Windrush Compensation Scheme (Expenditure) Bill
Debate between Lyn Brown and Lucy PowellMonday 10th February 2020
(4 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lucy Powell
My new hon. Friend makes a very good point. That very much reflects my experiences of trying to coach and support people, navigating them through what are for many very difficult and uncharted waters. The original Windrush generation—I will come on to their descendants in a minute—are very isolated. If it were not for support networks, for example churches, they would have very little in the way of support services. They are very scared about coming forward.
As I said, it is really important that we recognise that the Windrush generation and their descendants are, and always were, British citizens, and that we are leaving so many people effectively stateless and feeling unwelcome in this country. I could go through many cases with the Minister—I have raised many cases here—but I will not because a lot of other people want to speak. However, the sorts of situations that I have come across include people not being allowed back into the country for one, two or three years, with them, in the meantime, losing their job and their social housing, which meant that their children also lost their homes. I met an individual who had a refusal to have their status regularised in the mid-’80s—I think it was an administrative error at the time—which frightened them so much that they have lived under the radar ever since, never having a job, never accessing public services and never having a home. They have been living among their family networks for their entire life—this is somebody who is now in their 60s. As well as those types of situations, others have been well rehearsed in the media, such as where people have served in the British Army, or worked as nurses or public servants, and have found themselves on the wrong end of this shameful, shameful situation.
As others have said, including the Home Secretary, no amount of money can compensate for the loss of life, livelihood and dignity—of people’s whole lives. People have never gone on holiday, and people have lost their home, status and dignity. However, that does not mean that we should not properly compensate them, nor does it mean that, just because no amount of money can compensate them, paltry amounts will do. We need to give people justice and be seen to be giving them justice, and I will say a bit about what that might look like.
The purpose of the compensation scheme has to be, at its core, about restoring trust, undoing some of the damage that has been done and properly compensating people for their losses. It is difficult to see how the scheme, as designed, will help to do those things. The Home Secretary has said that these cases are complicated and of course they are, but the scheme’s design has made them much more complicated than they need to be. People do not have the time, the support and, in most cases, the documentation that is being asked of them.
How do we put a price on many of the things that they have lost? How do we put a price on someone not having had a holiday for 30 years, even though they are a working person? How do we put a price on someone not seeing a family member for 30 years because they live in fear of going on holiday? How do we put a price on someone not getting healthcare 20 years ago when they were poorly and that having had a detrimental effect on their life ever since? These things are hard to put a price on. As others have said, there is an undeniable fear of the Home Office, so many people do not want to come forward and make themselves known to it. A lot more needs to be done to overcome that.
I have a few asks of the Minister on the compensation scheme, and then I will talk about a couple of other things before I finish. Others have talked about the timeline. I welcome that it has been extended by two years, but that still makes it shorter than the amount of time that people had to claim for payment protection insurance compensation. If that is our benchmark, which seems a perfectly good one, we are failing on that. People should have longer to claim for this than they had for PPI.
The documentation has to be made a lot simpler. There will have to be a certain amount of discretion. It is about people looking at an application with common sense and judging it based on the evidence that is before them. As others have said, we need more support services. If it is not legal aid, which I think there is a strong case for, let us at least put some money into the support and advice services that can help people. Can we look again at some flat rates—some amounts of money—for things that we cannot put a price on, so that we can get proper compensation?
There are a couple of other things about the scheme, which I have raised and will continue to raise, even though I know that this is not a particularly popular cause. On proving good character, if we are agreeing as a House tonight that people were British citizens when they arrived, and that their descendants were also British citizens when they arrived, we cannot then apply the legislation from 2006 and 2009 about whether people meet a good character test or not. They are British citizens or they are not. As the Minister will know, I have dealt with a number of cases of people who have had convictions, and I know that Ministers have the discretion to let them apply under the terms of the Windrush scheme.
Ms Lyn Brown
I repeat that Ministers have discretion, and therefore, if they do not use that discretion, we will hold them to account for that for as long as we possibly can—as I will, while there is breath in my body.
Lucy Powell
I thank my hon. Friend—my good friend—for that comment. Ministers do have discretion, but I suppose that I am going even further than that: this should not be discretionary, because somebody either is and was a British citizen when they came, and therefore their descendants were, and their right to be here, to remain and to have citizenship is outwith any discretionary decision about their good character, their moral conduct or whether they have a conviction. I know that this might not be as popular as the case I have of someone who served in the British Army, or of someone who was a British nurse for many years—I am talking about people who have been convicted, in some cases of very serious offences—but that is our country’s problem, in terms of getting those people to serve their criminal sentence and then rehabilitating them, because they are British citizens. We need to look at that.
There are still a number of issues about Windrush descendants. The same principle needs to apply: if somebody’s parents were British citizens when they arrived here in 1969 or 1970, with their British passport that they came over with from Jamaica, their children are also British citizens regardless. They should not have to meet tests that have subsequently come into UK law. They are British citizens and we should apply that as a consistent principle. It is only when we start applying those principles consistently that we will begin to restore trust. It is all very well to paint people as terrible criminals, which is why they have to be deported, but that still gets the moral argument wrong because they are British citizens—[Interruption.] They are. If they are a descendant of a member of the Windrush generation, or are themselves a member, they had a right to British citizenship from the day that they were born and therefore, they are British citizens. The Government are applying retrospectively their moral judgments on that to try to appease some test of being tough on deportations and foreign criminals. I am sorry that this is not perhaps the same publicly appealing call as others, but until and unless the Government recognise the core principle—that somebody is and was a British citizen from the off and that we are trying to get that right in their compensation and by regularising their status—we will not go any way to restoring trust.
The Minister can shake his head all he likes, but I can talk to him now or afterwards about the cases that he or his predecessors and I have discussed, where that principle has been recognised. However, it is still being recognised discretionarily and that is wrong. I am sorry—I know that that is not popular but I will keep banging on about it until we sort it out.
That brings me to my final point. We cannot have these conversations without the lessons learned review being on the table, being debated and discussed. Until then, he and I will continue to argue about whether the deportations are necessary. If lessons are being learnt, everything else should be on hold until they have been understood, absorbed and acted upon. More than the financial compensation, members of the Windrush generation in my constituency, who are angry about what has happened and in some cases afraid, want to know that this will never happen again and that lessons are being learnt for them, for their children and for people thereafter.