Windrush Compensation Scheme

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, in her response to Wendy Williams’ Windrush review, the Home Secretary said:

“we were all shocked to discover that they and their families were subject to such insensitive treatment by the very country they called home.”—[Official Report, Commons, 19/3/20; col. 1154.]

Sadly, insensitive treatment is regarded by many as the Home Office’s stock-in-trade. It took a commendable series of articles and a book by journalist Amelia Gentleman—as she rightly remarked:

“The ability to feel outrage is a powerful tool.”—


to bring that to a wider public.

The Windrush scandal was not a mistake or some unfortunate one-off bureaucratic error. It was a direct result of a pledging war between the two main parties to cut the numbers of immigrants—in particular, Tory political promises to reduce net migration to an arbitrary target of tens of thousands and

“to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.”

The effect of the hostile environment policy was clearly racially discriminatory, but Ministers refused to listen to the chorus of warnings. Although stopping short of a full finding of institutional racism, Wendy Williams found

“an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation”.

The scandal also displayed all the worst aspects of bureaucracy: complex laws that very few understood, coupled with historical amnesia; a “culture of disbelief” and refusal to listen to what people were saying; the distorting effect that targets can have; a cruel lack of humanity; misinformation, doublespeak and inaccessibility; the lumping together of different categories, in this case legal with illegal residents; sheer incompetence, such as in destroying vital files, poor record-keeping, absence of corporate memory and poor-quality decision-making; and resistance to legitimate criticism. Will we see not only compensation but real change? There is some hope that the frenzy of Brexit-fuelled anti-immigrant hysteria has waned, and there are indications of public appreciation of the positive value of immigration, not least in the NHS and care services.

One key test of the Government’s attitude will be the treatment of the 3 million EU nationals, but, like the Windrush generation, many of them have been asked for an unreasonable level of proof. In a welcome change of tune, Michael Gove told our EU committee yesterday that a physical status document might be considered. An appeal to the Home Office to change its habits of a lifetime might get little traction on the basis of sheer humanity and sensitivity, but in a world in which the UK will be competing for workers of all levels of skill it would be wise for it to ensure that its reputation for nastiness and incompetence does not continue to harm the national interest.