Windrush Compensation Scheme (Expenditure) Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Money resolution & Programme motion
Monday 10th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I will be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker.

This has been an extremely painful debate, and, as Members throughout the House have recognised, this is a shameful episode in our country’s history. Members are rightly outraged by the injustice about which we have been hearing. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) and for Edmonton (Kate Osamor), who told us about the individual cases with which they have dealt as constituency MPs. These are heartbreaking stories of injustice: stories of people who have been stranded abroad, who have lost their homes and jobs, who have been denied NHS care, and who have been deported or, in some cases, sadly pushed into emigrating by their fear of the system.

As we have heard from Members in all parts of the House, we are talking about people who had every right to enter and settle in the United Kingdom. They came here because they believed in this country, and because they belonged here. We are talking about people who trusted this country, who took the system at its word when it said that they had settled status, but who were the victims of measures to stop people abusing the system, which they were not doing. People who were here perfectly legally were the victims of measures taken to deter or detect those who came here illegally, and that was wrong.

I fully support the Bill. It is right that there is a compensation scheme, it is good that it is being extended, and I hope that the claims about which we have been hearing will be met quickly. However, we should also think about the future. I look forward to the findings of the lessons learned review, which are expected to be published imminently, but some lessons are surely obvious.

It is right for us to try to prevent people who are not entitled to live here from gaining access to benefits, housing or employment, but that does not mean that we should behave like machines. We need more humanity in our system. How can decades of national insurance records be dismissed as insufficient evidence of the right to be here? Surely there should be a presumption of innocence in the case of elderly people who have lived here, as contributing citizens, for many years. Why did that not happen? And surely there is a wider lesson for our social system in general. We have a culture of box-ticking compliance, which was evident in the removal of caseworkers’ discretion that led to the shameful decisions about which we have been hearing.

The Windrush scandal should prompt us to think about the way in which the whole public sector works. We need less centralisation, less bureaucracy and more trust, both in citizens and in frontline staff. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) said earlier, we need a more human system, in respect of migration and throughout our society. That would be a just legacy of this scandal.