Banking checks on accounts opened by people suspected to be living in the UK illegally have been restarted by the Home Office, as officials relaunch a controversial hostile environment policy that was suspended following the Windrush scandal.
The current accounts will be closed in a new data-sharing agreement with the financial sector. The initiative is part of a package of measures designed to deter illegal migration and illegal working, by making it harder for people without confirmed immigration status to be paid.
The measure was initially rolled out in January 2018, but was suspended a few months later by the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, amid doubts over the reliability of the checks after the government acknowledged that it had misclassified thousands of members of the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants, when it became clear that the Home Office was unable to distinguish accurately between people living in the UK legally and those without the correct immigration status.
Announcing the decision to suspend the programme five years ago, the Home Office said: “It is right, in light of Windrush, that we review existing safeguards to ensure that those who are here lawfully are not inadvertently disadvantaged by measures put in place to tackle illegal migration.”
The decision to relaunch the banking checks was condemned by the human rights organisation Amnesty, which warned that people “with good claims and even rights” to be in the UK could be prevented from banking by the measure.
A Home Office statement said: “Making it more difficult for unlawful migrants to access financial services is an important tool to help deter illegal migration.”
The immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, said there would be “robust safeguards in place to prevent wrongful account closures”, adding: “Only those known to be here unlawfully or those who have absconded from immigration control will have their details shared.”
The measures do not require bank staff to check customers’ documents and assess their immigration status; instead, the Home Office will share details of people they believe to be ineligible for banking services in the UK via an anti-fraud organisation. Banks and building societies will then be obliged to check their current account holders against these lists.
Bank accounts will only be closed when the Home Office has made a further manual check to ensure that that the customer is in the UK without permission to stay, officials said.
“We are committed to going further and faster to prevent the abuse of our laws and borders. Illegal working causes untold harm to our communities, cheating honest workers of employment and defrauding the public purse,” Jenrick said.
Steve Valdez-Symonds, the refugee and migrant rights programme director at Amnesty UK, said the policy was “intended to indiscriminately exclude and socially isolate a mass of people – many of whom with good claims and even rights to be in the country, and others bearing little or no culpability in how they have come to be here without permission”.
The relaunch of the initiative came as Windrush campaigners marked the fifth anniversary of the scandal by handing a petition signed by 50,000 people to Downing Street, calling on the government to rethink a decision to drop several key reform recommendations made in the wake of the scandal.
The letter, whose signatories include the actor David Harewood and the singer Beverley Knight, described the axing of these recommendations as a “kick in the teeth to the Windrush generation, to whom our country owes such a huge debt of gratitude”. A vigil was later held at Windrush Square in Brixton, south London, and candles lit in memory of those people who were affected by the Home Office’s mistakes but who died before receiving compensation.
