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on October 22, 2024
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On 26th September 2024, the UK Government published an independent research report that had long been withheld from official publication, entitled The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal.
The review produced several fascinating, but also saddeningly unsurprising findings. These included that the UK’s wrongful detention and deportation of Caribbean migrants was a consequence of decades of racist immigration law, aimed at lowering Britain’s non-white population.
The latest report serves as a response to Wendy Williams’ Windrush Lessons Learned Review, which was published on 19th March 2020. The UK Home Office, under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Government, had refused to publish the Historical Roots report in 2022, rejecting requests to do so under the Freedom of Information Act.
Fast-forward to September last year, and a tribunal judgement declared that the department must disclose the report – which had already been published on the Home Office Windrush Intranet site in 2021 – to the requester. In July, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party scored an emphatic victory over the ruling Conservatives, leaving the Rishi Sunak-led party out of power for the first time in 14 years. Ultimately, the new administration decided to publish the Historical Roots report in its entirety.
The “Windrush scandal” – or “Windrush controversy” – was a political scandal that began in the UK in the late 2010s. Outcry erupted when it emerged that members of the “Windrush generation” – a group of people who had migrated to the UK from Caribbean countries between 1948 and 1973 – and other longstanding UK residents had been wrongly treated as illegal immigrants by the UK Home Office.
Such ill treatment included people being wrongly detained, denied their legal rights, and threatened with being deported from the UK. A review of historical cases found that at least 83 people who had arrived in the UK prior to 1973 had been subject to wrongful deportation.
The term “Windrush generation” was derived from the name of the Empire Windrush, the passenger motor ship that brought one of the first large groups of Caribbean people to the UK in 1948. However, it wasn’t only migrants from Caribbean countries who were impacted by the Windrush scandal, with other people from former British colonies in South Asia and Africa also affected.
The Immigration Act 1971 had given Commonwealth citizens living in the UK indefinite leave to remain – in other words, the permanent right to live and work in the UK.
However, it became apparent in April 2018 that the Home Office had not kept any records of people who had been granted permission to stay; nor had the affected migrants been issued with paperwork enabling them to confirm their lawful immigration status in the UK. Furthermore, the department had destroyed thousands of landing cards belonging to Windrush migrants.
Consequently, some members of the Windrush generation and other long-established UK residents encountered difficulties in accessing employment, healthcare, and other services. In the spring of 2018, the then-Prime Minister of the UK, Theresa May, apologised for how the people affected had been treated. An enquiry was announced, and it eventually reported in March 2020. Schemes were introduced to enable impacted individuals to prove their immigration status and access compensation for losses experienced due to an inability to prove this status.
The then HM Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, Wendy Williams, was appointed by the Home Office in July 2018 to carry out an independent review scrutinising the events culminating in the Windrush scandal.
The Government presented the findings of the consequent Windrush Lessons Learned Review to Parliament in March 2020. The review found that although the Windrush controversy had taken the Home Office by surprise, it was “foreseeable and avoidable”.
Ms Williams cited UK policies and legislation on matters of immigration and nationality since the 1960s as contributing factors to the scandal. She said that “those in power forgot about them [the Windrush generation] and their circumstances”.
On the matter of whether the Home Office was “institutionally racist”, Ms Williams stated that she had been “unable to make a definitive finding of institutional racism within the department”.
She did, however, express her “serious concerns” that the failings documented in her report “demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation within the department, which is consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.”
The review included as one of its recommendations – specifically recommendation 6 a) – that “the Home Office should devise, implement and review a comprehensive learning and development programme which makes sure all its existing and new staff learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world”.
As the tribunal set out, the Home Office went on to commission an independent historian – with the support of the department’s personnel, and drawing upon the resources of the National Archives – to write a historical guide to the roots of the Windrush scandal for Home Office staff. The intention was for this guide to be used as a resource to help Home Office employees better understand the historical development of UK immigration policy, in the context of the role of race in the British Empire.
To tackle labour shortages in the UK in the aftermath of the Second World War, the British Government facilitated the migration to the UK of individuals from its former colonies and Commonwealth member states.
The British Nationality Act 1948 introduced the status of “citizens of the UK and colonies”, giving people from these territories the right to live and work in Britain. It was the Empire Windrush that carried the first large group of these migrants, arriving at the Port of Tilbury in June 1948.
On 1st January 1973, the Immigration Act 1971 came into force. This legislation outlined that foreign nationals who were “ordinary resident” in the UK as of that day, were deemed to have “settled status” and granted indefinite leave to remain.
Unfortunately, many individuals were not provided with documentation making their status clear, and the Home Office failed to maintain a register confirming the status of these people.
Today, the UK Government’s Windrush Scheme remains available to applicants who have settled in the UK but lack a document to prove their status. It is free to apply.
You may be eligible to use the Windrush Scheme to obtain a document proving you are entitled to live and work in the UK, if one of the following is true:
If you’re a Commonwealth citizen who settled in the UK prior to 1st January 1973, or you’re the child of someone who did, you might also be entitled to apply for British citizenship for free.
For further information, advice, and guidance in relation to your immigration status and the steps you may take next, please feel free to call our experts in UK immigration law at Cranbrook Legal today, on 0208 215 0053.
In its introduction to the Historical Roots of Windrush report – which can now be read on the GOV.UK website – the Home Office made clear that the research report “does not represent Government policy and the views included in it are those of the author.”
Nonetheless, the report makes for an intriguingly provocative read. It directly characterises decades of UK immigration laws as racist, declaring that during the period from 1950 until 1981, “every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK.”
Although the Historical Roots report “does not make recommendations as such” – instead being “intended as an accessible explainer” – it does set out “lessons to be learned”. These include:
To answer the question we posed at the top of this article: sadly, it appears we very much can regard elements of both historical and ongoing UK immigration policy as racist. There is much evidence that racism hasn’t merely been deeply rooted in UK immigration policy over decades past, but continues to be a fundamentally relevant issue today.
It was only reported by the Guardianin September 2024, for example, that most applicants who feel compelled to use the expensive “10-year route” to UK settlement are people of colour. This lengthy immigration route is used by hundreds of thousands of people whose lack of income or professional qualifications bars them from accessing other immigration pathways to the UK.
A spokesperson for the legal advice and support service Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU) has described the 10-year route as “a racist policy”, and called for it to be scrapped.
In addition, the High Court ruled in June that the Home Office’s decision to drop three of the 30 recommendations made by Wendy Williams’ review was unlawful.
Occurrences like the above – as well as the Conservative Government having spent several years refusing to make available the Historical Roots report for public consumption – raise serious questions as to whether lessons have been learned from the circumstances that gave rise to the Windrush scandal.
The newly installed Labour Government certainly has a task on its hands to ensure – in the recent words of a spokesperson from the department – that “cultural change is embedded permanently into the fabric of the Home Office.”
If you have any concerns or questions in relation to your own immigration status or any other aspect of your engagement with the UK immigration system, please feel free to call Cranbrook Legal’s award-winning team of specialists today, on 0208 215 0053. You can also use our online contact form to book a free consultation.
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