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Complaints of racism and discrimination within Home Office teams set up to address the Windrush scandal prompted the launch of an internal investigation and the resignation of a senior official, The Guardian learned.
It can be revealed that the top black Home Office employee on the team responsible for Windrush’s compensation scheme resigned earlier this year, describing the scheme as systematically racist and unfit for its purpose.
The Guardian also learned that a separate set of discrimination complaints within a different Home Office team investigating the causes of the Windrush scandal led to an earlier internal investigation.
An “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” civil service official interviewed about 20 staff members working on Wendy Williams’ independent review Windrush Lessons Learned after ethnic minority staff members made allegations of racially discriminatory treatment.
Alexandra Ankrah, a former attorney who served as head of policy on the Windrush compensation scheme, said she resigned because she lost confidence in a program that she said “did not support people who have been victims” and that “does acknowledges their trauma. “
Several proposals he made to improve the scheme were rejected, he said. “The results speak for themselves: the slowness in getting money to people, the unwillingness to provide information and guidance that ordinary people can understand.”
It was concerned that several members of the Home Office staff responsible for the compensation scheme had previously helped implement the hostile environmental policies that had originally caused so much trouble for the claimants.
As of the end of October, the compensation scheme had been running for 18 months and only £ 1.6 million had been paid to 196 people. Officials had originally expected thousands of applications to be submitted and estimated that the government would eventually have to pay between £ 200 million and £ 570 million. At least nine people have died before receiving the compensation they requested.
Ankrah’s concerns were echoed by whistleblowers from the Lessons Learned review, who felt uneasy that ingrained work styles at the Home Office made staff insensitive on the issue of race. “The irony was that the same review team that was investigating what the Interior Ministry believes to be a past injustice was doing it in a way that defended all the systemic racism that exists in the Interior Ministry,” said a member of the Interior Ministry. team that was interviewed as part of said internal investigation.
Ankrah served as a policy chief in the Windrush compensation scheme from its launch in March 2019 until April 2020, when she resigned and moved to another department of the Home Office. He left the Home Office entirely in August 2020 to start working for the NHS.
He said he raised concerns with his bosses on several occasions about what he felt was systemic racism within the scheme. “It is not just racism. It is an unwillingness to look with curiosity or genuine concern at the situation of the victims, many of whom were elderly and ill, ”he said. As a result, a group of predominantly black and Asian people were being “traumatized again” by the compensation scheme, he said.
She said she was criticized by a senior colleague for always seeing “things through the prism of race” and was censured for “staying outside and throwing rocks.”
As the only black senior member of the team, she was “irritated” by these reprimands and asked: “[If] I was throwing stones from the outside, who put me on the outside? “He felt that his role on the compensation team was marginalized and that his” experiences as a black person, as a professional, were diminished or devalued. “
“I am not a disgruntled employee; I am not filing a lawsuit in labor court, it was not my job. It was about fulfilling the promise of this government to repair the damage that many people had suffered, “he said.
She described taking the position because she wanted to help with the process of ensuring justice for Windrush’s generation, but quickly became concerned about the team’s ability to deliver.
Ankrah proposed a simplified English version of the compensation request form, as well as a greater understanding towards the families of people who died before completing a claim. He also made suggestions on how to help widows and children.
He said he wanted to help people show that his treatment had a detrimental impact on their lives, but that his recommendations were ignored. “The plan was meant to allow people to make their own requests, without the need for legal advice. But the guide was poor; this meant that it was not suitable for its purpose. “
Ankrah’s main concern was that many on the team working on compensation had immigration law enforcement backgrounds, or were still working in that section of the Home Office. “These were the same people who hadn’t questioned the Windrush situation in the first place,” he said. “It is unusual, isn’t it, that the same part of the organization handles complaints? You usually have some kind of separation at least to show credibility. “
Ankrah was also concerned by numerous comments that she believed revealed the attitudes of Interior Ministry employees. She said the staff were reluctant with the payments and told her, “People should be happy with what they get.” She added: “A lawyer from the Interior Ministry told me: ‘If they die without a will, what a pity, they should have made a will.’
When he tried to help speed up the payment of a claimant with a terminal illness, his colleagues began to “argue whether he should be paid a negligible sum or a very insignificant sum.” She felt that some of the comments “betrayed a total lack of humanity.”
Three separate teams were established to correct the errors against the Windrush generation in 2018. In addition to the compensation scheme, the Windrush task force has been widely praised for quickly delivering documentation to some 13,000 people who had been wrongly designated as illegal immigrants.
Separately, BAME staff working on the review of lessons learned from Windrush, the third unit established in the wake of the scandal, said they were concerned that they would not be invited to key workshops and that they would be assigned non-speaking roles in the meetings, the whistleblowers told The Guardian.
After staff members attempted to raise concerns internally, a complaint was made to the chairman of the Interior Ministry’s career board. As a result, a human resources team from the Ministry of the Interior was instructed to do work to ensure that the team was “leading the way in creating inclusive work environments.”
An internal investigation was also launched, and some 20 staff members working on the review were interviewed extensively in early 2019 by an official with responsibility for equality and diversity. The findings of the internal investigation were not shared with the team, although it is understood that the lack of inclusion was analyzed.
Who are the Windrush generation?
They are people who came to the UK after World War II from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the MV Empire Windrush ship in June 1948.
What happened to them?
An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalized their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it.
Because right now?
It stems from a policy, established by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary, to make the UK “a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to require proof of citizenship or immigration status.
Why don’t they have the correct documentation and status?
Some children, who often traveled on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalized and many moved to the UK before the countries they were born in became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Ministry of the Interior did not keep a registry of the people who entered the country and granted permission to stay, which was granted to all the people who had lived continuously in the country since before January 1, 1973.
What did the government try to do to solve the problem?
A Home Office team was set up to ensure that Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents are no longer classified as illegally UK. But a month after a minister promised that the cases would be resolved in two weeks, many were still destitute. In November 2018, Home Secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been unjustly deported had died. In April 2019, the government agreed to pay up to £ 200 million in compensation.
The Wendy Williams Lessons Learned review on the causes of the Windrush scandal was published in March 2018 and is highly critical of the Home Office, although there was controversy over the decision not to describe the department as institutionally racist, a term that is widely used. reported that he was present. in earlier drafts.
However, the final version condemns “institutional ignorance and lack of consideration for the issue of race” within the Interior Ministry, and includes four recommendations on how the department can improve its record on race, diversity and inclusion.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said the department would not comment on individual personnel matters, but added: “We take any allegation of racism very seriously and any allegation is thoroughly investigated by the department.
“We reject any suggestion that Windrush’s compensation scheme is discriminatory or does not support victims. It was designed with the interests of the victims in mind and to cover every conceivable circumstance a person may have found themselves in. The scheme is more inclusive and open than any other compensation scheme in the UK. “
