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The Interior Ministry has not made adequate progress in reviewing its hostile environmental policies and must quickly demonstrate that it is not merely lip-smacking the idea of reform, the author of a damning report on the scandal told deputies. by Windrush.
Wendy Williams, whose review of Lessons Learned on the Causes of the Immigration Scandal was released earlier this year, said the department risked missing a once-in-a-generation opportunity for change. He also expressed surprise that only 168 people had received compensation two and a half years after the government first apologized for misclassifying thousands of legal British residents as illegal immigrants.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has pledged to implement the 30 recommendations made in the report. However, Williams expressed concern that there was no immediate plan to appoint a commissioner to represent the unheard of voices of migrants.
He said he was also concerned that there had been so little progress in reviewing the compliant environmental immigration policies, formerly known as hostile environmental policies, that Theresa May introduced to reduce net migration and that caused most of the difficulties experienced by those caught up in the Windrush Scandal.
“When it comes to the compliant environmental policy review, there are not the details or the speed of activity that I would have expected,” he said. “The deadlines and activities are not ambitious enough and I would expect to see more progress.
“The department has a choice. You can really accept my recommendations or you can be true to my recommendations and not institute that fundamental cultural shift, ”he told the home affairs selection committee. “This is a pivotal moment for the department.”
Williams reiterated his conclusion that the Home Office required urgent reform, adding that senior officials in the department did not understand the impact of some of its complicated immigration policies. “A senior member of the department said they did not believe, and indeed the department accepted, that there was someone in the department who understood the full impact of their own policies and legislation,” he said.
The department needed to improve diversity at the top levels to prevent a repeat of the Windrush scandal, he said. Despite an overall “positive image” with black and ethnic minority employees representing 26% of the Home Office workforce, “unfortunately, when you look at the details, those staff are concentrated in the top two grades. junior, and when you move up the department in terms of seniority, the numbers are reduced to single figures, either in terms of numbers or percentages ”.
A department that “doesn’t really understand the history of migration to the UK, British colonial history and the impact of their own policies and where they intersect is a department that is working and needs to address that,” he said.
Williams said she often found the experience of speaking with people affected by the scandal during her investigation “shocking.” He said that most of the people were puzzled and incredulous by what had happened to them. “I have to be honest: me too,” she said.
A group of people affected by the scandal has written a letter to The Guardian stating his concerns that the Interior Ministry’s “comprehensive improvement plan” is “long on regrets but short on details of how and when appropriate changes will be made.”
“The Home Secretary’s priorities are clearly not focused on ‘correcting the mistakes’ of Windrush, but on stubbornly pursuing the same approach of unbridled hostility that created them,” states the letter, signed by a group that includes Michael Braithwaite, which he lost his job as a special needs teaching assistant after being wrongly classified as an immigration offender, despite 56 years in the UK.
