Windrush Compensation Scheme

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Fifth Report of the Home Affairs Committee, The Windrush Compensation Scheme, HC 204, and the Government response, HC1098.

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Dame Angela, and to introduce the debate. I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for allocating time for it. I welcome the Minister, who I know will take seriously the matters raised by Members from across the House. In some respects, I am sorry that the Home Affairs Committee has felt the need to hold the debate, because had the Government responded more positively to our detailed and evidence-based report, it might not have been necessary to call the Minister here today to discuss the shortcomings of the Government’s response.

I am delighted to see present my colleagues on the Home Affairs Committee. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), who has done much to champion this issue over many years, and the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) are here today to speak to our report and the distressing evidence we heard from the people affected by the Windrush scandal. I am also pleased to welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), who will speak from the Opposition Front Bench.

To set the debate in context, the Windrush scandal that emerged in the summer of 2017 revealed the huge injustices and hardships faced by members of the Windrush generation who had been denied their lawful immigration status as a direct result of Home Office policies and practices over many years. Successive Home Secretaries have subsequently promised to right the wrongs experienced by members of the Windrush cohort, and to recognise the financial loss and emotional distress that Government actions caused. The Home Affairs Committee launched our inquiry in November 2020 because of serious concerns about long delays and difficulties in applying for the compensation scheme. The Committee remains seriously troubled that instead of providing a remedy for many people, the Windrush compensation scheme has compounded injustices.

Our inquiry found that the vast majority of people who have applied for compensation have yet to receive a penny. For some, the experience of applying for compensation has become a source of further trauma rather than redress, and others have been put off from applying for the scheme altogether. Despite the initial Government estimate of 15,000 eligible claims, the Home Office had received only 3,387 applications by the end of December 2021. Of those, 940 claims have received payment. Very sadly, when the Committee’s report was published, 23 people were known to have died before their compensation claims had been decided by the Home Office.

I would like to thank all the people who took the time and effort to engage with the Committee’s inquiry and provide the evidence that underpins our recommendations and conclusions. In particular, I thank the individuals who attended the Committee’s roundtable and shared their first-hand experience of the scheme, including Dominic Akers-Paul, Glenda Caesar, Gertrude Ngozi Chinegwundoh, Christian Hayibor, Carl Nwazota, Grace Nwobodo and Anthony Williams. I also thank Thomas Tobierre, a claimant, and his daughter Charlotte, who took part in an interview with Committee staff.

Our report considers people’s experience of the Windrush scheme and our recommendations focus on changes that we believe would have an immediate impact on the scheme’s effectiveness. Before I outline the report, I want to mention two of the heartbreaking accounts we heard during the inquiry. Anthony Williams arrived in the United Kingdom from Jamaica in 1971, aged seven. He served in the British Army for 13 years before becoming a fitness instructor. In 2013, he was wrongly classed as an illegal immigrant and sacked. Mr Williams was left unable to work or access benefits because he could not demonstrate his lawful status. He was also unable to register for a doctor’s appointment or see a dentist, and when a tooth infection began to spread, he consequently lost most of his teeth.

Mr Williams applied for compensation within a week of the scheme’s opening, but was unable to provide documentary evidence of his salary. In total, for the five years in which his life was affected, Mr Williams was initially offered approximately £18,000 in compensation. Mr Williams told us,

“Even now, I’m still having problems. I still don’t sleep. And it’s because of the compensation scheme. In the back of my mind now, because I survived five years of virtually living on nothing, the money is secondary now. My sanity is top of the game now to me”.

Glenda Caesar came to the United Kingdom from Dominica in 1961, when she was just three months old. She worked in the NHS for over 20 years. In 2009, Ms Caesar was wrongly sacked from her job and then denied access to unemployment benefits. She accrued thousands of pounds in rent arrears. In December 2019, following 10 years of being unable to work, Ms Caesar was first offered approximately £22,000 in compensation. She rejected that initial offer, describing it as “insultingly low”.

I wish to welcome the few recommendations that received a positive response from the Government. The Home Office responded most positively to the Committee’s recommendations on outreach and engagement. I am grateful for the Department’s acknowledgment that more needs to be done to reach eligible claimants. Will the Minister provide an update on progress with the campaign to target non-Caribbean Commonwealth communities, with a particular focus on Ghana, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh? Has he noticed any increase in applications from those countries as a result?

I am pleased the Government agreed with our recommendation that they should provide the number of full and final impact on life payments at each level of award as part of their regular data releases. Will the Minister confirm when we can expect the first data release? The Home Office confirmed that it would recommence holding face-to-face engagement events; will the Minister take this opportunity to announce in public when the first of those events will take place?

Over the course of our inquiry, we identified a litany of flaws in the design and operation of the Windrush compensation scheme, including the excessive burden on claimants to provide documentary evidence of the losses they suffered; the long delays in processing applications and making payments; the inadequate staffing of the scheme; a failure to provide urgent and exceptional payments to individuals in desperate need; delays in launching and adequately supporting grassroots campaigns to reach eligible claimants; and failure to rebuild confidence in both the Department and the scheme. Although we strongly welcome changes made to the scheme in December 2020 and again in July 2021, many concerns in the Committee’s report are yet to be addressed.

Fundamentally, many people are still too fearful of the Home Office to apply for compensation. The treatment of the Windrush generation by successive Governments was truly shameful. No amount of compensation could ever repay the fear, humiliation, hurt and hardship that was caused to individuals who were affected. That the design and operation of the scheme contained the same bureaucratic insensitivities that led to the Windrush scandal in the first place is a damning indictment of the Home Office.

In order to increase trust and encourage more applicants, we recommend that the scheme should be transferred to an independent organisation. In their response, rejecting that recommendation, the Government restated their position that transferring the scheme outside the Home Office would cause additional delays and that the Home Office is the appropriate Department for handling the scheme because of the need to access claimants’ immigration history. That is a disappointing response, given the incredibly low number of applicants.

The majority of submissions received by the Committee expressed concerns about the lack of trust in the Department among affected communities and the impact of that on people’s willingness to apply to the scheme. Will the Minister think again and consider whether the scheme will have failed if, as a result of that distrust, only a small percentage of the people who have suffered injustice ever come forward and are compensated?

I am disappointed that the Home Office rejected most of our recommendations. I will therefore focus my remarks on the most concerning matters, which relate to our recommendations on compensation, the impact on life, loss of employment and loss of pension. The evidence we received expressed particular concerns about how those categories of claim operate. Despite the concerns raised about the caseworker guidance on impact on life awards, which were outlined in the Committee’s report, the Home Office rather oddly referred the Committee to the same guidance in response to our recommendation that the Department provide greater clarity as to how awards are determined.

The Government committed in April 2019 to ensuring that claimants’ national insurance positions could be corrected, enabling them to receive the correct amount of state pension. Almost three years later, it remains unclear when a solution will be implemented. Will the Minister provide an update on that?

The Committee heard that the loss of occupational pension is a common type of loss among claimants, yet the Home Office restated its position that such losses are excluded from the scheme. The Committee acknowledges the complexity of the issue and included in its recommendations some options that, although imperfect, would enable claimants to receive some compensation. The Home Office’s response did not demonstrate any real engagement with the Committee’s suggestions.

On lifting the £500 cap on compensation for legal fees per immigration application, the Home Office restated its position that

“the immigration system has been designed to make sure people do not require legal assistance to make an application for an immigration product.”

I draw the Minister’s attention to the fact that the Committee received evidence from one individual whose family member faced multiple court hearings to prevent their deportation and spent £10,000 on legal costs.

The Home Office rejected our recommendation on introducing funded legal assistance to help people to make a claim. The majority of submissions we received said that legal assistance would be beneficial because the scheme is complex and because comprehensive claims submitted by legal professionals may be processed more quickly by caseworkers. Requests for additional evidence are not uncommon and some claimants reported finding that traumatic, given their previous contact with the Home Office. They told us they would have preferred to manage their claim via a representative.

The Home Office did not commit to making any changes to how applications for urgent and exceptional support are handled. Carl Nwazota, whom I mentioned earlier, applied for that type of support. He told us that throughout the entirety of his interaction with the Home Office he was homeless and living on the street, but the Home Office still refused him access to that support. The Home Office told him that until it received a completed compensation form, it could not help him.

Recently released data shows that from 1 October 2018 to the end of October 2021, just 10% of the requests received for urgent and exceptional support were decided within 10 working days of receipt. It is completely unacceptable that individuals facing hardship because of Home Office failures should continue to be let down and left destitute by the Department while they wait for compensation payments. We are therefore deeply disappointed with the Home Office’s response, which does not make any commitment to improving the operation of the scheme.

Sadly, the Home Office’s response to some of the Committee’s recommendations did not demonstrate that the Department had fully engaged with the issues. The responses to the Committee’s recommendations on providing greater clarity as to how compensation for impact on life is determined and on bringing the loss of occupational pension within scope were particularly disappointing, as they did not engage with the real concerns set out in our report.

The Home Office’s response to the Committee’s recommendations on identifying and addressing the causes of delay lacked any detail. Furthermore, although the Department has increased the number of caseworkers throughout 2021, the published data does not yet show that cases are being processed more quickly.

I have not touched on everything in the report, but I hope I have been able to give an overview of what is a substantial report, and of the issues it raised, which have not been satisfactorily answered in the Government response. Ultimately, many of the concerns raised with us about the compensation scheme echo criticisms made of the Home Office by Wendy Williams in her lessons learned review. We can only conclude that, four years on from the Windrush scandal, vital lessons have still not been learned by the Home Office.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Foster]

I am always happy to further consider evidence. Certainly we have seen higher awards being made, partly because of the quite significant changes we made to the scheme last year but also, unsurprisingly, due to the increase in the number of applications to the scheme, which I will touch on in a minute. The change appears to be having an effect, but, as more cases come to a final decision, particularly as reviews in other areas are done, we are open to making sure that it has made a difference. I am genuinely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the constructive spirit in which he approached the debate on the Windrush Compensation Scheme (Expenditure) Bill, as did the then shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, which helped produce a better outcome all round.

I am keen for Members to see for themselves the work being done in this area. Now that covid restrictions are behind us, I am happy to welcome any parliamentary colleagues who wish to visit the compensation scheme casework team to see for themselves the progress we have made. They can talk to the team working to resolve cases to get people the compensation they deserve. The team is based up in Leeds, separate from some of the other work. For many this is their only role in the Home Office; they are not working on wider immigration matters, although some have experience in those, given the nature of the issues that they deal with. I am certainly happy to welcome people to visit and meet the teams, talk to them and see the work being done. We had hoped to arrange visits at an earlier stage, but with the understandable restrictions during the covid period, it was something we had to consider very carefully. Now that the restrictions are behind us, a visit by the Select Committee would be welcome as well. We would be happy to arrange that.

Although we do not agree with every recommendation, overall we welcome the Home Affairs Committee’s report on the scheme, and we are already making significant progress in respect of several of the Committee’s key recommendations. However, some of the recommendations are complex and we need to consider those carefully to address the issues raised. I anticipate that Members might say, “Let’s have an example, then, of a recommendation you think is complex.” We are committed to ensuring that an individual’s national insurance position is corrected where an inability to demonstrate status has impacted their entitlement to the state pension. For example, someone may have been unable to have employment and therefore unable to make national insurance contributions, meaning that there are missing years when it comes to the calculation of state pension.

We continue to work with the relevant Departments to resolve this complex issue. We are making progress, although unfortunately I cannot give a specific date today as to when we will be able to bring that change into effect.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Will the Minister give way on that point?

[Kevin Foster]

Briefly.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I am just a bit concerned because it is now several years since the issue arose. Getting clarity on what their entitlement to state pension will be is something that will concern an individual. The Minister says he cannot indicate when the issue is likely to be resolved. Does he have a best guess? Will it be a year, two years, five years?

[Kevin Foster]

We hope it will be quicker than the right hon. Lady has just suggested, and potentially a lot quicker than one of the timeframes that she suggested. I am not in a position today to give a specific date, but we are making excellent progress towards finally resolving this issue. We accept that we need to bring certainty to people, particularly given the age of many of those we are talking about, as touched on by the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Even the children of that generation are well into their 50s and 60s, given that, in many cases, we are talking about people who arrived in the UK before 1 January 1973. We are conscious of the urgency of resolving this issue. I do not want to make a misleading statement today and give a specific date by which it will be resolved, but certainly we believe we are making excellent progress and getting close to resolving it.

The changes we made to the scheme in December 2020 have significantly increased both the amount of compensation awarded and the speed at which awards are made. Since December 2020 we have paid out over £33 million, in contrast to a total of just under £3 million prior to those changes. We now frequently pay out over £1 million a month in compensation, and we recently paid out one of our largest awards to date—a single award in excess of £260,000 to one individual. I hope that Members will understand why I will not give further details of that case, which may identify the person concerned, given the sums involved.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I thank everyone who has contributed this afternoon. It is clear from the speeches we have heard that the Windrush generation has been let down and is still battling for justice through the compensation scheme. What concerns me and the Committee most is that the voices of the victims are not being heard by the Home Office. It is not hearing what victims are saying about their experience and how they are finding dealing with the compensation scheme.

The Minister has said a bit about that, but there is a particular problem with a lack of trust in the Home Office. As a Committee, we say that there needs to be an independent organisation to operate the scheme and to give trust and confidence to the people who have not yet applied. It is disappointing that the numbers are still too low. We are also disappointed about the pension issue. I pressed the Minister on when we will have an actual date for that to be resolved by. There was no mention of the occupational pension, which is not part of the scheme.

We look forward to hearing about the engagements that are about to start post-covid, and we would like details of those. The Committee would like to visit the caseworker unit in Leeds, which is, I think, where the Minister said it is. We would like a day out to Leeds to go and have a look at this and see what is actually happening.

Finally, although we have produced a report and the Government have responded, it is my intention as Chair—the same goes for the members of the Committee here today—to follow this very carefully to see what the Home Office does over the next few months, and possibly years. We will not let this rest. We want to ensure that there is justice for the people who have been so badly let down, and that the compensation scheme goes some way to providing the justice that they are seeking and not yet getting.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Fifth Report of the Home Affairs Committee, The Windrush Compensation Scheme, HC 204, and the Government response, HC1098.