Diane Abbott
Main Page: Diane Abbott (Labour - Hackney North and Stoke Newington)
Meg Hillier
Our role as a Committee is not to dictate or comment on the exact details of Government policy or whether the Government are making the right policy, but to examine whether that policy is working. It is very clear in law that if people arrived from certain countries to the UK before 1973, they automatically gained citizenship, and others had rights to residency. We are saying loud and clear to the Government that other people from the Commonwealth are in this group, and it is not good enough just to expect them to find access to what is badged “the Windrush scheme”, because that may not mean as much to people from Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Ghana or wherever.
In our recommendations, we have urged the Government to actively reach out—to assess the cases that they have on their files, but also to encourage people to apply. Some of these people may now be in their countries of origin, so there is an international aspect to the issue. Just as some people went back to the Caribbean on holiday and could not come back into this country, there may be people in the same situation in other Commonwealth countries. It is absolutely imperative that the Government deal with this matter before it becomes the next big scandal.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I congratulate the Public Accounts Committee on this important report. Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most important sentences in the report is the one that says that
“while the Department has reviewed 11,800 Caribbean cases, around 160,000 non-Caribbean Commonwealth cases remain unreviewed”?
What does she advise the Government to do? These people cannot simply be ignored.