Windrush scandal: MPs react to Home Affairs Committee report
Ilford South MP Sam Tarry and Dagenham and Rainham Jon Cruddas MP have reacted to the Home Affairs Committee's Windrush Compensation Scheme report. - Credit: PA Wire/PA Images
East London MPs have condemned the Home Office's handling of the Windrush scandal following a damning report.
The Windrush Compensation Scheme was set up in 2019 after it emerged that, despite living and working in the UK for decades, many of the Windrush generation were detained or deported.
The Home Affairs Committee announced today (November 24) that "the vast majority of people who applied for compensation have yet to receive a penny".
As of September, only 20 per cent of the estimated 15,000 eligible claimants had applied to the scheme and just 5pc had received compensation.
The report showed 23 people have died "before they received any compensation for the hardship they endured at the hands of the Home Office".
Ilford South MP Sam Tarry called the findings a "disgrace", saying: “The Windrush generation have made an immeasurable contribution to our nation and this latest news heaps insult on top of injustice.
“It’s time for the Windrush Compensation Scheme to be placed under a new independent body to put an end to the Government’s continual failings of all those who’ve already suffered so much, and give them what they so rightly deserve.”
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The committee's report found a "litany of flaws" in the design and operation of the scheme including an "excessive burden on claimants to provide documentary evidence of losses, long delays in processing, poor communication and inadequate staffing".
Dagenham and Rainham MP Jon Cruddas said: "This is a damning indictment of the government's disgraceful handling of how so many from the Windrush generation have been mistreated.
"People who came to Britain who contributed so much to our economy and who enriched our society have been treated callously.
"When belatedly this is acknowledged by the government we now discover just a tiny number of those people have been offered the compensation promised.
"We can have no faith in the current Home Office to competently and decently put right the terrible wrongs done."
The Home Office has been contacted for comment.
