The architect of the Windrush compensation scheme has described how the Home Office ignored key aspects of his advice on its implementation and said some payments should be “more generous”, during a Commons hearing into problems with the programme.
The barrister Martin Forde said he had urged the Home Office to take a “light touch” approach to the amount of documentary evidence that claimants were required to produce in order to corroborate their compensation claims, and acknowledged that this light touch had not materialised.
But he defended the scheme against wider accusations of delays, arguing that expectations had been mismanaged and that many compensation schemes routinely took 18 months to process claims. By the end of November, just £2.2m had been paid out to 226 claimants, from a compensation pot originally expected to pay out more than £200m to as many as 15,000 people.
The home affairs select committee heard from legal advisers helping people affected by the Windrush scandal that claimants were being asked to provide unreasonably high levels of documentary evidence to convince Home Office staff to make appropriate payments.
It was proving particularly difficult for claimants to prove that their experiences had had a negative impact on their lives, one of the headings under which payments can be made. The Home Office’s misclassification of thousands of legal UK residents as illegal immigrants meant some people were wrongly deported, others were mistakenly held in immigration detention centres, and many more lost jobs and housing or were refused access to benefits and NHS treatment.
Forde acknowledged that it was hard for people who tended to be stoical about the difficulties they had experienced to gather documentary evidence proving that their lives had been upturned by Home Office mistakes. “I’m not surprised that people are disappointed by how much they’ve been awarded for that,” Forde said, adding that some impact-on-life awards should be more generous.
He said his advice that compensation payments should be made regardless of whether claimants had a criminal record had been ignored by the Home Office. He was also critical of the Home Office for failing to understand how much fear remained among those affected.
Recent deportation flights were undermining the process, he said. “There are lots of people who are genuinely scared. Every time there is one of these flights, it causes a problem in terms of people’s confidence in the Home Office.”
He had wanted legal aid to be granted to applicants to help them to submit claims, but said he was told this was not possible without parliamentary approval and he was persuaded that it was more important to design a scheme that could get up and running quickly. Some of the delays to the scheme could be attributed to the fact that without legal advice, claimants were finding it difficult to complete the form in a way that made it easy for officials to approve claims, he said.
Forde paid tribute to Alexandra Ankrah, the scheme’s policy adviser, who resigned this year saying she had lost faith in the scheme’s ability to deliver justice to those affected. He said she was an “excellent member of staff”.
Jacqueline McKenzie, a solicitor with McKenzie Beute and Pope who said she had seen more than 500 cases and was advising on 200, told the hearing that she was uneasy with the decision to put the Home Office in charge of the compensation scheme. “They are judge, jury and executioner in their own malfeasance, which I think is problematic,” she said.
Holly Stow, a senior case worker at North Kensington Law Centre who has helped with about 50 claims, said some of the offers had been “appalling”. “How are you meant to get good compensation from a team who are not empathetic to the people that they’re meant to be helping to receive justice?” she said.
Forde acknowledged: “People felt quite strongly that the Home Office should not be marking its own homework by administering the scheme.” However, he stressed that there were difficulties at this late stage in recommending moving it to another department. “The civil servants are doing a difficult job well, but the institution is tainted,” he said.
