Windrush

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is incumbent on every Member of this House, if we are all to be united in helping the people who have been affected by this situation, to be careful about the language that they use.

Recent events have shown that the safeguards we already have in place need to go further, so that is exactly what we are doing. For example, we have already put in place additional support for employers and landlords to safeguard members of the Windrush generation seeking jobs or rented accommodation. Updated guidance on gov.uk encourages employers and landlords to get in touch with the Home Office checking service if any Commonwealth citizen does not have the documents they need to demonstrate their status. The taskforce will contact the individual concerned to help them to prove their entitlement, and the employer or landlord will be issued with a positive notice.

My Department is working with other Departments and partner agencies from across the board to ensure that we have the relevant safeguards in place to prevent those from the Windrush generation from being denied the benefits and services to which they are perfectly entitled. Tomorrow, the Minister for Immigration will chair a cross-Government meeting to discuss this very matter with colleagues in more detail. We are also very conscious that ongoing immigration enforcement activity must not impact on people from the Windrush generation, and safeguards are being put in place to minimise such a risk.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary has announced the additional safeguards he wants to put in place for the Windrush generation, but will he apply those safeguards more widely? In evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, we have heard that about 10% of the cases passed by the Home Office to banks are incorrect, and that the banks may therefore be taking action against people who are here legally because of errors by the Home Office. Will he put in place safeguards for everybody?

[Sajid Javid]

The right hon. Lady makes a very important point, and I am looking precisely at that. She used the example of banks that may be acting inappropriately or in error, perhaps through no fault of their own. I will look at that very carefully, and I will get back to her, because this is a very important issue and she is absolutely right to raise it.

I must now conclude to leave other Members enough time to speak in this debate. I am clear that all the measures I have outlined today will make a real difference. I will continue to assess what further action needs to be taken, because I know that I am not alone in this House when I say that this situation has made me angry. I know that I am not alone when I say that it is unacceptable that there are those from the Windrush generation who feel hurt and betrayed by the country they call home. That is why the measures we are taking, and will continue to take, are so vital. We must make sure that those affected get the support and attention that they so rightly deserve, so that something like this can never happen again.

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[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I welcome the speech by the hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa), who raised important, detailed and thoughtful points.

We have heard too many heartbreaking stories and about too many deep injustices—of people told they were not legal despite being British citizens, who have been made to feel unwelcome in their own country despite having worked here, lived here and loved here, very often for most of their lives and for longer than many of us in here have been alive; of people locked up wrongfully by the British state in their own country; and of people such as the pensioner I heard from who said his experience of simply trying to renew his passport had been so painful and brought back difficult memories of racism he had experienced as a child.

Many from the Windrush generation have told their own stories, and we should pay tribute to them for having the bravery to do so, even when, as some told me, they felt a sense of shame as a result. The Windrush families are not the ones who should feel shame. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) rightly said, this issue has brought a sense of national shame, and we must all now be determined to put it right. I welcome the new Home Secretary’s promise “to do right” by the Windrush generation. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), who has been passionately pursuing this cause, is right that the Government will be judged on their actions rather than their words. We will need to see the progress of the taskforce, which the Home Affairs Committee will monitor.

The motion refers to documents being sent to the Select Committee. As with similar motions that have referred documents to other Committees, we have not instigated this call; nor have we had the chance to discuss or take a view on the motion, and we would of course decide how to respond. The motion itself is obviously a matter for the House, but we will continue to pursue our own questions as well.

[Jeremy Quin]

The right hon. Lady served with distinction in former Administrations. Does she share my concern that this is a very wide-ranging motion? It lists papers provided to Ministers covering a huge area of policy. It appears to cover minutes of a Cabinet Sub-Committee and discussions about our relationships with other independent states. This very wide-ranging motion goes well beyond what its mover set out as information she required. What are the right hon. Lady’s thoughts on that as a former Minister advised by civil servants?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am going to repeat what I said: our Select Committee has not had a chance to discuss this, but clearly we would be the recipients of the papers, if the motion were agreed to. It is for the House to debate the motion and for the Select Committee to decide how to respond, which we would do responsibly, as other Select Committees have done.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady and I both serve on the Home Affairs Committee. Does she share my concerns about the Labour motion? As Chair of the Committee, she has requested significant information on our behalf from the previous and current Home Secretaries, which will be forthcoming, so I wonder why Labour is asking for even more. Did the Labour Front-Bench team discuss with her what information she had requested on the Committee’s behalf before tabling the motion?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we have requested a huge amount of information, and we will continue to do so, because we must continue our work on the Select Committee, which is separate from any decision the House makes. As he also makes clear, individual Committee members may take different views in this debate.

I want to pursue some important issues around the Windrush scandal. The Select Committee wants to know about the review the Home Secretary has announced. Who will it be done by? I would have concerns were it to be done by a Home Office official, given the concerns and questions raised by the targets and bonuses, which might have involved even the most senior of Home Office officials. We look forward to receiving more information on that, as well as on how the taskforce will respond, on the legal framework that will now cover the Windrush generation, on the compensation framework, and on other matters too.

I am concerned about our conflating the debate on the Windrush generation with the wider questions of illegal immigration. We all agree, I think, that the Windrush generation are here legally—they are British citizens. I also question the idea that the only problem is with a group of people who, because they did not get the right papers in 1973, have inadvertently ended up in the illegal immigration system, rather than the legal immigration system; there are, I believe, wider issues, based on evidence we have taken. The problem is that our immigration system does not have a good enough process for resolving who is here legally and who is here illegally. It is a system that makes too many mistakes, as has been highlighted in our Committee reports, in the inspectorate’s reports, and in our recommendations. The problem is that when people do not fit into the boxes, the system does not help them. Too often, its spits them out. As we said in one of our recent reports,

“urgent action is needed to address errors in the enforcement process.”

I hope that the Home Office will respond to our recommendations.

In cases in which appeals are still in place, half of them go against the Government because the Home Office has got it wrong, but in many cases there are no safeguards, independent checks or appeals. We heard last week that when people apply for “no time limit”, as many of the Windrush families may have done, there is no way of appealing if the system gets things wrong, even if it is the Home Office that has screwed up or there has been some other error in the system.

We also know that there are problems with the burden of proof. A letter from a Home Office Minister explained that Mr Trevor Johnson’s application had been turned down because

“He has…been unable to demonstrate that he has been continuously resident in the UK for the years 1989 to 1990, 1994 to 1995 and 1997 to 1998.”

That means that he had provided proof of his residence for the remaining 45 years, but not for those three years. I could not give four pieces of proof of where I was in 1989 or 1994. I hope that the Home Secretary will now address that issue of the burden of proof.

The system is also terribly complicated, and no legal aid is available. It is impossible for those who struggle with literacy or mental health problems to navigate. It is also hugely expensive, and too often penalises people for simple mistakes. It was reported in The Daily Telegraph today that 600 highly skilled doctors, engineers and IT professionals who may have been here for many years are being denied leave to remain because of minor errors in their tax returns. I hope the Home Office will take that up, because it obviously extends beyond the Windrush generation.

There are also the questions about targets and the way in which they have operated. All Departments have targets, such as key performance indicators, but the problem in this instance is the absence of safeguards or independent checks to prevent the targets from distorting individual decisions. That is how injustices arise. Underlying all this has been the overall net migration target, which our Committee’s report recommended should be replaced. It includes emigration as well as immigration, it includes people who are here legally as well as those who are here illegally, and it gives the Home Office as a whole an incentive to encourage people to leave whether they are here legally or not.

If something is to come out of this awful case, it must be this: we value and support the commitment of the Windrush generation, but we must also look much more widely throughout the immigration system at the things going wrong. An immigration system is crucial to any country’s national identity. We believe that we are a fair country and a humane country, and we must ensure that those values are part of our immigration system.

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[Mrs Main]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall not be taking any interventions from the shadow Home Secretary, since she did not extend that courtesy to Conservative Members.

As I said, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford got to the nub of this debate. We have to ask ourselves whether documentation is needed for the Home Affairs Committee to do its business. I think that it probably is. I think she will be diligent in that task. As I said, I would like to see the information taken from the range of documentation.

[Yvette Cooper]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. I gently point out to her that the point I made was that it was not a matter for the Select Committee, but a matter for the House, to make a decision on the motion, and that we would choose how to respond. Although we have put our own questions to the Home Office, most of them are still unanswered. Clearly she will have her own points to make, but I ask her not to pray in aid my arguments.

[Mrs Main]

I take the point, and I hope the right hon. Lady gets the answers that she deserves. I think that all Conservative Members feel that the Windrush generation have been done a huge disservice. To conflate this debate with other forms of immigration, slavery and whatever else people have chucked into the mix, including fishing, does a disservice to the debate we must have about the wrongs that were done in the processing of the Windrush generation.

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[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey). On Monday, we had a first-class debate in the quiet environment of Westminster Hall. All of us who took part, including particularly though not exclusively the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), spoke to the heart of the issue and said what a number of colleagues on both sides of the House have said this afternoon: we are talking about people—people with aspirations, needs, family and commitments. Very often we reduce things too much by talking about a battery of statistics, telephone numbers and all the rest of it, and we lose sight of the fact that we are talking about people and their hopes and aspirations. Unfortunately, the motion and—I say this with the greatest respect to the shadow Home Secretary—the tone and manner in which she introduced the motion were not conducive to our seeing a replication of the debate that we had in Westminster Hall.

I say this not to be particularly partisan, but I think there is a very clear disconnect on this issue between the Opposition Front Benchers and their Back Benchers. Their Back Benchers are talking about people; they are talking about the principles that underpin their stances and objectives. The motion before us, which probably has very little to do with what many of our speeches have been predicated on, is all about politics and the process of politics. I would assert, I hope without contradiction, that most people who are affected by this issue really do not give a damn about the process. They just want to get it sorted out.

Legitimate questions have been asked, such as, “If we call up the Home Office number, and so on, will we compromise ourselves?”, and I hope that all of us feel that we have a duty to take back to our friends and constituents the fact that on this issue, the Government have recognised that there has been an error. The error has not necessarily been solely authored by this Government—it goes back to the end of the Blair-Brown era—but the people affected need confidence that the Government and the House are now on their side. They need to have confidence in the robustness, honesty and integrity of what Ministers say, whether that is in the media or at the Dispatch Box. If we decide, through narrow partisan political interest, to play politics with those people’s lives because we think that it might nudge us up one point or another in the opinion polls, that will let down our constituents.

Part of the problem, and I make no apology for rehearsing the point that I made on Monday, is that—

[Yvette Cooper]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Simon Hoare]

Of course I will.

[Yvette Cooper]

I listened to the hon. Gentleman’s thoughtful words earlier this week as well, but I really would ask him to withdraw some of the things that he has said about the Labour Front Benchers and the approach that they are taking, and in particular, about the shadow Home Secretary, who has been a passionate advocate for individuals who have been badly affected by the Windrush crisis. By all means, disagree with the motion, if the hon. Gentleman takes a different view, but I strongly urge him to withdraw the points about the shadow Home Secretary’s motive and approach, given the speech that she made earlier.

[Simon Hoare]

I say to the right hon. Lady that nobody in this House would doubt—let us be frank about this—the sincerity with which the shadow Home Secretary has faced fighting racism and abuse in this country. She is a leader in the field. I say to the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, that if only the motion had reflected that, because it does not—it is about process.

As I said on Monday, at the back of all our minds, on the Government Benches and on the Opposition Benches, there is probably a little echo of guilt. Whether it was UKIP, the BNP or some of the more excessive narratives of our tabloid press, issues of “asylum” and “refugee”, “illegal” and “legal”, got conflated with “them” and “us, “foreign” and “different”, “alien” and “domestic”. All of us, looking to our political bases, became anxious about seeing our support nibbled away, and instead of making the positive, liberal case for the contribution that immigrants make—the case made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) and by my constituency neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), on “Newsnight” on Monday—we ran away from those uncomfortable conversations on the doorstep. All of us—all of us—probably wish we had been a little more robust in making that positive case. That we did not make it is no excuse for not facing it now.

The Windrush generation answered our call in time of war and in time of peace, and the Government will answer their call to find a solution to this issue. Members on both sides of the House with equal passion owe all their constituents a duty to support that endeavour and to get it right—for people.

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[Caroline Nokes]

The hon. and learned Lady made some comments earlier that I wish to respond to, but I really think it is important that I put on record how sorry I am that people have been affected, and how crucial it is to me that we make sure we get it right, and that, going forward, we make sure this cannot happen again.

As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has said, putting this right must not mean taking resources away from the teams who are already working so hard to help those who have been affected. I have seen them working and know their dedication and commitment, which I saw this last weekend in Croydon and in Sheffield. That is why the Opposition’s Humble Address motion is not the right answer.

We have announced a package of measures today to bring greater transparency to Members of the House and to the public. I would like to remind the House of those measures. First, the Home Secretary will be writing each month to the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) with an update on progress. I have little time this evening to comment on her significant contribution, but I would like to say to her that it is important to me that we provide her with the updates and make sure that her Committee is aware of the progress. It is seldom that I say this on the Floor of the House, but I look forward to being called to her Committee as early as next week.

[Yvette Cooper]

I have put to the Minister, on behalf of the Committee, and to the Department about 50 questions so far, about half of them two weeks ago. So far, I think we have had only about five of them answered. When will they be answered?

[Caroline Nokes]

It is absolutely imperative to me—and indeed to my civil servants, who have been working incredibly hard—that the right hon. Lady not only gets the answers, but gets thorough and full answers. We will undertake to make sure that that happens as soon as possible.

Secondly, the Home Secretary will be writing to the right hon. Lady each month on the latest position on detention, removals and deportations. Thirdly, the Home Secretary will bring external oversight and challenge to a “lessons learned” review, which is already under way. He has asked the permanent secretary to give the review the resource that it needs.

The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) shared with us her experience as a former Immigration Minister. She made some observations that I, too, have reflected upon in my relatively short time in this role, and she made some valuable points. It is clear to me that there are resources needed to put this right, and also to look forward and make sure that there cannot be similar occurrences again.

There has been much debate about the impact of the compliant environment on the Windrush generation. We are taking steps—important steps—to safeguard those from the Windrush generation seeking jobs or rented accommodation. We have published updated guidance on gov.uk, which encourages employers and landlords to get in touch with the Home Office checking service if they are unsure about individual status. The taskforce will contact the individual concerned to help them to prove their entitlement, and the employer or landlord will be issued with a positive notice to enable them to employ or register the individual.

The Home Office is working with other Departments. The hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) raised the importance of my doing so, particularly with reference to working with organisations such as the DWP, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to make sure that not only Departments, but the partner agencies across the board, work to ensure that we have the relevant safeguards in place to prevent those from the Windrush generation from being denied the benefits and services they should be entitled to. Tomorrow, I will chair a cross-Government meeting to discuss those safeguards in more detail.

We have also been clear that ongoing enforcement activity must not impact on people in the Windrush generation. Immigration enforcement has put in place arrangements to minimise this risk.