Theresa May has expressed regret for using the term “hostile environment” and has criticised Home Office staff for an “inbuilt cynicism” she believes contributed to the Windrush scandal.
May devotes a chapter to the scandal, which unfolded while she was prime minister, in her forthcoming memoir, The Abuse of Power. She concludes that it was an abuse of power and describes the treatment of the Windrush generation who were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants as “shocking”.
The Conservative MP says she is “profoundly sorry”, but in her 14-page analysis of what caused this abuse of power she seeks to spread responsibility, attributing the problem to the failures of “successive governments”.
May blames Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister between 1945 and 1951, for failing to give Windrush arrivals paperwork to show their right to be in the UK, and notes that Labour politicians created the concept of the hostile environment in the decade before she became home secretary in 2010.
“Much has been made of the use of the term ‘hostile environment’ when I was home secretary,” May writes. “In retrospect, it was not a good term to use.
“It was suggested at a time when it was clear that it related to people were here illegally, but of course it became a term that was used in relation to a generation who had every right to be here.”
May appears to downplay the central significance of a series of hostile environment policies that she introduced while home secretary, in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts.
As result of the subsequent significant tightening of documentation checks, thousands of people from the Windrush generation experienced difficulties accessing NHS healthcare, benefits, pensions and work. Some were sacked from their jobs or evicted, and some were wrongly detained and deported to countries they had left as children decades earlier. May makes no mention of detentions or deportations in her chapter.
She asserts that she was “not aware of any debate that pointed out there were people who had not been given evidence of their status here when they arrived and who would therefore be adversely affected” by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts.
Fiona Bawdon, the author of Chasing Status, a 2014 report highlighting the risks of the hostile environment legislation that May’s Home Office was introducing, said it was “disingenuous” to suggest that the department had not been warned.
“I and others tried to alert the Home Office to what was happening four years before the Windrush scandal broke, as it was already clear that people who had lived in the UK legally for decades were having their lives turned upside down,” she said. “They chose not to listen and displayed no curiosity until they were forced to by the Guardian’s reporting in 2018.”
A Home Office source who worked in the department at the time said it was unfair to accuse officials of being overzealous in their approach, when they were simply following rules designed by politicians. The source asked: “Who was setting the tone?”
May acknowledges that she only fully grasped the severity of the difficulties experienced by the Windrush generation when Sir Lenny Henry raised the issue at a service in April 2018 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence. May was sitting in the front row next to Meghan and Prince Harry when Henry demanded to know whether the government was going to sort out the problems being experienced by the Windrush generation, which had already been headline news for over a week.
“In his remarks to the congregation, the actor Sir Lenny Henry made what was for me and others an uncomfortable reference to the Windrush issue,” she writes, adding that she was disturbed to hear that Home Office officials were demanding four pieces of documentary proof for each year that someone had been in the UK. “I found it hard to believe it at the time, and raised the issue with officials when I returned to No 10.”
Henry said he had made the comments spontaneously after discussing the scandal with Lawrence’s father, Neville. “I was turning over in my head what I might say if I were brave enough. It felt like the right time to speak truth to power,” he said.
May describes as “regrettable” the decision this year by the current home secretary, Suella Braverman, to drop several key reform recommendations designed to ensure that the scandal could not be repeated. “Given the impact on the Windrush generation of the actions taken by the Home Office, it was my view that the government should accept the recommendations in full,” she writes.
