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Ar Priti Patel faces legal action over failure of Windrush Compensation Scheme
Priti Patel
LONDON, England, December 14, 2021 - UK Home Secretary Priti Patel is facing legal action for the failure of the Windrush Compensation Scheme to pay victims – with just five per cent receiving money in the four years since the scandal came to light.
Two groups, Windrush Lives and Good Law Project, are asking for control of the Home Office-run scheme to be given to an independent organisation to ensure victims receive long-awaited justice.
Launched in response to the Windrush scandal that broke in 2018, the scheme has been hampered by extensive delays and bureaucratic hurdles.
Director of the Good Law Project, Jo Maugham, told The Independent newspaper: “The evidence is that the Home Office can’t be trusted to mark its own homework. The Home Affairs Committee has said what Windrush victims have said all along: the scheme has to be handed over to an independent organisation if it is to work.
“Together with Windrush Lives, we are asking Priti Patel to listen to Windrush victims and set up an independent scheme. If she really wanted to make things right, she’d do so voluntarily.”
In a 24-page pre-action protocol letter, seen by The Independent newspaper, the home secretary is given a December 23 deadline to cease operating the scheme and to appoint an independent body to take over its operation and reply, before proceedings are taken further. Its estimated that some 15, thousand persons are eligible for compensation.
As a result of the scandal, Black people who lived and work in the UK over a number of decades, were detained, refused healthcare, lost their homes and jobs and were even deported after being wrongly classified as illegal immigrants by the government.
According to Members of Parliament who are on the Home Affairs Committee: “The treatment of the Windrush generation by successive governments and the Home Office was truly shameful. No amount of compensation could ever repay the fear, the humiliation and the hurt that was caused both to individuals and to communities affected.”
The Windrush Compensation Scheme was established in April 2019 and about 15,000 people were thought to be eligible. However, by the end of September 2021 only a fifth of these had come forward and only a quarter had received compensation.
But those who were eligible for the compensation scheme were did not trust the system.
the compensation scheme has itself become a further trauma for those applying, with a "litany of flaws" in its design and operation.
Their report highlights excessive burdens on claimants, inadequate staffing and long delays - and says many of those affected "are still too fearful of the Home Office to apply."
They want an independent organisation to take over responsibility for the scheme, to "increase trust and encourage more applicants".
Campaigners have also criticised the size of the payments being handed out. For example, an individual would receive £10,000 for being deported, or £500 for denial of access to higher education. Individuals would receive £250 for every month of homelessness.
The government has said that the flat payment for deportation of £10,000 would also be combined with other payments such as loss of earnings. It adds that, including other schemes in place, more than £1m has been handed out to victims
The Windrush generation are people, including Jamaicans, who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1973, many of whom were later wrongly classified by the Home Office as illegal immigrants.