Human Rights Watch on Thursday asserted that the British Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s findings of severe issues with the Home Office’s management of the Windrush Compensation Scheme has “wider implications” for everyone seeking compensation.
“The ombudsman’s decision illustrates once again that the Home Office’s Windrush Compensation Scheme is not fit for purpose and is compounding the suffering of Windrush survivors,” Almaz Teffera, researcher on racism in Europe at Human Rights Watch, stated.
The ombudsman’s recent findings reveal how enactment of the compensation scheme as fallen short of its goals. The framework of the compensation scheme was developed after an exposé was released in late 2017 detailing the Windrush scandal, in which the Home Office had wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights to the “Windrush generation,” a group of people from British Commonwealth countries who had boarded the HMT Empire Windrush—one of the few ships that arrived in the UK from Caribbean British Commonwealth countries between 1948 and 1971.
Although they were given indefinite leave to remain, had “settled status,”and were legally “ordinarily residents” in the UK under the Immigration Act 1971, they were not issued proper legal documentation, and as a result lost access to employment, pensions and healthcare services.
For example, Thomas Tobierre, a Windrush descendant, lost his job after a false declaration that he was not a British citizen. The Home Office did not recognize his pecuniary losses as compensatory, arguing instead that private loses are “too hard to compensate.” His is one of many ongoing cases where families have been allegedly refused the right to effective remedy.
In addition to legislative constraints, the Home Office demanded that descendants provide at least one official document from every year that they had resided in the UK, creating a heightened burden of proof. In 2012, the “Hostile Environment” policy compounded the effects of allegedly discriminatory measures. The policy empowered non-state actors to conduct independent checks, such as landlords checking on tenants’ citizenship status before renting property.
The compensation scheme arose as a means to provide more clarity and to remedy hardships perpetrated against communities that were unjustly categorized as illegal immigrants by offering compensation.
