Between 1948 and 1973, hundreds of thousands of people from the Caribbean travelled to the United Kingdom at the invitation of the British government, which needed workers to staff the NHS, run the buses, and rebuild a country still recovering from war. They came as British subjects, entitled by law to live and work in the UK indefinitely. Many brought their children. Many had those children here.
They became known as the Windrush generation, after the Empire Windrush ship that carried the first wave of arrivals in 1948. They paid tax, contributed to the National Insurance system, voted in elections, built communities. Many had lived in Britain for forty or fifty years.
From 2012 onwards, hundreds of them were told they didn't exist legally in the UK. Some were denied cancer treatment. Some were sacked from jobs they had held for decades. Some were evicted. Some were detained in immigration removal centres. In 83 documented cases, people were deported from the country they had lived in legally their entire adult lives.
This is the Windrush scandal. It was not an accident.
The hostile environment
The policy that caused the Windrush scandal was called the "hostile environment". It was designed and implemented by Theresa May as Home Secretary from 2012, with the explicit stated aim of making life sufficiently difficult for people without leave to remain that they would choose to leave voluntarily — to "self-deport."
The hostile environment required landlords, employers, banks, the NHS, and the DVLA to check the immigration status of every person they dealt with. Those without documentation proving their right to remain in the UK could be denied housing, employment, healthcare, a bank account, and a driving licence.
For the Windrush generation — many of whom had arrived as children, had never been given formal documentation of their status, and had simply lived in Britain for decades without needing to prove anything — this was an impossible requirement.
The destroyed records
The Home Office had a solution to hand. When people from the Commonwealth arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1973, they were recorded on landing cards — physical cards documenting their arrival and legal status. These cards constituted proof of exactly the kind of right-to-remain that the hostile environment required.
In 2010, the Home Office destroyed those landing cards. The destruction was not accidental. It was a deliberate records management decision, taken with knowledge of what the cards contained and with awareness that the hostile environment policy was being developed.
This fact was known within the Home Office. It was not disclosed when individuals began approaching the department for help proving their status. Instead, people who had been British subjects for decades were told to prove a right of residence they had never needed to prove before, using documents that the government had destroyed.
The consequences for individuals
The Windrush Lessons Learned Review, conducted by Wendy Williams and published in 2020, documented the range of harms experienced:
- People were denied NHS cancer treatment because they could not prove their immigration status
- People lost jobs they had held for 20, 30, 40 years
- People were evicted from homes they had lived in for decades
- People were detained in immigration removal centres alongside people who had entered the country illegally
- 83 people were wrongly deported, some to countries they had left as children and had not visited since
- At least 11 people died before any compensation reached them
The review found that the hostile environment was "foreseeable and avoidable" — that the Home Office should have known, before implementing the policy, that it would harm people with every legal right to be in the UK.
Institutional racism
The Williams Review used the term "institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness" to describe the Home Office's approach. Critics, including the review's author in her 2022 follow-up, noted that a stronger term was appropriate.
The Windrush generation was predominantly Black. The hostile environment, in its design and implementation, applied systematically disproportionate harm to Black British citizens. This was not unforeseeable — it was an inevitable consequence of applying documentation requirements retroactively to people who arrived before modern immigration controls existed, in a context where those people happened to be predominantly from one ethnic group.
Williams subsequently said, in testimony to a parliamentary committee, that she had used restrained language in the original report and that the treatment of the Windrush generation constituted, in her view, "institutional racism."
Theresa May's response
Theresa May, by 2018 the Prime Minister, apologised to those affected by the scandal. She did not accept personal responsibility for designing the policy. She described herself as "concerned" and "appalled" by the outcomes.
The hostile environment policy — the policy she designed, the policy whose foreseeable consequences she bore responsibility for — remained in place. The Windrush Compensation Scheme was announced, with compensation paid to those who could prove they had suffered harm. By 2023, the average wait for compensation was over 18 months. Many applicants reported the process as retraumatising.
Sources
- Windrush Lessons Learned Review — Wendy Williams (2020)
- House of Commons Home Affairs Committee — The Windrush generation (2018)
- Amelia Gentleman — The Windrush Betrayal (Guardian Faber, 2019)
- NAO — Windrush Scheme: Lessons to Learn (2022)