The first blog in this series (https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/22/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-i/), I showed how the announcement of a “hostile environment” for migrants by UK Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012 led to suffering and trauma for thousands of people, the Windrush generation. In the second blog (https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/26/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-ii/), I told the story of Hubert Howard, who was one of its victims. In this third blog, I show how documents that could have prevented the disaster to Hubert and thousands of others were deliberately destroyed. I describe how the scandal slowly emerged and the government’s obstinate refusal to roll back on the policy; and I show how a compensation scheme was finally devised and how it failed so many Windrush victims.

Sabotage?

The passports held by the Windrush arrivals in 1948, and by those who arrived in subsequent years, eventually expired, and many were never renewed and were later lost. Moreover, many of the children who travelled with their parents did so on their parents’ passports and subsequently had none of their own. This did not pose any problems – until they were asked to provide documentation to prove their status. The government refused to accept work records, tax and National Insurance or NHS records as evidence of citizenship. Yet if a lack of passports was the problem, there were other documents that could have been used to solve it: the landing cards completed by the Windrush passengers during their voyage, which they presented to immigration staff on arrival, The cards had been carefully collected and eventually stored in a basement room at the Home Office. According to BBC News, they were later “used by officials to help subsequent generations to prove they had a right to remain in the UK.”^[1] But, in 2010, the Home Office destroyed them.^[2] Once they were destroyed, members of the Windrush generation and their descendants discovered they had no way of proving their legal status.

Passing the buck

The decision to physically destroy the landing cards was taken in October 2010, under the Tory/LibDem coalition government when Theresa May was Home Secretary. In April 2018, however, when she was Prime Minister, she was questioned about the decision by Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Commons:

Corbyn: “Did the Prime Minister – the then Home Secretary – sign off that decision?”

May: “No. The decision to destroy the landing cards was taken in 2009 under a Labour government.”[3]

May had avoided the question, which was about her responsibility for the 2010 decision to physically destroy the landing cards. Instead, attempting to put the blame on Labour, she diverted attention to what seems to have been the original decision-in-principle, taken in 2009.^[4] According to the Home Office, that decision was an administrative decision taken in the context of the digitalisation of Home Office files. The UK Border Agency had approved a business case to get rid of paper records, including the cards.^[5] Under the Data Protection Act 1998, personal information should only be kept for long periods if it is strictly necessary to do so. According to the UK Border Agency in 2018, its judgement in 2009 had been that “the information on the [boarding cards] was of limited value and not sufficient to justify continued retention.”^[6] This judgement seems to have been made despite their proved usefulness in determining status.

    So far, it looks as if these decisions were made by officials, behind closed doors, without the direct involvement of politicians. Indeed, while May was avoiding Corbyn’s question, her spokesperson in Downing Street helpfully claimed that the decision to actually do a destruction job on the landing cards in 2010 was also an “operational decision”, implying that Theresa May was not involved.^[7] Not surprisingly, Labour politicians also hastened to deny any past involvement: Alan Johnson, Labour Home Secretary in 2009, said it was “an administrative decision”.^[8] Johnson said he “had absolutely no recollection at all of being involved” in the landing cards decision.[9] Jacqui Smith, his predecessor at the Home Office until June of that year, said it was “not a policy decision she had made”.[10]

Doubts about politicians’ claims of innocence, however, were raised by Lord Kerslake, a former head of the civil service. He told BBC Newsnight that “the Borders Agency was effectively part of the civil service and it took its advice and direction from ministers.”^[11] It was, he said, “pretty unlikely” that the Home Office would destroy records. “But the truth is we don’t know,” he said. “We need to investigate this in more detail to understand what happened.” Nevertheless, whoever was ultimately responsible, irreversible decisions had been made, with dire consequences for the Windrush generation.

The gathering storm

The plight of the Windrush victims was slow to emerge. But public awareness grew, largely due to press reports about individuals. The Guardian began to publish the results of its major investigation in late 2017. In February 2018, the Jamaican High Commissioner in London, Seth George Ramocan, said, “In this system one is guilty before proven innocent rather than the other way around,” and joined with other Caribbean diplomats in calling on the government to be “more compassionate”.^[12] There was widespread anger at the plight of Albert Thompson when he was denied cancer treatment. On 21 March, at Prime Minister’s questions in the House of Commons, Theresa May refused to intervene in his case, saying it was the responsibility of the hospital to make the decision. About Albert himself she said he needed to “evidence his settled status in the UK.”^[13] May insisted on this despite mounting evidence that none of these people had ever been “illegal migrants” and despite the disastrous consequences of the hostile environment policy on all its Windrush generation victims.

    On 15 April 2018, during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London,  Downing Street refused a formal request by the High Commissioners of 12 Caribbean Commonwealth countries for a meeting between their heads of government and Theresa May to discuss the Windrush scandal.^[14] Pressure on the government increased and Home Secretary Amber Rudd apologised in the House of Commons for the way people had been treated. Bizarrely, she blamed Home Office officials for being too focused on policy. They had, she said, forgotten the importance of the individual.^[15] The next day, May made an unconvincing – indeed, confusing – apology to the Caribbean leaders gathered at the summit. She told them her government was not “clamping down on Commonwealth citizens”. It was all the fault of the new rules (which she herself had introduced) which had “resulted in some people, through no fault of their own, now needing to be able to evidence their immigration status.” She did not, however, offer to abolish those rules or to roll back on her demand that Albert Thompson should “evidence his settled status in the UK”. Instead, she declared that “the overwhelming majority of the Windrush generation do have the documents that they need, but we are working hard to help those who do not.”^[16] None of these apologies and promises would make any difference to the Windrush victims.

Smoke and mirrors

Amber Rudd resigned as Home Secretary two weeks later, after denying knowledge of Home Office deportation targets, some of which she had herself proposed to Theresa May. On 30 April, Sajid Javid, her replacement as Home Secretary, gave the hostile environment a new name. He explained:

I don’t like the phrase hostile. So the terminology is incorrect and I think it is a phrase that is unhelpful … [The policy] is about a compliant environment and it is right that we have a compliant environment.^[17]

This word game was meaningless. It was an exercise in smoke and mirrors in which nothing changed: the Windrush victims were still “illegal”, with “no right to be here”. Like Theresa May and Amber Rudd before him, Javid wanted to maintain a hostile environment. Giving it a new name did nothing for its victims, who had been legal and “compliant” since the day they arrived in the country – or, in the case of their descendants, since the day they were born. Javid pledged to “do whatever it takes to put [the situation] right”; he even claimed that because of his own Asian background[18] he was “personally committed to and invested in resolving the difficulties faced by the … Windrush generation.”[19] But he gave no sign the policy would change in anything other than its meaningless new name. As Labour MP Stella Creasy tweeted while he was still answering questions in the House of Commons:

Just told the new Home Secretary whether he calls it compliant or hostile, it’s deeds not words that matter in how he treats Windrush generation.^[20]

Compensation

The details of the Windrush scandal began to emerge in 2017. The Windrush Scheme, established in 2018. enabled more than 13,800 victims of the scandal to receive documentation confirming their legal status as citizens. But they had received no compensation for their unjust treatment, and the ruin it had brought to their lives. But in 2019 the Windrush Compensation Scheme seemed to promise some redress to the Windrush generation. Unfortunately, as the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee reported in December 2021, “instead of providing a remedy, for many people the Windrush Compensation Scheme has actually worsened the injustices faced as a result of the Windrush scandal.”^[21] For one thing, the Home Office seemed unable to decide how many victims there were. The Committee reported that “four years after the Windrush scandal broke, the Government does not have a confirmed figure for the total number of people affected.”^[22] The Home Office’s original assessment was that there would be 15,000 eligible claims. But in February 2020 a “revised impact assessment” was given which reduced the number to 11,500. In July 2021, the Home Secretary announced another reduction: now the numbers were somehow between 4,000 and 6,000. The reasons for this reduction were unclear, based as it was on “information from the Windrush Scheme and the Windrush Compensation Scheme, but also using some judgement where information is limited.”^[23] The meaning of “using some judgement” is not clear. The Committee identified “a litany of flaws in the design and operation of the Windrush Compensation Scheme.”^[24] The scheme placed “an excessive burden on claimants to produce documentary evidence of the losses they suffered.”^[25] This obsession with documentation, or the lack of it, was the same obsession that denied its victims citizenship status in the first place. Clearly no lessons had been learned in the intervening period. There were also “long delays in processing applications and making payments, and inadequate staffing of the scheme; a failure to provide urgent and exceptional payments to individuals in desperate need.”^[26] There were delays in supporting grassroots campaigns designed to reach eligible claimants. Given the nature of the Windrush scandal as a consequence of the hostile environment policy, we should not assume the Home Office’s goodwill or trust its changing numbers. Moreover, on the question of numbers, many thousands suffered from the effects of having their citizenship status wrongly denied and, not surprisingly, attention has tended to focus on the Caribbean Windrush generation. But, the Committee noted,

people from other Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth countries have also been affected. The children and grandchildren of people who could not evidence their lawful status have also faced difficulties.^[27]

The Committee summarised the failure of the Windrush Compensation Scheme as of November 2021:

Our inquiry found that the vast majority of people who have applied for compensation have yet to receive a penny: for some, the experience of applying for compensation has become a source of further trauma rather than redress, and others have been put off from applying for the scheme altogether. We are deeply concerned that as of the end of September, only 20.1% of the initially estimated 15,000 eligible claimants have applied to the scheme and only 5.8% have received any compensation. It further compounds the Windrush scandal that twenty-three individuals have died without receiving compensation for the hardship they endured.^[28]

By June 2023, 34 had died.  The Committee also noted that “the design and operation of this scheme contained the same bureaucratic insensitivities that led to the Windrush scandal in the first place.” This was, it said, “a damning indictment of the Home Office, and suggests that the culture change it promised in the wake of the scandal has not yet occurred.”^[29]

    But the Windrush scandal was not the only scandal of the hostile environment. David Cameron and Theresa May were part of another scandal that emerged from the policy, one which also caused immense suffering and was responsible for many deaths. More of that in the next blog.

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[1] “Windrush Investigation urged over landing cards”, BBC News, 19 April 2018:  Windrush: Investigation urged over landing cards – BBC News

[2] Windrush: Theresa May hits back at Labour over landing cards”, BBC News, 28 April 2018  Windrush: Theresa May hits back at Labour over landing cards – BBC News

[3] Cited, Liz Bates, “Decision to destroy Windrush landing documents taken under Labour, insists Theresa May” PoliticsHome, 18 April 2018: Decision to destroy Windrush landing documents taken under Labour, insists Theresa May

[4] Windrush: Theresa May hits back at Labour over landing cards”, BBC News, 28 April 2018  Windrush: Theresa May hits back at Labour over landing cards – BBC News

[5] “Who destroyed the Windrush landing cards?”, Channel 4 News FactCheck: FactCheck: who destroyed the Windrush landing cards? – Channel 4 News

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “Windrush: Alan Johnson says landing cards decision was made in 2009”, BBC News, 20 April 2018: Windrush: Alan Johnson says landing cards decision was made in 2009 – BBC News

[9] Windrush: Theresa May hits back at Labour over landing cards”, BBC News, 28 April 2018  Windrush: Theresa May hits back at Labour over landing cards – BBC News

[10] Ibid.

[11] “Windrush Investigation urged over landing cards”, BBC News, 19 April 2018:  Windrush: Investigation urged over landing cards – BBC News

[12] Gentleman, A., “Caribbean diplomats ask UK for more compassion for citizens”, The Guardian, 22 February 2018: Caribbean diplomats ask UK for more compassion for citizens | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

[13] Gentleman, A., “Windrush U-turn is welcome, but May’s policy was just cruel”, 16 April 2018: Windrush U-turn is welcome, but May’s policy was just cruel | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

[14] Gentleman, A. “No 10 refuses Caribbean request to discuss children of Windrush”, The Guardian, 15 April 2018: No 10 refuses Caribbean request to discuss children of Windrush | Commonwealth immigration | The Guardian

[15] Gentleman, A., “The week that took Windrush from low-profile investigation to national scandal”, The Guardian, 20 April 2018. The week that took Windrush from low-profile investigation to national scandal | Commonwealth immigration | The Guardian

[16] “Windrush generation: Theresa May apologises to Caribbean leaders”, BBC News, 17 April 2018: Windrush generation: Theresa May apologises to Caribbean leaders – BBC News

[17] Steven Poole, “Compliant environment’: is this really what the Windrush generation needs?”, The Guardian, 3 May 2018: ‘Compliant environment’: is this really what the Windrush generation needs? | Reference and languages books | The Guardian

[18] Javid was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, to a British Pakistani family

[19] Andrew Sparrow, “Sajid Javid disowns ‘hostile environment’ phrase in first outing as home secretary”, The Guardian, 30 April 2018: Sajid Javid disowns ‘hostile environment’ phrase in first outing as home secretary – as it happened | Amber Rudd | The Guardian

[20] Twitter post, @stellacreasy, 30 April 2018.

[21] House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee Report, 7 December 2021:  The Windrush generation has been failed by the Compensation Scheme (shorthandstories.com)

[22] The Windrush Compensation Scheme, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Report (24 November 2021), para 9: The Windrush Compensation Scheme – Home Affairs Committee (parliament.uk)

[23] Letter to Yvette Cooper MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, from Home Secretary Priti Patel MP (20 July 2021).

[24] The Windrush Compensation Scheme, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Report (24 November 2021), Summary: The Windrush Compensation Scheme – Home Affairs Committee (parliament.uk)

[25] Ibid., para. 9.

[26] Ibid.

[27]Ibid., para 2.

[28] Ibid., Summary.

[28]Ibid., para 2.

[28] Ibid., Summary.

[29] Ibid.