One year ago today, Sajid Javid was appointed home secretary. His appointment followed Amber Rudd’s resignation amid the Windrush scandal.
At first, it seemed Javid wanted a fresh start and to draw a line under the way that the Home Office used to be run – the characteristic mix of chaos and cruelty that has been the calling card of the UK’s domestic handling of immigration for three decades. Javid spoke of wanting to “do right” by the Windrush generation, and promised to be “fair and humane” in how he managed immigration.
For anyone who has experienced the UK’s immigration system, this was promising. It seemed on the face of it to be a recognition that the system’s faults are not just operational but systemic too.
Systemic because, despite government ministers talking about the Windrush scandal as some kind of ghastly and unpredictable mistake, the ‘hostile environment’ was operating exactly as it was designed to when thousands of Windrush generation people living in Britain found themselves being detained, deported and humiliated.
And operational because, on top of a systemic fix, our immigration system needs a nuts and bolts overhaul too. As the Guardian recently reported, caseworkers are overworked, under resourced, and forced into making decisions about people’s cases under huge pressure. It’s little wonder so many wrong initial decisions are overturned at appeal.
Sajid Javid promised to fix these two problems, and at a crucial time for the UK’s relationship with people who migrate here. This year, the Home Office began the unprecedented task of registering every single EU citizen living in Britain, so it can tell who got here before the post-Brexit immigration rules will change.
The Home Secretary’s challenge hasn’t just been to get this mammoth task right – but to do so while rebuilding trust in the department’s ability to deliver. Our polling shows that only one in four people (26%) think that the Home Office will properly implement Settled Status, while a full two in three (64%) have no confidence in the implementation and that no EU citizen will be wrongfully forced to leave.
Sadly, over the last 12 months, Sajid Javid has, with an almost uncanny reliability, shown a tendency to repeat the mistakes of Windrush in his roll-out of the EU registration scheme.
First, the Home Office’s approach is fundamentally the wrong one – even if it were operating perfectly, it would be unfair and inhumane. Why? Because it has displayed indifference (or perhaps ignorance) of the need to register not just EU citizens who have full-time jobs, who read the papers, who operate within the mainstream of society, but also the perhaps 15% of EU citizens who are in one way or another vulnerable – for example, people with poor IT literacy, elderly citizens, people who work cash in hand, children or victims of domestic violence. Many EU citizens won’t be aware that they need to apply for a new immigration status. The Home Office’s settled status marketing campaign is ill-designed and doesn’t reach vulnerable groups.
The result of the Home Office’s apparent indifference to these groups will be that they slip through the net, become undocumented and therefore targets for the hostile environment.
Second, the system doesn’t work properly. Automated checks of applicants’ tax and benefits records aren’t functioning properly, so even people who have been in the same job paying taxes for years are being required to send in extra documents. Similarly, the ID check is meant to be automated too but applicants are being asked to send in their passport. When you’ve got to get through three million applications in a year, these extra delays matter.
Finally, the people administering the system are clearly under a level of pressure that means that they are unable to properly do their jobs - and they are making mistakes as a result. We have already seen mass data breaches, with applicants’ email addresses cc-ed into correspondence so everyone else can see them. These kind of slip-ups are a trademark of the Home Office’s stressed and overworked junior workers and caseworkers.
And on top of all this, a veil of silence from the Home Office. The department is giving the impression of being uninterested in answering queries or complaints from people using the scheme or from organisations such as the3million who have been raising concerns from day one. And on the rare occasion we do hear from a minister, it is to tell EU citizens who have been victims of domestic violence that they should ‘go home’.
A year on then, the promise of a ‘fair and humane’ immigration system seems a long way off, and mistakes of the past destined to be repeated. If Sajid Javid is serious about his commitments when he took the job, the settled status scheme needs urgent attention now.