WCS0033
Supplementary written evidence submitted by Jacqueline McKenzie (WCS0033)
[Note: This evidence has been redacted by the Committee. Text in square brackets has been inserted where text has been redacted.]
1.1 This evidence is submitted by Jaqueline McKenzie of McKenzie Beute and Pope and The Centre for Migration Advice and Research. The latter runs the Windrush Justice Project. Jacqueline is a solicitor in England and Wales and an Attorney at the Bar of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court of Grenada. She gave oral evidence on the Windrush Compensation Scheme (WCS) to the Home Affairs Committee (HAC) on the 9 December 2020[1], was a member of the Independent Advisory Group to the Windrush Lessons Learned Review[2] and is a member of the Windrush Advisory Group coordinated by the Home Office though this group is to be abandoned in place of the Home Secretary’s Cross Government Working Group formed on the 22 June 2020[3].
1.2 In May 2018, Jacqueline started holding pro bono legal surgeries for people affected by the Windrush scandal at the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in Brixton and at locations across England. In July 2018, having seen over 500 people at these surgeries, she set up Windrush Action (WA) to be a representative voice of people directly affected by the Windrush scandal and together with solicitors from Birnberg Peirce and barristers from Doughty Street and Garden Court Chambers, made written submissions to the WCS on the 16 November 2018 on behalf of WA. Jacqueline is no longer a member of WA but continues to work closely with over 20 organisations across the country who are delivering advice, advocacy and other services to people affected by the scandal. Jacqueline joined with several leading law firms to write to the Home Secretary on the 17 August 2020 to raise concerns about the WCS and has regularly spoken in the media and at public meetings on these issues.
1.3 Jacqueline is currently assisting 262 primary and secondary claimants with status documentation, compensation claims and ancillary Windrush matters.
1.4 On the 14 December 2020, just five days after the HAC referred to above, the Home Secretary announced new rules to the WCS[4]. These are generally welcomed but fall short of the radical overhaul needed. The positive changes include:
1.5 This submission to HAC is further to my oral evidence of the 9 December and is based on my experience of working on these issues prior to and since the scandal. It is also based on my ongoing communication with claimants, the Home Office, the CARICOM diplomatic corps, Windrush advocacy groups and lawyers, and is informed by the changes to the WCS implemented on the 16 December 2020. It responds specifically to a list of questions provided by the HAC.
2 Is the Home Office managing to “right the wrongs” experienced by the Windrush generation through this Compensation Scheme?
2.1 The Windrush scandal must be posited within a discourse of how the Windrush generation, as a group of people identified across races, cultures and identities, joined by a pattern of migration and through varied experiences, have feared in a society which has regarded them largely as second-class citizens. In the main, they have been so maligned and mistreated that both they and future generations have performed poorly in education, employment, economic development, health and in their experiences with the criminal justice system. Politicians and policy makers of the 1950s, 60s and 70s did not regard the Windrush generation as full and permanent citizens of the UK. Paul Gilroy, writing in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation concluded that whilst Churchill extolled the virtues of the mother country, he was steadfast in his desire to place migrants from the new Commonwealth at a distance and to ‘keep Britain white’.[5] It is impossible to right the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation without going beyond the limitations of their experiences under the hostile environment. There is a need to assess the impact of the historical injustices with a view to providing both restorative and reparative justice. This work has not yet begun.
2.2 The WCS is limited to aiding people who can prove an eligible claim. Using data from the Census 2011[6], the Home Office calculated that some 50,000 people could be eligible to apply for immigration status documents from the Windrush Scheme (WS). Most of the people applying to the WS could also be eligible to apply to the WCS. It remains puzzling as to why there is such a disparity between the potential for 50,000 applicants as a baseline and the circa 13,000 who have received documentation or for the disparity between the 13,000 and the low numbers who have submitted a compensation claim of just 1867 by the 31 January 2021[7]. Moreover, the 50,000 figure is likely to be an underestimate as it is based on people in the UK on a particular date and does not factor in what could be tens of thousands of people, particularly in Africa and Asia, who have not yet been able to access even the WS let alone the WCS.
2.3 Money cannot right the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation or even those affected by the scandal. At best, the WCS has the capacity to alleviate some suffering by reimbursing eligible claimants for actual losses and a compensatory sum for the effect the scandal has had on their lives; it should, at a minimum, put claimants back into the position they would have been but for the grave historical errors compounded by the operation of the modern-day hostile environment.
2.4 The WCS is linked to the acquisition of immigration status through the WS but applicants who believe they are eligible continue to be refused both settlement and citizenship, the latter for reasons including failing to meet the residency test when their being out of the UK was down to the Home Office, the high numbers of refusals of returning residents visas and the exclusion of some descendants of the Windrush generation who arrived in the UK after 1988 or who arrived as adults. There is still work to be done on remedying the legislation which has unfairly removed or denied status to people without warning or consultation and been misapplied in some cases. Until these issues are addressed, we will not really know the scale of the Windrush scandal let alone the scale of the compensation issue.
3.1 Revised tariffs - The increase in the tariffs for ‘Impact on Life’ is welcomed. During my oral evidence referred to above, I described the inadequacy of the original tariffs and asked what sort of impact the Home Office imagined when they set a tariff of just £250.
3.2 Trauma - It is essential to understand the role that trauma plays in the Windrush scandal and its intergenerational effect. Claimants of the Windrush generation express guilt in the belief that they failed to secure their own or their children’s immigration status and the descendants of those affected have undoubtedly lost life enhancing opportunities. There are now up to five generations of families affected by the scandal and many of the claimants describe the reaction and performance of the Home Office as retraumatising rather than reassuring. The history and experience of the claimant cohort is largely misunderstood. Wendy Williams, in her report into the Windrush Lessons Learned Review wrote, in response to questions about racism: “While I am unable to make a definitive finding of institutional racism, I have serious concerns that these failings demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation within the department which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.”[8] The Windrush generation are a proud group of people who thought they were moving from one part of their country to another, i.e., their motherland. They hoped to excel through hard work and valued the notions of Britishness. If they could not excel, they had high hopes for their descendants. Generally, this has not been their experience. Though media coverage has aided their struggle, many tell me that they and their families feel a sense of shame at having their lives on public display but saw this as the only way to achieve justice. They believe that they are portrayed as beggars rather than people who are seeking to be put into the position most worked hard to be in in the first place. It is my view that most of the claimants I see are more traumatised now than they were at the outset as a result of their interactions and engagement with the issues; then they were just thankful that someone had taken notice and were hopeful for a swift resolution. A major fault of the WCS is the lack of funding available for claimants to be able to access psychiatric and psychological reports to be able to show the extent of the trauma they and their families have experienced and continue to experience and for therapy.
3.3 Independence - Claimants are up against a formidable opponent. It is extraordinary that the very department which caused the problems in the first place and those coming after with the hostile environment, the tortfeasor, are responsible for administering the redress. Moreover, it is unclear whether there is effective independent oversight of the WCS. If there is, it is unclear what form this takes. It is one thing to say that someone provides independent oversight by their role but what does this mean and how is this work conducted? By now, I would expect to see an independent interim evaluation of the governance and performance of the WCS. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that tier one reviews, the first stage of the appeals process, are conducted by the Home Office and tier two reviews by the Adjudicator’s Office[9] which falls within the same legal entity as the Commissioners of HMRC. It would have been preferable for there to have been an organisation at arm’s length from government for the tier two reviews if not both tiers. The Parliamentary and Health Ombudsman can only get involved via MPs once claimants have exhausted both tiers. This entire process is perceived as too bureaucratic and insufficiently independent and as a result, claimants are accepting offers which ought to be challenged in some cases. I am sympathetic to the campaign for the WCS to be removed from the Home Office but worry that this could result in even further delays. Three years on, the Home Office really ought to be made to fix the problems and get on with the job.
3.4 Delay – The delays in the processing of claims is a major issue. I personally know and have heard of 12 cases involving people who have died. The Home Office advise that their records show that 21 people have died and they have received 91 estate claims as of 31 January 2021[10]. These statistics are likely to increase given the ages of many of the claimants and given the disproportionate mortality rates in African and Caribbean people due to many factors including Covid-19. The Home Office set up the Windrush Task Force to administer both the WS and the WCS expecting 50,000 people to access status documents. Many of these could be eligible to apply for compensation. It is difficult to comprehend what the set up could be that produces such a severely underperforming unit managing less than 5% of the anticipated claims. What would the situation be if the Home Office had received just double the number of the claims it has received of the 15,000 it says it was expecting though it is not clear how that estimate has been arrived at.
3.5 Access to Justice – The parties do not enjoy equality of arms. The preparing of claims requires expert input. The lack of an option for claimants to choose their legal advisors either outright or from a panel for which the Home Office would be responsible for fees, puts them at a disadvantage and is almost unheard of in a scheme such as this. The consequences are severe and include claimants having to give up between 25% and 30% of their compensation to solicitors including many of the leading human rights firms. I have even seen a copy of a conditional fee agreement where a client was expected to give up 67% of their compensation award. The Home Office had contracted with Citizens Advice to help claimants. They play an important role in society and would have much experience of working with the claimant cohort but I was concerned as to their suitability. Very few specialise in providing immigration services and they are one of the organisations to whom most claimants turned when they first encountered the hostile environment, obtaining mixed results. Several claimants told me they were reluctant to return to them for help on their compensation claims. They have however helped over 200 claimants.[11] The Home Office have now contracted with We Are Digital to deliver claims assistance from the 1 March 2021 for the sum of £844,000[12]. In a letter from the Home Secretary to HAC[13], she confirms that that organisation was chosen because it has worked with the Home Office to provide digital assistance to the claimant group when accessing immigration services online and because they have national reach. The Windrush claimants would not have been accessing immigration services online, in the main, and the work needed now is not assistance with online access but significant advice, legal and hand holding throughout the claims process delivered in a culturally sensitive way. There are service providers in all the major conurbations where claimants live, including lawyers, law centres and community advocacy groups, who a claimant could chose to go to; these groups have been assisting claimants since the outset in some cases and exist in areas such as Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Liverpool, London, Luton, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford and Preston. They should be funded to do this work which requires an understanding of the conditions under which people have lived, the immigration back history and hours, over several days, of discussion just to get to the stage of writing an impactful statement. I look forward to the evaluations of the outcomes of both the work of Citizens Advice and We Are Digital.
3.6 Loss of Employment – The removal of the 12-month cap is good news. However, this category still falls short of putting people back to where they were or could have been. In some cases, the cap of £13,764.00 may suffice and in others, it will not. There can be no justification therefore for an across-the-board sum. The Home Office has advised that this is too difficult to resolve. They do need to utilise actuarial expertise to attend to this as a matter of urgency. Claimants need to be reimbursed and compensated for loss of future earnings to retirement age, loss of pay increments and rises, loss of career progression and promotion, loss of savings where specific products have been encashed, loss of pension contributions and the impact on pension accumulation and losses caused as a result of having to cash in pensions prematurely. Many, due to discrimination in employment, worked in informal economies or for employers who we now know did not submit their national insurance and taxation to HMRC. Further, several people worked on a self-employed basis for exceptionally low wages and did not report to HMRC. These were not necessarily tax avoiders as their earnings would have meant that many would not have paid any tax but more to do with an ignorance of the requirement to report even exceptionally low income.
3.7 Impact on Life – This is the head of claim under which most claimants are likely to succeed. As of 16 December, there are 5 levels of claim but the descriptors in each level are vague and, in some cases, indistinguishable. It is also difficult to understand the process for evaluation. What expertise do Home Office case owners have to assess trauma, stress and anxiety? Who are they consulting on how cultures and identities impact on life events? Whose expertise are they relying on in psychological assessments? From the feedback they provide on the narratives supplied by claimants, it seems clear that scant regard is given to the material placed before them let alone being able to interpret that material. The only way to truly evidence the impact on anyone’s life would be through expert intervention from either trauma specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists and other therapists. Unless this is built into the scheme then it cannot be deemed fair.
Impact on life: tariff table Level Description Remedy amount with my comments in italics:
This tariff is not available to secondary claimants, yet it is the level that most are likely to qualify under. This decision must be revised even if limited to the number of secondary claimants per primary claimant.
The Home Office has given no indication as to how they define moderate and what they mean by a relative short period of time; examples should be provided. There is unlikely to be anyone who has suffered an impact lasting weeks or months. The very fact that this issue came to light three years ago and many claimants are only just getting compensation is indicative of an impact beyond a few months and many people have been harmed several years ago.
The Home Office has given no indication as to how they define relatively normal which is a contradiction in terms and substantially affected; examples should be provided. The comment about time frames in 2 above, applies.
The Home Office has given no indication as to how they define seriously compromised; examples should be provided.
I have struggled to understand what the Home Office means by irreversible because unless someone has died, there is likely to be, with some intervention and redress, change; examples should be given.
4.1 There are ongoing issues with the ‘loss of employment’ and impact on life categories as described in 3.6 and 3.7 above.
4.2 The reimbursement for legal fees of £500 is inadequate. I have seen cases where claimants paid thousands of pounds making visa applications, obtaining counsel’s opinion and taking cases to the Tribunals.
4.3 There is a group of people of the Windrush generation who applied to naturalise as British citizens or for indefinite leave to remain or for evidence that there is no time limit on their right to be in the UK, before the scandal became known. There is no reason why this group of people should not be entitled to reclaim their fees. Many in this group have spent around £2000 in legal and Home Office fees to be able to obtain evidence of a status they already held.
4.4 I have a small but important group of cases where claimants were made to leave university courses or stopped from applying in the first place. The tariff of £500 is not acceptable in such cases. This does not factor in the loss of life chances though it is hoped that the improved tariffs on impact on life will assist those claimants who are affected.
4.5 Very few claims will fall under the other headings so it is important to get impact on life, loss of employment, loss of a university education and legal fees, right.
5.1 The Home Office has arranged several community events around the country and since the lockdown, these have moved online where it is more or less the same group of claimants, advocates and community representatives in attendance. They have been particularly good in articulating the issues, but the claimants are not at all representative numbering less than 25 people of a potential cohort of 50,000.
5.2 During April and May 2018, I met with both the Home Office’s Director General overseeing Windrush and the communication lead and shared ideas, including a paper on how to engage effectively with the community. This included a methodology used by the ONS to engage groups of various nationalities to complete the 2011 Census. The Home Office did not heed this advice but in December 2020 took on Windrush ambassadors to work for 2 months. I am certain that this was a futile operation partly because there was little anyone could do during a lockdown, there were no budgets attached to the role to hold events or do any serious work and it is not clear what knowledge some of the ambassadors had of the issues. The Home Office repeatedly try to address this issue on the cheap and without any adequate thought processes. I look forward to seeing the evaluation of the ambassador’s programme.
5.3 To engage people effectively, particularly those tens of thousands who have not yet come forward, will take a team of people with the knowledge and skills and who can go into the respective communities and do outreach and engage. The Home Office has consulted but what is needed is that it supports a proper programme of outreach and engagement into centres of influence using individuals and organisations embedded within the relevant communities. The very advocacy groups who provide the Home Office with consultation opportunities have not been provided with any meaningful support to do their work, yet they are the ones who are best placed; they cover most of England with networks in Wales and Scotland, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
5.4 The Home Office advertised a community fund of £500,000 but this is not for advice and advocacy work. And even then, we were advised by a senior Home Office official that the sum was being redirected to the Home Secretary’s Cross Government Working Group. It is my view that this sum was only restored after we condemned the move at the HAC on the 9 December 2020 because on the 14 December the Home Secretary announced that the fund was now available. However, three years after the scandal, very few groups have had any funding from the Home Office to do any sort of work and claims to this budget are capped at £25,000 and limited by scope. An overview of some of the organisations who have received this funding in the first round, shows that it is failing to reach the groups and organisations best placed and currently doing the work.
5.5 The Home Office spent £9 million[14], and possibly more since they announced that sum, to support community groups to help people needing help to apply for EU Settled Status. Now this scheme is not without problems and EU citizens have been treated abysmally but when you compare the support given to that group and the lack of support given to Windrush victims, it is telling. Of course, there is scale but the funding could be apportioned. The Home Office advised me that they did not consider funding organisations because they did not know who to fund. This was also said by a major media outlet who raised over £1 million pounds to support work being done for the Windrush generation but gave none of it to the actual grassroots groups doing the work. This to me is indicative of the suspicion and concept to which the Windrush cohort and those who represent them are regarded. There has been no assistance to help those delivering services on a day-to-day level. I cannot but help think that systemic racism and stereotypes are at play here.
6.1 This has been one of the worst performing areas of the WS, best illustrated by direct examples:
6.2 I am of the view that if the preliminary payments of £10,000 can be granted more expeditiously, then the need for this team is questionable and their resources should go to helping to process compensation claims. The work with vulnerable people should have gone to an independent and experienced NGO.
7.1 Generally, when you interact with the Home Office, people are
professional notwithstanding the evidence I give regarding the VPT. However, I have a case of a client who I believe received an inadequate offer. I offered to complete a tier 1 review for her only to find that someone at the Home Office had told her that there was no point, that she would not get any further compensation and that lawyers were being misleading. In frustration she decided to accept what I believe to be an inaccurate offer.
7.2 I was feeling confident that there were people at the Home Office wanting to resolve the Windrush scandal until November 2020 when there was news of an internal investigation into complaints of racism and discrimination within the teams set up to address the matter leading to the resignation of Alexandra Ankrah. Alexandra, a former barrister and policy expert, was the most senior Black employee in the team responsible for the WCS. She described the operations of the department as systemically racist and unfit for purpose. At the same time, the Guardian also reported that 20 members of staff working on the Windrush Lessons Learned Review were interviewed by a civil service equality, diversity and inclusion officer after allegations of racial discrimination were made by them. [15] That this should happen three years after the first stories appeared advising of the Windrush scandal is extremely disturbing and not at all indicative of lessons being learned. I hope measures are being taken to ensure that there are no issues of racism or discrimination affecting the work of the Home Office’s Windrush teams. I look forward to hearing the outcome of these investigations.
8.1 There is no doubt that the Home Office has a difficult job to do.
One of the things I said repeatedly during the Windrush Lessons Learned Review was that the department is too big, unwieldy and policies are driven by political ideology. It was alarming to hear that officials who previously worked on deportation are now working on Windrush though I accept that I have no evidence that people are not able to act professionally. Due to the pandemic, I have found improvements in dealing with case owners by having increased access by email and telephone which reduces the level of bureaucracy and misunderstanding and has resulted in some very speedy outcomes. However, the political drivers are such that the overall culture will remain the same. The Home Secretary’s language on activist lawyers, asylum seekers, deportations, particularly of people who have lived all or most of their lives in the UK, the planned reopening of detention centres for women and reneging on the UNHCR backed Action Access pilot[16], deprivation of citizenship, immigration fees, the increases to the Immigration Health Surcharge and the requirement to pay same by tax payers, the impact of no recourse to public funds, makes it difficult to determine any cultural change. This is exasperated by the fact that the issues raised by the Windrush scandal are far from being resolved.
9.1 The application form is very straightforward and at 20 pages is hardly onerous. The casework guidance, also used by claimants, at 94 pages is too long, bewildering and requires expert interpretation in some areas. The difficulties in making a claim are not to do with either of these two issues though but to do with evidencing the claim particularly ‘impact on life’ and ‘loss of employment’. We have spent over a year with some claimants trying to assist them to get GP records, employment and HMRC records and trawling through their life histories to evidence a claim. With the burden of proof being lowered, this is something I hope will make claims easier to manage but it remains unclear what constitutes evidence in some cases and in many instances, where claimants are acting for themselves, it would be useful to have a checklist of evidence to act as an aide memoir.
10.1 See 3.5
11.1 Examples of poor practice have been addressed above. My own experience
though is that I have had good and timely feedback when dealing with senior members of the Windrush teams. I am hopeful that we will see an end to the requests for onerous amounts of further information, especially of an irrelevant nature and especially when this information was part of the claim in the first place.
working well?
12.1 See sections 3 and 4 above.
If not, what changes would make the rules and guidance work better to give people fair compensation?
13.1 See sections 3 and 4 above.
14.1 I mention one extremely poor example in 7.1 above but I have limited
experience of the review process and have a positive outcome of a review.
14.2 Several the issues raised in reviews may well be addressed by the uplifts to
the ‘impact on life’ tariff and the reduction in the evidential burden. We are
waiting to see what some of the revised offers might be.
15.1 The scheme started in May 2019 and should not end before a minimum
period of 6 years, i.e., May 2026, if at all. It is unclear why it remains the case that it will end in 2023 when so few people have come forward to make claims let alone the delays being experienced by the relatively small number of existing claimants.
15.2 The Home Office must revisit the tariff, Loss of Employment, to factor in
future loss of earnings, future loss of pension contributions, pension losses,
early encashment of savings and investment products and pensions and loss
of income due to increments, inflationary uplifts and promotion
opportunities. Actuaries must be brought in to examine this area which is causing significant angst and hardship and failing to put claimants back into the position they would have been were it not for the Home Office’s own actions.
15.3 The Home Office must review the descriptors under Impact on Life and provide more concrete evidence as to how you distinguish between the levels. They must also provide guidance as to how the decisions are being made because in practice, they appear to be arbitrary both for and against claimants.
15.4 The tariff for loss of a university place needs to be significantly revised. Experts need to assess impact not just using the descriptors available under the Impact on Life tariff but by doing an analysis on the economic and opportunity cost consequences.
15.5 It is not clear why the process of deciding an application is so slow. The Home Office must revisit its staffing quotas and the skills set of people engaged in this area of work if this is the problem.
15.6 There are issues regarding immigration status which impact on compensation. For example, people wrongly denied re-entry to the UK, did not qualify for the preliminary payment of £10,000 promised last December. Instead, these claimants are being told that it is unclear whether they have a claim. If the reason they were kept out of the country in the first place was down to the Home Office, they must have a claim irrespective of what the law says on absences of 2 years.
15.7 The ongoing work to revise nationality law is important and the Home Office must continue to engage with practitioners and stakeholders.
15.8 Funding should be made available to enable claimants to obtain specialist expert reports, especially on their mental wellbeing. This was in the gift of the adjudicator but appears to have been deleted. It is required however at the first instance.
15.7 Funding should be made available to assist claimants to receive private therapy for ongoing trauma should they wish for this. NHS waiting lists are too long. Claimants have suffered enormously and their conditions are worsening by their experiences of having to interact with the Home Office.
15.8 Immigration fees paid by members of the Windrush generation for Indefinite Leave
to Remain and citizenship should be refunded. It is reasonable for there to be a cap on how far back a period this should cover.
15.9 All legal fees paid in the making of and appealing applications to the Home
Office should be refunded.
15.10 The Home Office needs to fund the grassroots Windrush organisations to
carry out both engagement and advice and advocacy on a one stop shop basis. The current community fund does not allow this to happen in that it prohibits advocacy work.
15.11 The Home Office needs to run a campaign on the Windrush Scheme and the
Compensation Scheme in relevant parts of the UK and in relevant countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean like that done for the EUSS.
15.12 The scheme needs to adopt a legal panel of solicitors and advisors who are
paid to assist claimants
15.13 I did not think that the Windrush Compensation Scheme should have been handled
by the Home Office in the first place and most certainly not the work with vulnerable
persons. I am concerned about further delays but I accept that there needs to be a critical examination as to whether claimants having to deal with the Home Office is retraumatising and whether the expertise exists within the department to make the operation run smoothly. However, there are flaws in the actual scheme so just moving the scheme as it is to another organisation will not resolve some of the issues raised above. The Home Office needs to be set some targets within a timeframe for improvement and if they fail then there can be no argument about whether the scheme remains with them or not but whilst this is happening, there must be an urgent review of the ongoing problem areas.
15.14 Reviews should not be handled by the Home Office at any level.
15.15 Written communication from the Home Office is quite daunting for claimants and
should reflect plain English guidance.
15.16 It is not clear what real independent oversight there is of the Windrush
Compensation Scheme. Whoever occupies this role should be made to produce reports on a quarterly basis. It is not clear what they do otherwise.
15.17 It would be useful to know the outcome into the investigations into
allegations of racism and discrimination in the departments attending to
Windrush issues.
15.18 It would be useful to see an evaluation of the CA Service and We Are Digital
Contracts as well as the work of the Windrush Ambassadors.
15.19 Work needs to be undertaken with stakeholders involved in this work to implement
the elements of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review that can be implemented with community engagement. The Home Office is showing scant regard for the actual organisations delivering work to aid people affected by the Windrush scandal.
July 2021
[1] https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/1372/pdf/
[2] Windrush Lessons Learned Review: Independent Advisory Group terms of reference - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[3] Windrush Cross-Government Working Group - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[4] Windrush compensation scheme overhauled - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[5] Gilroy, P, There A’int No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, 1987
[6] 2011 Census - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
[7] Windrush Compensation Scheme data: January 2021 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[8] Williams, W 2020, Windrush Lessons Learned Review
[9] Ask the Adjudicator’s Office to review a Windrush Compensation Scheme decision - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[10] Windrush Compensation Scheme data: February 2021 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[11] Ibid
[12] The Windrush Compensation Scheme - Committees - UK Parliament
[13] Ibid
[14] New fund to support vulnerable EU citizens apply for settled status - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
[15] In November 2020, the most senior Black member of staff Black official quit ‘racist’ Windrush compensation scheme | Windrush scandal | the Guardian November 18, 2020)
[16] Revealed: Priti Patel U-turn on end to detention for refugee women | Refugees | The Guardian