Victims of the Windrush scandal have been stunned by the political fallout triggered by their decision to go public with personal accounts of the catastrophic consequences of the Home Office’s decision to treat them as illegal immigrants.
Many were unsure whether to welcome Amber Rudd’s resignation or be concerned that a change in leadership at the Home Office might slow down efforts to try to resolve the catalogue of problems facing this generation of older, Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents who have no documents.
Timeline Amber Rudd's apologies
The home secretary has issued five apologies in the last week – four of them over her department's handling of the Windrush crisis and immigration targets.
Rudd delivered an unprecedented apology to parliament and acknowledged that her department had “lost sight of individuals” and become “too concerned with policy”.
Rudd apologised for failing to grasp the scale of the problem. She told the home affairs select committee: “I bitterly, deeply regret that I didn’t see it as more than individual cases gone wrong that needed addressing. I didn’t see it as a systemic issue until very recently.”
On Thursday morning, Rudd was forced to admit officials did have targets for removals, having previously denied their existence.
“The immigration arm of the Home Office has been using local targets for internal performance management. These were not published targets against which performance was assessed, but if they were used inappropriately then I am clear that this will have to change."
On Thursday afternoon, Rudd was forced to issue a hasty clarification after appearing to leave the door open to the UK staying in a customs union with the EU.
“I should have been clearer – of course when we leave the EU we will be leaving the customs union."
In a series of late-night tweets, Rudd apologised for not being aware of documents, leaked to the Guardian, which set out immigration removal targets.
‘I wasn’t aware of specific removal targets. I accept I should have been and I’m sorry that I wasn’t. I didn’t see the leaked document, although it was copied to my office as many documents are."
But there was underlying excitement that finally, after years of being ignored, it now looks like it will be impossible to overlook the extreme suffering inflicted on large numbers of retirement-age Windrush children, by a series of deliberately inflexible policies introduced by Theresa May when she was home secretary.
Sarah O’Connor, 57, who was driven close to bankruptcy by the scandal, said she hoped the political upheaval would also highlight the worrying resurgence of racism in Britain, which she believes has been stirred up by the government’s immigration policies.
“I grew up with the National Front around my area – I thought those attitudes had been stamped out. I think that the government has stoked it up again, without realising what they are doing,” she said. “The Home Office attitude has been: send them back. But unfortunately we are British. This has all ignited the fire of racism again.”
Nick Broderick, 63, who arrived in the UK when he was three, and lived with his mother (an NHS nurse) and his older sister (who worked as a matron at the Royal Free hospital in north London), was sacked from his 18-year job as a night-shift driver (driving mostly EU-origin workers to jobs at the Amazon warehouse, or farming jobs) when immigration officials did a check on the office’s records.
He was told he was going to be deported, and made plans to kill himself, if he was taken back to Jamaica. He said he had hoped that Rudd would stay on to “fix the department’s wrongs”. “But she stands at the head of the organisation; she had to take responsibility,” he said.
Before this morning, he knew nothing about Rudd’s replacement, Sajid Javid, but he was impressed by his first statement. Javid’s acknowledgement that his own family could have been caught up in the scandal was welcome, Broderick said. “He actually knows how close he could have been to finding himself in my position. He seems to have the right feeling for the job; I feel very positive about him.”
But Broderick, like many affected by the scandal, was frustrated that Rudd had ultimately had to step down over a policy introduced by May. He said: “May is responsible for this. She has to take the blame as well.”
Natalie Barnes, whose mother Paulette Wilson, 61, spent a week in Yarl’s Wood immigration centre and narrowly avoided being deported back to Jamaica, a country she last visited in 1968 when she was eight, said she felt “a bit sorry for” Rudd. “Theresa May has put it all on her,” she said.
O’Connor, who moved to Britain from Jamaica 51 years ago when she was six and has lived here ever since, was told she was here illegally by officials last summer, and is £17,000 in debt as a result of being prevented from working and having been told she was not eligible for unemployment benefits.
She was devastated when her immigration status was questioned – she attended primary and secondary school in the UK, paid taxes, held a driving licence, was married for 17 years to someone British, and has four British children. She said she was anxious about what would happen to the compensation process after Rudd’s departure.
“What about her promises to us? She said some good things,” she said. She cautiously welcomed Javid. “If he does what he says he is going to do, that’s all well and good – but actions speak louder than words. Maybe because he is from a minority group, he will understand what we are going through better than Rudd; it could have been someone in his family in our situation. He may have more sympathetic views. His first priority should be to the Windrush people.”
Broderick was also impressed by much of what Javid said in his first appearance in the Commons as home secretary – his repeated statement that he did not like the word “hostile” and preferred the word “compliant”, and his commitment to introducing a “fair and humane immigration system”.
There is accumulating evidence that despite the global attention focused on Windrush victims, many remain in dire financial straits, despite the government’s promises to act fast. One man made homeless by the scandal was last week rehoused by the local council, but placed in a flat with no furniture. He has no money to buy any, having been denied benefits and prevented from working.
Trevor Johnson, a widowed father of two, has been hoping to receive an urgent back payment of two years’ worth of unpaid benefits, so he can stop worrying about the alarming bailiffs’ letters that keep being delivered. An enquiry to the Department for Work and Pensions press office about when the payment might be made was referred to the Home Office. A Home Office spokesperson was unable to comment on whether the money might be paid urgently, to allow Johnson to begin rebuilding his life quickly, or whether he would have to wait until more details were announced of the compensation scheme.
“The Home Office will be setting up a new compensation scheme which will be run by an independent person. We will be making this process simple and going the extra mile to support people in this situation. The Home Office will be pursuing the large programme of work at pace,” a spokesperson for the department said.
The issue of personal apologies to victims provided further evidence of a department that remains tone deaf to the sensitivities of those whose lives have been thrown into disarray by its policies.
Sylvester Marshall (the cancer patient previously referred to as Albert Thompson) was mildly surprised to receive no apology from officials when he went to collect his residency papers on Friday. Questioned about its decision not to show any regret towards Marshall, the Home Office said in an emailed statement: “The home secretary has issued a number of apologies to all those affected over the last fortnight – this includes Mr Thompson.”