Britain after World War Two
After the war ended, Britain was in ruins. Thousands of homes and buildings had been destroyed by German bombing raids. Many of Britain’s workers had died in the war and the country needed to be rebuilt. Britain particularly needed workers in:
[…] In order to find these workers, Britain reached out to its colonies across the world, including in the Caribbean.
[…] Commonwealth citizens could travel with their Commonwealth passport without needing any extra documents to prove their right to live or work in Britain.
[…] When people from the Caribbean arrived in Britain, their experience was far from what they expected. Despite being invited to Britain, many people faced racist discrimination. Many Black people also faced racist violence and harassment.
Despite labour shortages, many Black people were refused jobs because of the colour of their skin and often had to take jobs for which they were overqualified. It was also difficult to find housing, as many white landlords refused to rent rooms to Black people. The accommodation that was available was often in poorer areas.
(BBC BITESIZE: Caribbean migration: the Windrush generation)
From 1962 onwards several laws relating to immigration were passed, notably those of 1962 and 1971
The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act
The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 marked a decisive turning point in UK immigration law. It was the first statute to impose immigration control on Commonwealth citizens seeking to enter the UK….
(DavidsonMorris: Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 Explained 2026)
The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which aimed to restrict numbers, set up a voucher system for those entering the UK to work. However, the law backfired. Many men who were working here at the time had intended to return to their families in the long-term, but when they realised that they may not be readmitted if they left the UK, they brought their families to join them and decided to settle permanently in the UK instead.
(BBC BITESIZE: Commonwealth immigrants in the Modern Era, 1948-present)
The Immigration Act 1871
The Immigration Act 1971 stands as one of the most influential pieces of legislation in the United Kingdom’s immigration framework [...]
Key Provisions:-
a. Control of Entry. The Act established that those who do not hold the right of abode need leave to enter or remain. Immigration officers were empowered to grant or refuse permission at the border, impose conditions (such as restrictions on work or recourse to public funds), and enforce removal in the event of breach.
b. Right of Abode. The right of abode […] conferred an unconditional right to live in and enter the UK free from immigration control.
c. Patriality. The Act used the concept of “patriality” to define who qualified for the right of abode. Categories included […] those with a parent or grandparent born in the UK, and (some) who had been ordinarily resident in the UK for at least five years. Importantly, patriality did not apply universally to anyone who had lived in the UK; it was restricted to citizens with specific ancestral or residence connections.
d. Leave to Enter or Remain. The Act empowered the Secretary of State to grant limited or indefinite leave to enter or remain. Limited leave could carry conditions, including restrictions on employment or the duration of stay. Indefinite leave to remain (ILR) allowed permanent residence without time restrictions.
(Glovisa: Immigration Act 1971 UK Explained)
Those who had been here living and working, for at least five years, needed to have, to acquire, or re-establish evidence of their Indefinite Leave to Remain. They also needed to have any future passports endorsed in this way. With Indefinite Leave to Remain, they could apply for British Citizenship which was then free for a short period of time.
George applied for, and was granted, British Citizenship at the earliest possible time, and advised many of his Jamaican friends and acquaintances to do the same. Many of them could not see the point. If they had been here for at least five years, they could not have foreseen the difficulties they would face thirty years later if they had either lost or destroyed any paperwork which would have established the date on which they had arrived.
Further Immigration Acts in 2002 and 2006 introduced citizenship tests and electronic monitoring of asylum seekers.
The Hostile Environment
Some use the term “Hostile Environment” to describe all policies which make life difficult for migrants living in the UK – treating them as less deserving of dignity and humanity than British citizens. More specifically, it is a set of policies introduced in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, with the aim of making life unbearably difficult in the UK for those who cannot show the right paperwork. Or, as she said at the time; “The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.”
To achieve this, the Government set about trying to cut undocumented migrants off from using fundamental services including the NHS and state support, and made it illegal to work, or for a landlord to rent them a property. Doctors, landlords, police officers and teachers are tasked with checking immigration status, and often people who look or sound ‘foreign’ are asked to show their papers in order to rent a home or get medical treatment.
(The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants: The Hostile Environment Explained)
The Home Office had already implemented a biometric identity card system for immigrants. This was to be used to underpin an elaborate system of immigration controls to be enforced by employers, landlords, hospitals, banks and others introduced by the Immigration Acts 2014 and 2016. But the Commonwealth Citizens, including many children, had arrived decades before any of this was introduced. Some had lost passports, settled status letters and related documents. Some of the children may never have had these documents.
They grew up and many more years passed with their having no reason to worry their right to be in the UK, the country that had become their home, would ever be called into question. But this is now being called into question by employers, landlords, hospitals, banks, social services, the benefits agency and the Home Office.
The Home Office has lost records. It has also refused or failed to check records it does have to confirm people’s status. Other government departments may have relevant records too. Most significantly, the Home Office is responsible for introducing changes to immigration policy – the introduction of biometrics and the later expansion of immigration checks dependent on these.
To make matters worse, government cuts to legal aid, particularly from 1 April 2013, have left many people without assistance to sort out disputes or doubts about their status. And the Home Office has been demanding a fee of £229 for people to obtain the biometric document which the Home Office, for its own reasons, has introduced years after they were settled here.
Yesterday, the Home Secretary said this fee would no longer be charged.
(Amnesty International: Seventy years after Windrush)
But a seminally disastrous mistake had been made in 2010 which led to a new concept – the Windrush Scandal.
The Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK, despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties. A former Home Office employee said the records, stored in the basement of a government tower block, were a vital resource for case workers when they were asked to find information about someone’s arrival date in the UK from the West Indies – usually when the individual was struggling to resolve immigration status problems. Although the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has promised to make it easier for Windrush-generation residents to regularise their status, the destruction of the database is likely to make the process harder […]
The former employee (who has asked for his name not to be printed) said it was decided in 2010 to destroy the disembarkation cards, which dated back to the 1950s and 60s, when the Home Office’s Whitgift Centre in Croydon was closed and the staff were moved to another site. Employees in his department told their managers it was a bad idea, because these papers were often the last remaining record of a person’s arrival date, in the event of uncertainty or lost documents. The files were destroyed in October that year, when Theresa May was home secretary.
A person’s arrival date is crucial to a citizenship application, because the 1971 Immigration Act gave people who had already moved to Britain indefinite leave to remain.
When staff were asked to find evidence of an arrival from the Caribbean or other former colonies and had difficulty tracing any other records, senior officers would request the key to the basement of the neighbouring building and consult the landing cards. They recorded the names, dates of arrival and in some cases the name of the ship.
“Sometimes the Passport Office would call up, and people would say: ‘I’ll look in the basement,’” the ex-employee said.
The Labour MP David Lammy said: “This revelation from a whistleblower reveals that the problems being faced by the Windrush generation are not down to one-off bureaucratic errors but as a direct result of systemic incompetence, callousness and cruelty within our immigration system.
“It is an absolute disgrace that the Home Office has destroyed these documents and then forced Windrush-generation migrants to try and prove their status, threatening them with deportation and stripping them of their rights.
“This was no accident and the orders to destroys records must have come from somebody at the top of the department. It is time for the home secretary to do the honourable thing, take responsibility for this fiasco and resign.”
(The Guardian April 17 2018: Home Office destroyed Windrush landing cards, says ex-staffer)
If only the government had registered the status of Commonwealth citizens who had arrived before 1973, or had not destroyed their boarding cards, they would have been able to challenge the cruel actions carried out under the “hostile environment". It is likely that most of those affected would have been able to re-establish their Indefinite Leave to Remain. Thereafter, and up to now, the plight of those affected by the Hostile Environment policy has acquired a more punitive name - the Windrush Scandal.
The Windrush Scandal
The origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population, according to a leaked government report. The stark conclusion was set out in a Home Office commissioned paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress […]
It concludes that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.
(The Guardian, May 29 2022: Windrush scandal caused by ‘30 years of racist immigration laws’ – report)
Too Little, Too Late April 17 2018
Prime Minister Theresa May has apologised to Caribbean leaders over the Windrush generation controversy, at a Downing Street meeting. She said she was "genuinely sorry" about the anxiety caused by the Home Office threatening the children of Commonwealth citizens with deportation. The UK government "valued" the contribution they had made, she said, and they had a right to stay in the UK.
(BBC NEWS: Windrush generation: Theresa May apologises to Caribbean leaders)
Windrush Compensation
In 2018, news of the Windrush scandal reached the public domain, when it emerged that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens had been detained, deported and denied legal rights after wrongly being classified as illegal and/or undocumented immigrants. Hundreds of individuals were placed in immigration detention, lost their jobs and homes and were threatened with removal, with many others deported to countries they hadn't resided in since childhood.
Reforming the Windrush Compensation scheme was launched on 15 November 2021 […]
The Windrush Compensation Scheme was launched in April 2019 by the Home Office to compensate members of the Windrush generation and their families for the losses and hardships they suffered as a result of not being able to demonstrate their lawful immigration status.
When the scheme was set up the Home Office estimated that 15,000 people would be eligible for compensation. As at the end of August 2021, only 837 people have received payment.
(Justice: Reforming the Windrush Compensation Scheme)
In 2025 Clive Foster OBE , a senior pastor at the Pilgrim Church in Nottingham, was appointed as Windrush Commissioner. A personal statement reads:
“I’m committed to delivering justice for people affected by the Home Office Windrush Scandal through cultural change, accountability, and action. My aim is to deliver change that people can see and feel in their everyday lives. I act independently, without fear or favour, guided by the voices and needs of impacted people. I firmly believe that the legacy of the Windrush generations must be defined by their extraordinary contribution to the UK, not by a scandal.”
(Office of the Windrush Commissioner)
Windrush compensation scheme needs significant overhaul, MPs told (June 1 2026)
Survivors of the Windrush scandal should be given legal support in making claims for compensation to help slash the number of claimants who are denied payouts and to bring the scheme in line with compensation programmes rolled out for victims of the Post Office Horizon and infected blood scandals, the independent Windrush commissioner, Clive Foster, told MPs.
Claimants found applying for compensation exhausting and painful and most received no payment at the end of a difficult process, Foster told the public accounts committee, highlighting that nearly six in 10 applications resulted in no money being awarded.
(The Guardian: Windrush compensation scheme needs significant overhaul, MPs told)
Had George lived beyond 2013 he would definitely have campaigned vigorously for the rights of people affected by Theresa May’s “hostile environment policy”, which led to the Windrush Scandal.
Next: Nottingham Black Archive