Source · Select Committees · Home Affairs Committee
Recommendation 16
16
Deferred
Explain risk mitigation for historical cases review and share widening costs.
Conclusion
The Home Office should also explain clearly how it has considered and is seeking to mitigate any risks it identified when making the decision not to broaden the scope of its historical cases review, including but not limited to the risk of failing to identify non-Caribbean Commonwealth nationals who may have been wrongly detained and/ or removed, or whose data may have been proactively shared with other government departments. The Home Office has stated that widening the scope of the historical cases review would take a ‘substantial number of caseworkers around two years to review at a significant cost’. Without being provided a precise estimate of what that cost would be, we cannot accept that as a reasonable justification for not widening the scope of the review as suggested by the Public Accounts Committee and by Wendy Williams in her Lessons Learned Review. The Home Office must share its estimate of the cost and caseworkers required. (Paragraph 51) The impact of covid-19 on engagement events
Government response summary AI-generated
The government states the Windrush Compensation Scheme is open for applications and that it is unable to directly identify individuals who have not made contact, thereby sidestepping the request to explain risk mitigation for not broadening the historical cases review and declining to provide cost estimates for such a review.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government · verbatim extract
Deferred
The Historical Cases Review was established to answer questions from Parliament as to the number of Windrush Generation individuals who had been removed or detained, or subject to compliant environment sanctions. It was never intended to identify all people affected in all ways by Windrush issues. Indeed, there is no way to use Home Office data to do this. The department published the results of the review in two letters to the Home Affairs Select Committee, the first in August 2018, and the second in June 2019. In line with the then Home Secretary’s commitment to have the work of the review externally assured, PWC were brought in to do this and they concluded that the review was constructed correctly and that its operation was effective. Extending the review to all nationalities would bring what is currently an unknown but large number of cases into scope, as such it is extremely difficult to give any reasonable estimate for the cost of such an exercise, as a very rough figure we would suggest in the tens of millions. Such an exercise would still not identify all people potentially eligible for the Compensation Scheme and as such is not an effective way to proceed. The Historical Case Review saw staff undertake a manual check of cases, out of which only 221 were found to be potentially impacted. Of the 221, 55 were found to be potentially unfairly subject to compliant environment sanctions. This approach is costly, inefficient and ultimately unlikely to guarantee that we will be able to locate and reach those people. We have instead focussed efforts and resource into outreach and engagement. To date we have spent approximately £1,192,979.00 on media campaigns, communication materials and outreach events. As a result of this we have had 18,516 applications to the Windrush Taskforce as of end Q2 2021, and 3,139 applications to the Windrush Compensation Scheme as of 31 October 2021. To raise awareness of both the department has conducted extensive outreach to reach the full spectrum of affected individuals and give them the help they need.
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