Windrush compensation payments are so slow victims are dying before receiving them.
Priti Patel says there have been at least five deaths after claims were submitted but before they were paid - but the Home Office insists claims are being processed as quickly as possible.
The Home Secretary added: “We are working closely with families and legal representatives to determine the right person to whom compensation can be paid."
But Labour ’s Catherine West said: “The Home Office has always been pretty feeble.
“With Covid and remote working it’s now basically paralysed.
“Even when there are urgent humanitarian Windrush cases, time after time it fails to resolve the most tragic situations.”
The MP for London’s Hornsey and Wood Green is now battling on behalf of a victim who came to the UK in his teens and is now in his mid-60s.
A claim was submitted in April last year but 15 months later he has heard nothing despite the Home Office confirming it had “all the relevant evidence.”
So far the Home Office has received 1,275 claims but has only paid out on 111 of them at a total cost of £430,000. The final bill is expected to be more than ten times that.
Yet Ms Patel claimed that those with “critical or life-shortening illnesses are prioritised.”
Windrush victims arrived in the UK in the 1950s and 60s only to be wrongly classified as illegal immigrants meaning they could not work, find housing or travel.
At least 13 subsequently died after they were illegally removed from the UK.
Commons Home Affairs Select Committee chair Yvette Cooper said: “Delays mean some of those who faced terrible injustice will have died before ever seeing a payment.
“The Home Office must urgently sort out the delays to ensure the Windrush generation finally get justice.”
Windrush campaigner Sarah O’Connor, 57, died before she was able to make a claim. She came to the UK when she was six but once labelled an illegal immigrant could not take a job or get benefits and faced bankruptcy.
Hubert Howard, 62, died in November last year, three weeks after being granted British citizenship but before he received a Home Office apology for his ordeal.
He came to Britain in 1960 but could not return to Jamaica even to see his sick mother because he could not get a passport.
The previous month Joshua Moses, a reggae musician who had arrived in Britain in the 1960s aged 12, died shortly after receiving citizenship, too late to make a long-planned trip back to Jamaica.
Tesco fishmonger Eddie Lindsay of St Ives, Cornwall was sacked because he could not prove his status. He also died without compensation.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are determined to right the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation which is why we established the Windrush Compensation Scheme.
“We are continuing to process individual claims as quickly as possible, but cases deserve to be processed individually, with the care and sensitivity they deserve, so that the maximum payment can be made to every single person.
“The Scheme was independently designed, with community leaders and Martin Forde QC, so that the claimant is at the heart of it and it is as easy to use as possible. The first payment was made within four months of the scheme launching and has now offered claimants over £1 million.
“The Home Secretary will be updating Parliament before the summer on how we will implement the recommendations of the Windrush Lesson’s Learned Review.”
