Home Office failings let down Windrush migrants, damning report finds

Her review was commissioned after it emerged two years ago that missing paperwork was depriving some immigrants who arrived in the UK from the 1940s to the 1970s of access to healthcare.

Officials were forced to defend a decision to destroy thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival of early immigrants on the former troop carrier Empire Windrush and on later voyages to the UK.

The former Home Secretary Amber Rudd lost her job as the details of the scandal emerged.

Ms Williams said that “warning signs from both inside and outside the Home Office were apparent for a number of years”, adding: “Even when stories began to emerge in 2017 in the media about high-profile injustices, I have concluded that the Home Office was still too slow to react.”

She said there had been “a culture of disbelief and carelessness when dealing with applications”, fuelled by a conviction that a “hostile environment policy” should be “pursued at all costs”.

Ms Williams added: “I have also talked about a culture of ignorance and thoughtlessness when dealing with matters of race, the Windrush generation, their history and circumstances. The Windrush generation were let down by systemic operational failings by the Home Office.”

Lorenzo Hoyte, a Wakefield welder who was denied a passport to attend his mother’s funeral, despite having lived in Britain since the 1960s, accused the Home Office of being “unfit for purpose” and of treating him and others “like sub-humans”.

“You end up living secretly in the open. You’re scared of officialdom, scared that someone’s going to find something out about you,” he told The Yorkshire Post.

Mr Hoyte, 61, who was also unable to travel to the Moscow or Los Angeles Olympics to see his sister, Joslyn Hoyte-Smith, compete in the women’s relay, added: “The Home Office was obsessed with seeing proof of this, proof of that – it became a way of life. They didn’t understand or care.”

Joseph Bravo, a Leeds electrician who missed his daughter’s wedding in Cyprus because the Home Office refused to give him a British passport after 54 years as a UK resident, welcomed today’s report but criticised officials for not having apologised.

“Everyone knows they were guilty,” he said. “They were more interested in catching people who were here illegally than in dealing with injustice.

“It’s not nice when the Home Office says you don’t exist. I spent years looking over my shoulder.”

Theresa May, who was Home Secretary when the hostile environment policy was introduced, told the Commons: “I have given my own apology previously but I do so again today.”

She said the Windrush generation were British, in the country legally, and “should not have been treated in this way”.

The present Home Secretary, Priti Patel, said she was “truly sorry” for the “pain, suffering and the misery” inflicted on the Windrush generation.