Victims of the Windrush scandal still face long waits and inadequate offers of compensation, according to a new report by a global human rights group.
Human Rights Watch said the home ministry’s compensation system should be turned over to an independent body.
Five years ago it was revealed that thousands of Brits, most of them of Caribbean origin, were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants.
The Home Office said it was “obliged to right Windrush’s wrongs”.
A spokesman said the scheme had “paid or offered more than £68million in compensation to the people affected” and that they would “ensure similar injustices can never be repeated and create a Home Office worthy of any community it serves “.
The scandal, which played out in April 2018, affected people who arrived in Britain from Caribbean countries between 1948 and 1971.
They were dubbed the Windrush generation – a reference to the ship HMT Empire Windrush, which docked at Tilbury on 22 June 1948 and brought workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands to fill Britain’s post-war labor shortage.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of his arrival.
It also affected people from non-Caribbean countries that were previously British colonies who moved to Britain before immigration laws changed in 1971.
Many of those affected were unable to find work, housing or access to medical care. Some who had spent most or all of their lives in the UK were unfairly deported.
Human Rights Watch said people should be entitled to legal aid for their compensation claim because the process is “complex, subject to arbitrary decision-makers, and simply inaccessible.”
The burden of proof placed on victims was “unreasonable” and required people to track down employers and landlords who turned them down a few years ago.
The organization’s report also said that the plaintiffs “do not feel they would receive a fair hearing” at the Home Office “as it is the agency responsible for the injustices”.
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- Windrush victim’s compensation case before the Supreme Court
Thomas Tobierre, 69, told the BBC he arrived in Britain as a young child from St Lucia in 1965, when the Caribbean nation was still a British colony.
Mr. Tobierre worked as an engineer for about five decades, mostly for the same company. But after being sacked in 2017, he said he couldn’t take another job because he couldn’t show he was legally entitled to live and work in the UK.
“It’s like they’re saying you don’t exist,” he said.
He explained that he has used up his £14,000 private pension fund while earning no income.
When Mr Tobierre sought compensation, he spent weeks gathering evidence to prove he had been in the UK for so long – for example an old primary school report card from the 1960s which he happened to have kept.
He said the Home Office also asked him for evidence that he had used up his pension fund, only to later tell him the loss of company pensions was not covered by the scheme.
His daughter Charlotte said she had filed a formal complaint because his pension loss had not been made good.
Mr Tobierre said the Home Office initially offered him £3,000 which – after an appeal – was revised to £16,000 in 2020.
He said that while the amount was less than what he lost on his pension and debt, he accepted the settlement because he needed to pay for home adjustments for his wife Caroline, who had stage four cancer.
Mr Tobierre said he went through the process again in 2021 when Caroline applied to be a close family member of a data subject. She was told she may only have about 12 weeks to live and wanted the money to pay for her funeral.
“She [the Home Office] put her through such a long interview,” he said, adding, “She broke down so many times. I don’t think that was necessary.”
MB – whose name we’ve shortened – told the BBC her mother Eleanor was homeless for 25 years because she couldn’t prove she was legally in the UK.
She sought compensation when the system started in 2019, MB said, and was asked about documents that were either lost or never existed.
“Who keeps records from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s?” She asked. “She [her mother] remembered going to an agency [to ask for work], and her lawyer contacted her, but they said they didn’t remember her. And why should they? That was years ago.”
Jacqueline McKenzie, a lawyer representing hundreds of Windrush victims, told the BBC the program was “torturing people” by asking them for “abundant amounts of evidence that people just don’t have”.
She said: “A lot of that goes back decades, particularly related to employment — so many of the employers and the kind of places they’ve worked… they don’t exist.”
Ms McKenzie added that problems with the program appeared to have “worsened”, explaining: “They had four years so we would have expected rapid improvements.”
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