Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott challenged Sajid Javid on citizens barred from returning to home and family – but barred from his compensation scheme
In an almost-unreported exchange during yesterday’s debate on the government’s planned scheme to compensate Windrush-generation citizens for their suffering during the Tories’ ‘hostile environment‘ scandal, Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott challenged her counterpart Sajid Javid about a glaring hole she had identified in the scheme.
Abbott had discovered that UK citizens who left the UK for reasons such as family funerals or holidays and were prevented from even boarding their flights home will not qualify for the scheme – on the astonishing grounds that it’s “difficult to know” whether being banned from the UK is a “loss”:
Javid failed to respond to the question.
The compensation scheme itself is unclear about this issue – but as Ms Abbott’s office told the SKWAWKBOX:
In the response to the consultation doc on Windrush compensation, it states,
“The Government does not propose to give a specific compensation payment for those who were unable to return to the UK due to their immigration status. It is difficult to determine whether inability to return to the UK is a loss that should be compensated separately from other payments.” (p.33, point 4.24).
The government’s compensation scheme document can be downloaded here:
SKWAWKBOX comment:
The problems with ‘their immigration status’ were caused, of course, by the government’s destruction of the evidence of their status – and the government has bent or broken rule and precedent to prevent the public becoming fully aware of the extent of its guilt. Worse, Theresa May knew those affected were citizens – and acted against them anyway.
Now her successor Sajid Javid is planning to heap insult on top of injury, by denying many of them compensation on the flimsiest and most nonsensical grounds imaginable.
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