By Ben Kerrigan-
Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is planning to abandon several of the key commitments to recommendations made in the wake of the Windrush scandal in order to facilitate its hardline promises to fast-track the detention and removal of migrants.
The home secretary has reportedly abandoned several pledges it made, including to creating the post of a migrants’ commissioner, who was due to be responsible for speaking up for migrants and for identifying systemic problems within the UK immigration system.
Another promise to increase the powers of the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI) has also been abandoned, following a downgrading on work on the post-Windrush reform programme.
The recommendations were agreed three years ago by the Uk government under Priti Patel, after a formal inquiry by Wendy Williams examined the scandal under which the Home Office erroneously classified legal residents who arrived from Caribbean countries in the 1950s and 60s, as immigrants living in the UK illegally
Although the Home Office has the duty of setting the permissible level of migration in the Uk in order to address longstanding complaints of excess illegal migration in the Uk, the sudden U turn renders the original announcement either not very sincere, or a smokes screen to give a n impression of scheduled change.
The present regime can argue that when Home Secretary’s Change, policies can change too, but it questions the principle of collective responsibility , especially in the same party.
The UK Guardian revealed that Home Office officials have also U turned on a commitment to run a series of reconciliation events to be attended by senior Home Office staff and ministers during which members of the Windrush generation would have been invited to “articulate the impact of the scandal on their lives”.
Governmental sources said the decision to drop Williams’ recommendations was supported by Downing Street and designed to restrict opposition to Sunak’s determination to control illegal immigration at all cost.
Control of immigration is necessary, and an honourable goal, but The Home Office should not jus change its promises to the public without proper explanation.
“The home secretary is doing what is necessary to make sure everything is done to stop the boats. The Williams review is not set in stone,” the source said.
The former home secretary Priti Patel made a firm promise to introduce all 30 recommendations made by Williams in 2020, who listed in her Windrush Lessons Learned Review the precise steps the department needed to take to avoid any repeat of the scandal.
An announcement is due to be made next week, revealing that 28 of the 30 recommendations were being formally “closed”, even though several have not been completed.
Three recommendations have been marked “discontinued”: recommendations nine (the migrants’ commissioner) and three (the reconciliation events), and recommendation 10, which would have strengthened the role of the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, giving the body “more powers with regard to publishing reports”.
The Home Office may need to either show the recommendations made by Williams to be inadequate in the face of its current goals, or admit it is proceeding along a wrong path without concern. Its agenda of curbing entry to the Uk is well understandable, but an desire to scrap recommendations deemed necessary and useful, will need to be accompanied with a comprehensive explanation.