Windrush Generation and the Home Office

Debate between Meg Hillier and Patrick Grady

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to speak briefly on what is our 82nd report of this parliamentary Session, which looked at the Windrush generation and the Home Office. We asked the National Audit Office to look into this issue when it became apparent that a large number of British citizens and residents had lost jobs, homes, benefits and access to healthcare as a result of errors in the Home Office. We then took evidence from those who represent people who were victims of this and from the victims themselves, and we challenged Home Office officials about how they handled the matter. That is what our report covers.

We looked into what led to the Windrush scandal and how the support that was set up to help those affected is working. We also flagged up concerns about the future and laid down a number of recommendations for the Home Office, which are to be responded to through the normal Treasury minutes process and in other responses by certain deadlines.

What we discovered was that the Home Office failed to understand the real-life impact of policies that it was implementing. There was a group of people with citizenship and residency rights who were badly affected—people who were legally in the country with citizenship prior to 1973 when citizenship was granted automatically to many citizens, including those from the Caribbean Commonwealth. By changing the rules, the Government created huge problems for many people, but appeared unaware of that. I will come on to the warning signs that they missed in a moment. Those people, as I said, lost jobs and lost housing. Some went on holiday to the country in which they or their parents had been born, and were refused readmission to the UK, and others were deported.

The Home Office was warned about these problems and about the potential impact in 2014 through countless individual cases raised by Members of Parliament and by others working for some of the individuals concerned. Caribbean Ministers also raised these issues from 2016. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who did so much to raise the profile of this issue. Our job as a Committee is not just to look at what went wrong. It is important that the Minister is here to listen to what went wrong so that lessons can be learned. Most of our recommendations are about what can be learned for the future.

Since the failure of this system, the Government have set up a Windrush scheme. Although it has achieved much—people can ring up and speak to an individual—it has certainly not helped everybody as it should have done. The urgent hardship fund that the Government established took eight months to set up. One of the concerns that we had as a Committee was that people had lost their jobs, and therefore their livelihoods and their homes, and so had to borrow money off friends. The lack of urgent funding was a real issue. We are pleased that the Government have now set up the scheme, but we think that there is more to be done. As we speak and as our report was published, there is no compensation scheme yet established, and we are a year on from that. It would be helpful to hear the Government’s response in that regard. I am sure that the whole House is hanging on what that compensation scheme will look like. This is also a generation of people who are not getting any younger. Some of them have already died waiting for a resolution.

Let me go through a number of our concerns. The first is that, although the Department has reviewed all 11,800 cases of people from the Caribbean who may be affected, we understand that there are around 160,000 cases from other Commonwealth countries that have been not reviewed by the Home Office. It is not the policy of the Home Office at this stage to review them. We are concerned about that, because there are many people from other Commonwealth nations who are affected, or could be affected, by this, and it is important that the Government understand that, get on top of it and make sure that others are not affected.

There is a big systemic issue in the Home Office. I speak as someone who, although Chair of the Committee now, was in the past a Minister in the Home Office, in part dealing with immigration. Under several Governments there have been poor systems, poor data and poor information about people, but this Government set great store by their Atlas programme, which is their new software system to deal with immigration matters. We as a Committee are clear that, on its own, a new software programme does not solve matters. We have to make sure that, in the first place, the right data is being put in. We want to make sure that the Government are focused on sorting out those systemic issues, and we have made a number of recommendations on which we expect the Government to come back to us with a response over the next six to 12 months.

As well as Commonwealth citizens, there are also lessons that could be applied to those going through the European Union registration scheme in the hope that the Government can stave off a similar crisis. At the moment, our European Union citizens have until the end of this month to register as resident in this country. That is a fast-paced programme. After that date, it is important that anyone who has not got the right paperwork is caught by the Home Office so that their existing rights, which have been guaranteed by the Government, are protected and that they do not hit problems with employment and other services if they have to provide certain information that they do not have. It is a digitally focused system, so there are real lessons there for the Government, and we are keen to hear from them how they will make sure that those citizens are protected because of the lessons that they have learned from the Windrush scheme.

In summary, the Home Office has very much focused on processes—it introduced new rules, which, in turn, led to different processes—but it has not taken a bigger-picture view of the impact that those processes and the problems have, if not resolved, on real people’s lives. When someone loses their job and their livelihood there is a long-term impact. These issues were flagged up to the Home Office by many of us in this House, by many agencies and by Governments. This report now flags up some serious issues for the Government to respond to, and we look forward to their response.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I am surprised that there are not more people with an interest in this subject. This is a very useful report, as it demonstrates how deeply embedded the hostile environment still is in the Home Office and how much further there is to travel. It also shows the need for far-reaching cultural change.

I wish to pick up on recommendation 5, on the need to extend the review beyond Caribbean Commonwealth citizens. I wonder whether the Committee discussed quite how wide ranging that should be. In particular, I wonder whether the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee is aware of the situation of the Chagossian community—the Chagos islanders—who were forced from their homes in the Commonwealth in the 1960s, many of whom have made their homes here in the United Kingdom. Getting citizenship for them, and for the future generations that have come after them, has been very difficult. The least that can be done to demonstrate that there is a change to the hostile environment would be to grant these people the citizenship that they deserve.

[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.

Digital Democracy Commission

Debate between Meg Hillier and Patrick Grady

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier]

The hon. Lady raises an important point. These are all issues that we need to debate and discuss if we are going to make any progress. I hope that, at the end of this debate, we will get some assurance from the Deputy Leader of the House that the matter will be taken seriously and that further work will be done.

As I said, a vote takes about 15 minutes in total—the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion has also done her maths. In the previous Session of Parliament, there were 544 Divisions in the Commons. Even if three minutes had been saved on each one—a modest improvement on our current practice—it would have meant a time saving of up to 27 hours for each MP. I hope we would have used that time productively; others may want to comment on that. That just goes to show that an awful lot of time is spent on something that could be done more quickly. We have also recently had experiments with iPads. They certainly speed up digital recording, as the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) indicated, but there are still issues with human error and accuracy.

The record of votes is important. In the modern age, it is ludicrous that people have to wait several hours to find out how their Member of Parliament voted on an issue. As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said, other things are not recorded. People get confused about what was an abstention and ask, “Was someone not there?” We should be able to record if someone is absent, for instance, because they are on maternity leave, or absent because they are sick or because they chose to abstain. That is common sense, one would think.

Clearly, any new approach will have problems, so it is worth teasing out what some of those are in the hope that they will be openly discussed and resolved. MPs could lose their smartcards, if that system is the one implemented, which may mean that fingerprints could be a preferred method. MPs could pass their cards to the party Whip or other MPs who could impersonate them or vote in their place, so we would need a system for verification. Verification currently allows for those who are on the premises but unable to vote in person to be nodded through by the Whips. I voted that way a number of times after my youngest daughter was born. The Whips nodded me through, but only after an Opposition Whip was satisfied that I was present, so we have a very crude way of verifying now. I think that could have been done differently and, certainly, we could look to improve it.

The cost of upgrading the system is not to be sniffed at. On Monday, the commission had reports from Officers of the House that it could cost more than £500,000 over the next three or four years, if decisions were made quickly. However, the long-term benefit could justify the one-off cost. Restoration and renewal of this Parliament provides a big opportunity to modernise this core activity of MPs.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate and apologise that I cannot stay until the very end. On time-saving, time represents cost—it is not just about time for MPs, but for staff and security, especially when Divisions go on late into the evening. The costs involved in a one-off cost would surely be offset by the time saved.

[Meg Hillier]

Absolutely. The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about time-saving, because clearly, some votes are consequential on other votes, so there is always going to be a time when we may have to wait for the result of a vote before we can vote again. However, sometimes, as with deferred Divisions, a number of votes could be carried out simultaneously, whereas currently we have to queue for separate 15-minute time periods to go through the Lobby.

It is worth stressing, as the hon. Member for Torbay said and as we heard from many Members—this is why we did not go for distant, remote electronic voting as a recommendation—that the ability to work closely and talk to Members on a daily basis is a very big part of the work of this House. It is important that that spirit is seriously considered in any change. However, I am directly asking the Deputy Leader of the House to take this matter very seriously and to ensure that the Government do not knock it into the long grass. It is a matter for the House. She is our champion, along with the Leader of the House, to Government. I hope she takes this seriously, because we need a green light to investigate change.

From talking to officials in the House, I know that, at the moment, there is a lot of enthusiasm for embracing the commission’s recommendations. A number can take place without interference—dare I say it?—from hon. Members. However, this is one where we really need to be engaged and I hope that today, the Deputy Leader of the House will set out a clear timetable on the measure and commit to serious consideration of its potential benefits and to reporting back to the House on that progress.

We can look at other examples in other Parliaments. Egypt, only two weeks ago, introduced an electronic voting system. It has had some problems with impersonation, so that is a lesson to be learnt. In Romania, politicians have 10 seconds to vote once they have initiated the smartcard voting system. In the United States, electronic voting was introduced to Congress in 1973. Members there vote by inserting their voting card into an electronic dock and by pressing the appropriate button. In South Korea, they vote electronically and can change their vote as they go, so there are very important issues that we might want to discuss about the change of culture that this would bring. Of course, as hon. Members have highlighted, in the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the European Parliament, voting is done electronically. It is not a new phenomenon, and we need to ensure that it is properly embraced.

In my lifetime, Parliament has evolved very slightly to reflect technological change. Voice recording was introduced in 1978, when I was a schoolgirl. In 1989, the Chamber was first televised, and only last year, a low-level camera was installed—I was a student in 1989, and I hope that, before I am a grandmother, we might have considered electronic voting, bringing Parliament into the 21st century.