the opportunity to debate again this very sad issue. Many noble Lords have spoken of the problems and the history of this massive unfairness; it is a real human disaster. I suspect that it goes back to what I have seen for many years as the institutional racism of the Home Office.

My noble friend Lord Foulkes talked about the work that the Guardian has done in reporting on about 1,000 wrongful immigration offence reviews not being started for two years, and a backlog of 3,720 since the scandal was uncovered. Has the Home Office really changed its spots, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, suggested?

I recall that an early draft of the Williams report called the Home Office institutionally racist, and reckless in developing a defensive culture around immigration policy. Of course, you do not often get away with criticising the spoon that feeds you, as I found with my HS2 report. Has the Home Office really changed its spots?

I recall the immigration Bill, which I think has now been withdrawn. Like the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, I have to question how our hospitals would survive without immigrants. How would the academic world survive without the movement of world-beating academics? The hospitality sector is in very serious trouble, as I spoke about last week. Then, of course, there are the fruit and vegetable pickers; we now have to fly them in from Bulgaria, forgetting all about social distancing, which seems not to matter. We are in a worse state than Germany, where the chairman of the German fruit growers’ association was reported as saying that Germans are the wrong shape for picking fruit and do not like bending down. I think that applies to the UK as well.

The Home Office needs to change its spots and get rid of this dogmatic and unfair approach, which will do nothing to help our economy recover. Will the Home Office reflect fully on the Williams report and its recommendations? Will the Minister support the excellent suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, of an independent review? That is a great idea, but it must be truly independent, and preferably not led by the Home Office.

[The Deputy Speaker]

I think that we may have the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. No, we have no luck there. We will move on to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee.