The UK government has failed the “Windrush generation” so many times… And now, it’s happening again.
Let’s start from the beginning. After 1948, thousands of people from Caribbean islands moved to the UK – named the “Windrush generation” because many arrived on the ship HMT Empire Windrush.
They travelled to the UK with the legal right to permanently live and work there, but failure one: the UK government never issued them documentation so they could later prove their lawful status in the UK.
In 2010, failure two: the UK government destroyed the Windrush landing cards that might have been used to prove their lawful status.
That year, 2010, is key to the story for another reason. It’s when a new set of proposals emerged – what the UK government eventually called its “hostile environment policy.”
It established a set of requirements designed to prevent access to services for anyone unable to prove their immigration status. Its stated aim was to make the requirements so difficult they would push people to leave the country.
Thus, failure three: thousands of long-term, lawful residents of the UK – mostly Black Britons – suddenly found themselves targets of an ill-conceived anti-immigrant policy. The government was telling them they had to prove their status, but the government had also made it impossible for them to do so.
The impacts were devastating. People lost jobs, homes, health care, pensions, and benefits. In many cases, they were detained, deported, and separated from their families.
Eventually, in 2018, the government apologized for the scandal, and in the following year, they opened the Windrush Compensation Scheme. It was designed to compensate members and relatives of the Windrush generation for losses and hardships they suffered.
Which brings us to today and failure four: the compensation scheme itself is failing and – as we detail in new research – violating victims’ right to an effective remedy for human rights abuses they suffered.
As of January 2023, only 12.8 percent of the estimated 11,500 eligible claimants had been compensated. Problems include a complex application process, an unduly high burden of proof, and a lack of meaningful avenues for appeal.
It’s impossible not to see what’s at the core of all these failures, as my colleague Almaz Teffera, HRW’s researcher on racism in Europe, explains:
“The failure of the Windrush Compensation Scheme and the scandal itself are connected to unresolved institutional racism that dates back to the British Empire.”
The UK government’s serial failures on Windrush have shown they are simply unable to deal with this issue properly. It’s time they hand over the compensation scheme to an independent body.
