A Home Office minister was heckled by people caught up the Windrush scandal during a heated meeting in Westminster called to draw attention to the slow progress in assisting those affected by the department’s mistakes.
Simon Murray said it was “painful” to hear accounts from people describing their difficulties receiving documentation and compensation, five years after the government first apologised.
He was greeted with some hostility and repeatedly interrupted by victims of the scandal, who shouted “gaslighting” and “we’ve heard this before” as he reiterated the government’s promises to deliver justice.
“That was very painful for me to listen to but I wanted to hear it,” Lord Murray told the crowded meeting organised by Action for Race Equality. “It is important for me to hear it, as the government minister with responsibility for the Windrush compensation and status schemes.”
He said that the government has now paid or offered more £70m in compensation, and that the compensation scheme was being constantly improved. “The victims of the Windrush scandal suffered a terrible injustice,” he added. “It is a shameful episode in our history.”
Jeremy Crook, CEO of Action for Race Equality, noted that people affected by the scandal were still trapped overseas, unable to return to the UK because they did not have the correct documentation.
Politicians, lawyers and Home Office staff were joined by people who are still fighting to put their lives back together, after finding themselves among the group of thousands of people who came to the UK legally as children from Commonwealth countries but were later misclassified by officials as illegal immigrants.
The minister heard from several people who explained the complex ways in which their lives were ruined by the mistake. One man, who had to give up his career as a secondary school maths teacher after his right to work in the UK was questioned, said he had been offered a “derogatory sum” in compensation. “I wished the floor would open up for me to fall through it,” he added, remembering the moment when he was told how much he had been awarded. He called for the department to be more empathic.
A former psychiatric nurse said she was unable to travel to visit her mother before she died because the Home Office lost her passport twice and then said they could find no record of her. “I couldn’t get to the funeral,” she said. “They need to sort this out.”
One man described how his sister was still stuck in St Vincent because she was unable to trace documents proving that she had the right to live in the UK.
The Labour MP Dawn Butler told the meeting: “The Windrush scandal was just an element of a wider state-sanctioned hostility that has been directed at black people for as long as I can remember. The Home Office is not an effective department; it is not competent.”
Murray said he was greatly looking forward to June and the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush liner, “when we will celebrate the enormous contribution of the Windrush generation”. The campaigner Patrick Vernon said it would be a bittersweet celebration, adding: “There are thousands of people still locked in the Home Office’s maladministration.”
