Social housing sector failed Windrush victims, says CIH president

The president of the Chartered Institute for Housing (CIH) has accused the social housing sector of failing to support staff and tenants victimised in the Windrush scandal. 

In her closing remarks at the CIH conference yesterday, Lara Oyedele said the sector “did nothing” to support affected people, saying that many registered providers sacked staff and evicted tenants who were affected by the Home Office’s wrongful persecution of British citizens. 

The name Windrush derives from the ship that brought one of the first large groups of Caribbean people to the UK after WWII and is often used to refer to immigrants from Commonwealth countries in the subsequent decades. 

While those who arrived were automatically British subjects with rights to live and work in the country permanently, it began to emerge in 2017 that hundreds of ‘Windrush’ people were being wrongly detained and deported because of the government’s ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies. 

In a personal speech to the conference, Oyedele explained how she was the child of Windrush parents who came to the UK in the 1960s. 

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“My mum worked as a nurse in the NHS, my dad was a bus driver and worked in factories and that is a very common story of immigrants who came in the fifties and sixties from the commonwealth,” she said.  

“I personally felt that the sector did nothing to help their staff and tenants who were affected at the time. Many of us evicted Windrush tenants and many of us sacked our staff who suffered at the time.  

“I am very disappointed the sector did not stand up and support people like my family at the time”. 

The hostile environment policy was introduced in 2012 and tasked organisations across society – including landlords and employers – with enforcing immigration control in an effort to force undocumented migrants to leave. 

Many of the Windrush generation arrived as children on their parents’ passports and the Home Office had destroyed thousands of records that could have proven their right to remain in the UK. 

As a result, many were falsely categorised as illegal immigrants and lost access to housing, healthcare, banking and driving licenses. In at least 83 cases, British subjects were wrongly deported. 

The scandal resulted in the resignation of Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 and the establishment of a compensation scheme – although by November 2021, only 5% of victims had received compensation and 23 of those eligible had died before receiving payments.