Windrush Day 2021

Anne McLaughlin Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP) [V]]

First, I pay tribute to those caught up in the Windrush scandal for hanging on in there and sticking with this, and to the many campaigning community groups, activists, supporters, and friends and family of those who have suffered so badly. I thank them for campaigning, signing petitions and speaking to us, as well as for looking in on people and looking after people. Without them, people would have suffered even more greatly than they already have.

I also pay tribute to the hon. and right hon. Members who have stuck with this issue and fought tooth and nail for people. I make particular mention of the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes)—I congratulate her on securing this debate, and thank the Backbench Business Committee, too, for agreeing to it—and there are many more who have spoken today and in the past.

As the SNP’s immigration spokesperson, I also want to mention the consistent position that both my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) have taken over the years. They joined other voices in pointing out the scheme’s many flaws and suggested improvements, including making it independent. If someone is ordered to pay me compensation for a crime they have committed against me, they should not decide how much and when I will paid. They are the ones in the wrong, and just as it is taken out of their hands, so it should be with the Home Office.

My colleagues argued strongly for legal aid, but again they were ignored. They also argued for changing the standard of proof required in some financial claims away from beyond reasonable doubt to the normal civil standard of balance of probabilities. On that, at least, the Minister took advice from Martin Forde QC, who designed much of the scheme, and the guidance was changed. That is good, but the other flaws remain and, as we have heard, progress has been painfully slow.

As a new MP in 2015, I regularly felt frustrated at passionately arguing the case for someone or something but almost never getting anywhere in terms of policy changes. However, I underestimated the importance that people place on MPs speaking up for them and acknowledging their injustice. Therefore, as the SNP’s immigration spokesperson I will say again that what happened to those people who came here as part of the Windrush generation was utterly wrong. This Government should be ashamed of themselves and should be doing everything they can to make amends, in so far as is possible. They talk about it but, as we have heard, it is not happening for enough people and it is not happening fast enough.

When this scandal emerged, the Home Office claimed that it was a one-off admin error and that delays and complications with administering the compensation were also admin errors. I would argue, though, that it is too much of a coincidence that it all fits with this deeply hostile environment. There is a growing narrative from this Government about two types of immigrants: the good, compliant ones and the illegal ones, who are, it follows, according to this Government, bad, and bad for the UK.

That fits with the wider narrative that there is no such thing as white privilege when there absolutely is, that there is no institutional racism on these islands when there is, and that the British empire was a force for good in the world. The next thing we know, we will be hearing those on the Government Benches telling us that the British went around the globe because they had to civilise people, and they will not blink an eye when they say it, though I make notable exceptions for those who have spoken in this debate. That narrative is increasing and it allows things like the Windrush scandal to happen.

I do not want to spend too much time away from the specific issue of Windrush, because those people absolutely deserve the focus of this debate to be on them. However, I want to list a few other things that the hostile anti-immigrant narrative is allowing to happen right now. It is allowing people to be held in communal accommodation completely inappropriate to their needs, such as army barracks, hotels and hostels, and in Glasgow the dreadful so-called mother and baby unit where babies and toddlers have no space—and I mean no space—to do anything other than sleep and eat.

The narrative allows highly skilled migrants—another group of people we asked to come here because we needed their skills—to be thrown out of the UK on the most spurious of reasons. It has allowed the Home Office to go searching for ways to throw them out, asking the tax office to tell it of any who have ever had any discrepancies in their self-assessment returns. Then, despite Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs having resolved the issue years ago and being completely satisfied, the Home Office is being allowed to kick those people out.

I could not fail to mention today, on 1 July 2021, the up to 1 million EU citizens who have missed the deadline to apply to remain in the country that is their home. Many of them simply will not have believed that they had to apply, perhaps because for many of them, like the Windrush generation, this has been their home for longer than the Home Secretary has been alive. Whatever the reason, those people have today lost their right to live and work here, and employers have lost the right to employ them, no matter how badly they are needed. That could have been avoided, and it would have been avoided had the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster stuck to the pledge they signed when trying to get people to vote for Brexit. That pledge said to EU citizens: “Nothing will change for you.” But it has and I am deeply concerned about those EU citizens living here today. It could also have been avoided if the Government, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West pointed out, actually learned lessons from the lessons learned review carried out by Wendy Williams.

As I have said, I do not want to take away today from the people we are here to talk about—the Windrush generation. They came here because they were invited. My partner’s family were among them, but thankfully we are not caught up in this. We needed them to help rebuild after world war two. While people in the Caribbean were well used to having white people in charge of their country, they were not used to the racist abuse to which they would be subjected when they reached our shores. They assumed they would be welcome because they were part of the Commonwealth, they had fought in our wars and, as I said, they were invited here, so it must have been a huge shock when they got here. Let us not forget that the 5,000 Jamaican nurses mentioned by the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood who came here to provide us with healthcare meant there were 5,000 fewer nurses in Jamaica, the country that had trained them.

I turn to the complexity of applying for compensation. The Home Office has said it is taking so long because it is very complex and that assessing financial loss and other profound impacts and consequences is not easy and cannot be done overnight. The fact that each claim takes not the 30 hours of staff time that were estimated but, according to the National Audit Office, 154 hours certainly backs that up. How can the Home Office also claim, therefore, that it is so straightforward that those applying do not need a lawyer? All the reasons that the Home Office gives for it taking so much time are the same reasons why legal aid should be allowed to support applicants. That would also make the Home Office’s task easier and hopefully build some faith in the scheme. That is why the Home Affairs Committee recommended it and why the SNP tabled an amendment to the Windrush Compensation Scheme (Expenditure) Bill to that effect.

The recent news that the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants is teaming up with seven companies to give free legal advice was so welcome and such a relief. All I can say is: thank goodness for a legal profession that believes in access to justice for all. However, it should not be down to the profession and its resources. People must be given support by the perpetrators of this outrage, and the scheme must be independent of those perpetrators.

Finally, why on earth did the Home Office last year spend only £8.1 million of the £15.8 million budget allocated to run the scheme? The link between that and the lengthy delays is obvious. The solution is obvious, but my fear is that, for all the reasons I mentioned, the Government are not looking for solutions because their political ideology wants to make these islands as inaccessible and unwelcoming as possible to those they consider foreign, whether they are or not.