Windrush

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Ruth George). I pay tribute to her for all the work she has done on behalf of her clearly very vulnerable but incredibly brave constituent. I hope the Home Secretary has listened to what she said and will look into that very worrying case.

I have three brief points. First, we need to understand what has happened and who took which decisions, when and how. We need that information because we need to prevent people’s human rights from being overridden by bureaucratic fiat yet again—I am not convinced that will not reoccur.

My constituent Yvonne Williams is a Windrush generation daughter. She was kept at Yarl’s Wood detention centre for eight months, and she learned just last week that she was due to be put on the plane back to Jamaica that so many Members have talked about in relation to their constituents. Last weekend, the decision was rescinded at the last minute and it appears that my constituent may well be able to stay.

My constituent is very well networked. She is well known in Oxford, and I was on her side as her local MP, but I am concerned about the large number of people who are isolated, who are not backed up by their MP, who have not been picked up and whom the Home Office may be missing. The Home Office will not know about those people if it does not understand why and how these mistakes were made.

Secondly, I want to make a point about the need for the Home Office to liaise with the Department for Work and Pensions. I have another case of a late middle-aged man who came to the UK when he was very young and discovered issues with his status only recently, when he was required to transfer from jobseeker’s allowance to universal credit. I was grateful that the Secretary of State talked before about how he is going to liaise with other Departments, particularly to make sure people’s access to services and to benefit is not compromised. What I want him to do, with the Ministers from the DWP, is make sure they get that message out there to the jobcentres, so that they do not turn around to people and say they will cut off their support. Instead they must say, “Right, we are going to help you because we know you’ve got a right to be here and we need to give you that support, via government and via the Home Office.” Until now, they have been saying they are going to cut off the support.

I want to end by saying that the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) need to remain with us and ring in our ears as we walk out of the Chamber tonight. She set out clearly how the Windrush case is not necessarily anomalous; it is, sadly, a hallmark of a Home Office that has been described by people on both sides of this House variously as operating in an “arbitrary” manner, in an “unfair” manner, in a “punitive” manner and in an “incompetent” manner .That has got to change. This has to be the clarion call that changes that operation of the Home Office.