Parliament to Hear Legal Testimony on Reparations for Windrush Generation

There is a specific type of institutional cruelty that goes unnoticed. It doesn’t come with yelling or overt hostility. It shows up as letters requesting documents you never received, unanswered phone calls, and officials who look at you—a person who has lived in this country for fifty years, paid taxes, raised children, and possibly contributed to the creation of the National Health Service—and tell you, with practiced bureaucratic blankness, that you cannot prove you belong here. Thousands of members of the Windrush generation experienced that. And now, decades after the first Caribbean migrants disembarked from the HMT Empire Windrush in June 1948 at the Port of Tilbury, Parliament is being asked to hear legal testimony regarding the viability of any kind of real reparations.

Even though it shouldn’t be, the story is now so well-known that it almost seems worn out. Hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth citizens arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1973 on perfectly legal visas, invited by a government that needed their labor and expertise to rebuild a nation devastated by war. They were granted permission to reside and work here by the British Nationality Act of 1948. They received no supporting documentation. No one maintained trustworthy records. Additionally, many members of the Windrush generation found themselves trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare created by their own government when successive governments, starting in the 1980s, tightened immigration enforcement and demanded proof of status in order to obtain jobs, housing, healthcare, and pensions. A few were taken into custody. Some were deported to nations they had not visited since they were young. Before they received an apology, some of them passed away.

In 2018, the government admitted that something had gone seriously wrong. In April of that year, Prime Minister Theresa May apologized a few days after Home Secretary Amber Rudd. 2019 saw the announcement and implementation of a compensation plan, and Wendy Williams, the HM Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services at the time, was asked to conduct an independent review. In March 2020, Williams made thirty recommendations, stating that the scandal was “foreseeable and avoidable” and that it was a reflection of “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race.” She refrained from making a formal declaration of institutional racism. However, there was very little opportunity for a different interpretation given the language she used.

According to the majority of serious evaluations, the compensation plan that resulted from all of this has failed the individuals it was intended to assist. Only 12.8% of the estimated 11,500 eligible claimants had received compensation as of January 2023, according to a Human Rights Watch analysis of the procedure conducted in early 2023. Critics claimed that the Home Office, which had created the issue, was in charge of the program, which lacked sufficient independence, legal assistance for applicants navigating a difficult and time-consuming process, and an appropriate right of appeal. The program “was designed to fail the people who were supposed to benefit from it,” according to 69-year-old primary applicant Thomas Tobierre, who spoke to Human Rights Watch.Saying that about a government remedy is damning. The fact that the majority of the evidence is in favor of it is more damning.

As you watch this unfold, it’s difficult not to become increasingly frustrated. On February 29, 2024, when Parliament debated the scheme’s efficacy in the House of Lords due to a motion from Baroness Benjamin, there was a sense in the chamber of people repeating what had already been said: voicing concerns and calling for reforms. In January 2023, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman had already abandoned three of Williams’ thirty recommendations, such as the idea of reconciliation events and the appointment of a commissioner for migrants who could act as an impartial advocate for those impacted. Whether on purpose or not, those cancellations conveyed the idea that the government’s desire for accountability was limited.

Anything more structurally significant than another round of apologies is what legal testimony before Parliament could now accomplish. The main legal disputes revolve around whether Britain’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its own Human Rights Act are met by the Windrush Compensation Scheme as it is currently set up. The Windrush generation suffered “irreparable” harm, according to the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which visited the UK in January 2023. They called for reparations that were straightforward, easily accessible, and resolved in the claimant’s favor wherever there was uncertainty. The current scheme does not meet that standard at all.

The deeper, and perhaps more unsettling, question is whether Britain is willing to accept this as what it truly was: a persistent, racially charged failure of the state toward a group of people it had invited, exploited, and then turned against, rather than a bureaucratic error. Every piece of immigration legislation passed between 1950 and 1981 was at least partially intended to limit the number of people with Black or brown skin who could reside and work in Britain, according to an internal Home Office report that was leaked and obtained in 2022. The report was not published by the Home Office. Some of those questions might be forced back into the open by legal testimony before Parliament, which would give them a formality and weight that advocacy reports and press coverage haven’t quite been able to provide.

These individuals arrived in Britain aboard a ship bearing the name of an island wind in the Caribbean. They had the legal right to remain when they arrived. A few of them are currently in their 70s and 80s. A few have vanished. The survivors are once again keeping an eye on Parliament to see if testimony and legal arguments can result in a settlement that truly matches the scope of what was done, something that decades of apology and partial compensation have failed to do.