Why risks of new Windrush – this time with EU citizens – are real

With rich irony, yesterday the House of Commons held a debate to mark Windrush day just as another immigration scandal threatens to unfold. On Wednesday the deadline for EU Nationals to apply for Settled Status in the UK passed amidst worries that thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands had missed it. It is important for their sake as well as for the sake of the wider Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic community that we learn from the wrongful detention, deportation and denial of legal rights suffered by so many of the Windrush generation and their descendants. 

The Windrush Lessons Learned Review commissioned by the UK Government is quite clear. The author, Wendy Williams said,  

“While the Windrush scandal began to become public in late 2017, its roots lie much deeper. Successive rounds of legislation and policy effectively set traps for the Windrush generation…  Over decades, legislation progressively eroded the rights of the Windrush generation…  The Hostile Environment was another step on the long road towards a more restrictive immigration regime, but it was also a departure in terms of the scale and seriousness of the effects which would be directly felt by individuals…  The department developed immigration policy at speed, impelled by ministerial pressure, with too little consideration of the possible impact of the measures.”  

Evidence monitoring the impacts of one of the key measures of the Hostile Environment, the Right to Rent scheme, shows it produces discrimination on nationality and racial grounds by outsourcing immigration enforcement to landlords. Other Hostile Environment policies which outsource decision making to healthcare workers, bank workers and employers carry the same risk.   

Wendy Williams found that the Home Office didn’t consider the risks to ethnic minorities appropriately as it developed the right to rent policy and that it carried on with implementing the scheme after others pointed out the risks and after evidence had arisen that those risks had materialised. The policy exemplifies the department’s unwillingness to listen to others’ perspective or take on board external scrutiny, and an approach to policy making which is ideological rather than evidence based. 

As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, back in 2018 I was involved in a detailed case study of two of the Windrush cases. We found that those acting on behalf of the Home Office repeatedly ignored extensive documentary evidence that these people had every right to be in the UK. Instead, they detained them and were on the verge of deporting them. Given that treatment it is perfectly understandable that there is serious concern about what might become of those EU nationals living in the UK who have not met the deadline for application to the settlement scheme. 

As always it will be the vulnerable who suffer most. During the Windrush scandal it was old people who were hit hardest. As the Wednesday deadline approached a Consultant Anaesthetist took to Twitter to set out the story of his 83-year-old German born mother who came to the UK in 1962. She has given a lifetime of dedicated service to the UK and now, like so many of her generation, she has dementia. She has no understanding of the process to gain settled status. Without her son she would have been left unassisted. Even for elderly people without dementia the online process is tricky. What of the elderly or other vulnerable people with no loving family to help them navigate the system? They will be at risk of losing bank accounts, tenancies, access to the NHS and welfare benefits. 

The lessons which should be learned from the Windrush scandal is that these risks are real.  As with the Windrush scandal, many of these EU nationals may be unaware there is any issue with their documented status for years. As for the victims of the Windrush scandal it may come as a horrible shock and cause untold Kafkaesque misery. 

One of my constituents, a white man in his 70s, returned from holiday one year to be told by Border Force Officials that he was an ‘illegal immigrant’. Born in Canada to a Scottish mother he had come to the UK as a baby and known nowhere else. He had never thought he’d be caught up in the Windrush scandal and was deeply upset and had a genuine fear he was going to be deported until my office were able to sort out his documentation. 

Another constituent of mine, a British National from the Commonwealth, who has been here from over 30 years, has been unable to get work as a professional driver for the last five years. He was wrongly accused of having hijacked someone else’s identity because two people with the same name ended up with the same national insurance number. His DWP file was eventually cleared and his right to benefits reinstated yet the Home Office didn’t regularise his identity and he can’t get a new passport or driving licence. His life has been destroyed, he now suffers from severe anxiety, and he has had a significant loss of earnings. He came to me desperate to get his driving licence and unaware of the Windrush Scheme which has been set up to deal with the fall out of the Windrush scandal to get people documents proving their right to live in the UK and to compensate those who have been so severely wronged. My office is working with him now to complete a Windrush application. 

Responses to parliamentary questions show that the waiting time under the Windrush compensation scheme is lengthy. Many have been waiting more than a year and, disgracefully, 21 have died while waiting for a response. And yet the home office has massively underspent its budget for the scheme. It's time that decision making was properly resourced, and that legal aid was made available to help claimants through the bureaucracy.  

Despite all this, the UK Government has ignored repeated warnings about EU nationals falling through the cracks of the settled status scheme leading to a repeat of the sort of mistreatment of British residents we saw during the Windrush scandal.  

The civil penalties and criminal sanctions which can be imposed on employers with illegal EU workers on their books may lead to job losses for those waiting for the grant of a late EU Settlement Scheme application. The administrative burdens of the right to rent checks may lead landlords to discriminate against those with foreign sounding names. It will be just like the days of the signs in the window saying No Blacks and No Irish need apply, except less overt, more insidious. 

The Windrush scandal should have marked the end of the hostile environment, but post-Windrush the Home Office is as hostile as ever as evidenced by the recent events in Kenmure Street. The local multi-cultural community firmly and peaceably showed what they thought of the British Government’s conduct and the victims of the Border Force raid were released. But they and others are still in danger. 

It’s a sad fact that the words Hostile Environment were first used by the Labour party and that the Tories plans were ushered in by their Liberal Democrat handmaidens. While the Tories have made the Hostile Environment their own, it is indicative of a direction of travel on immigration that is widely supported by the Westminster based parties.  

This shameful heavy-handed approach to immigration has no mandate and no place in modern Scotland.  It is one of the many reasons why the SNP wins election after election in Scotland and the responsibility to realise the means to do something about it weighs heavy upon us.