Two members of the Windrush cross-government working group have resigned, citing unhappiness with ministers’ response to the Windrush scandal.
Bishop Joe Aldred, and Arike Oke, who represented the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), informed the government last year that they were leaving the group. The Home Office has only this month published the new, smaller membership list, revealing it has shrunk from nine to seven people.
Aldred said the group was a “fig leaf” and left in protest at the government’s failure to repeal hostile environment legislation introduced between 2012 and 2016, which caused problems for thousands of people who were unable to prove that they had the right to live in the UK.
“If the government is really remorseful, then it should repeal that terrible legislation. I raised that several times, but there’s just no appetite for it,” he said.
Aldred said the focus on reforming the Home Office was misguided. “The Home Office was merely acting as the handmaiden of the government and the laws they made. The government has no intention of changing those laws, so it is making the Home Office take the fall. It’s total hypocrisy.”
He described the hostile environment legislation, rebranded compliant environment legislation, as “pernicious and unchristian”. The legislation, introduced when Theresa May was home secretary, outsourced immigration checks to landlords, employers, NHS workers and other untrained groups. Many people who were in the UK legally found themselves unable to prove their status, and lost their jobs and homes or were denied healthcare.
The Windrush working group was set up to bring together community leaders and senior government officials four times a year to discuss reform of the Home Office in line with recommendations made by the independent inspector, Wendy Williams, in her lessons learned review. The group was also meant to “support the design and delivery of practical solutions to address the wider challenges that disproportionately affect people from BAME backgrounds”.
The home secretary, Priti Patel, launched a comprehensive improvement plan for the department in September 2019. Williams last month noted some improvements in the Home Office but concluded that she was “disappointed by the lack of tangible progress or drive to achieve the cultural changes required”. She was critical of the Home Office’s failure to review the effectiveness of its hostile environment policies.
Aldred also said he felt uneasy with the way that the national response to the Windrush scandal had perpetuated a negative narrative about the wider generation of people who came to the Britain after the second world war, the vast majority of whom were unaffected by the Home Office scandal.
“I do not like the way in which it becomes generalised and we become an object of pity, when actually the story of the Windrush is about resilience and about enterprise,” he said.
The BCA left the working group after the government published the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report last year, written by Tony Sewell, another member of the Windrush working group. The report downplayed structural racism and concluded that the “claim the country is still institutionally racist is not borne out by the evidence”.
The BCA said the report undermined the work of the Windrush working group. “We felt we could not possibly continue to work with the group after the report came out,” Dawn Hill, a board member at the BCA, with responsibility for Windrush issues, said.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are committed to righting the wrongs of Windrush, which is why the insight and expertise of the members of Windrush working group is so hugely valued. We continue to work with the group on an ongoing basis on how to improve our compensation scheme, which has so far paid out £45m.”
