Suella Braverman plans to abandon several of the key commitments made in the wake of the Windrush scandal as the UK government prepares to implement hard-line promises to speed up the detention and removal of migrants.
Sources told the Guardian that the Home Secretary has pledged to create the post of a Commissioner for Migrants, who would be tasked with talking about migrants and identifying systemic problems within the immigration system of the United Kingdom.
Another promise to increase the powers of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) has also been abandoned as work in the post-Windrush reform program is downgraded.
The recommendations were accepted three years ago by the government after a formal Wendy Williams inquiry looked into the scandal under which the Home Office misclassified legal residents, many of whom arrived from Caribbean countries as children in the 1950s and 1960s, as immigrants living in the UK illegally.
The recommendations would have stepped up independent scrutiny of the Home Office’s migration policies, days after Rishi Sunak staked his political future on plans to curb irregular migration to the UK.
In his first major speech of 2023, in which he set out five key promises, the prime minister said on Wednesday: “We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally you are detained and quickly removed.”
Officials have also scrapped a pledge to hold a series of reconciliation events to be attended by senior Home Office staff and ministers during which members of the Windrush generation would have been invited to “articulate the impact of the scandal on their lives.”
A Home Office source said Suella Braverman had expressed a desire to move on from the Windrush clean-up exercise when she took up the role last autumn. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK ParliamentAFP/Getty Images
A Whitehall source said the decision to drop Williams’ recommendations was backed by Downing Street and was aimed at curbing potential critics of Sunak’s flagship policy.
“The Home Secretary is doing what is necessary to ensure that everything is done to stop the boats. The Williams review is not written in stone,” the source said.
A Home Office source said Braverman had expressed a desire to move on from the Windrush clean-up exercise when he took over in the autumn of last year and hoped to quietly finish work on the initiatives reform
“I think there is a sense that Windrush was a bit toxic. The current Home Secretary seems to be saying ‘this is nothing to do with me and it’s all fixed anyway’,” said the source
Former home secretary Priti Patel made a firm promise to introduce the 30 recommendations made by Williams by 2020, who listed in her review of lessons learned from Windrush the precise steps the department needed to take to avoid let the scandal repeat itself.
An announcement will be made next week revealing that 28 of the 30 recommendations were being formally “closed”, although several have not been completed.
Three recommendations have been marked as ‘discontinued’: recommendations nine (the Commissioner for Migrants) and three (reconciliation events), and recommendation 10, which would have strengthened the role of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and immigration, giving the body “more powers with regard to the publication of reports”.
The Williams review also sought to compel ministers to implement the inspection’s recommendations or explain why not. It is currently the only government inspectorate that cannot decide when its reports are published, instead relying on the Home Secretary’s discretion.
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Since the current Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Neal, was recruited two years ago, only one in 23 reports has been published in an agreed eight-week period. A key report exposing security breaches at Dover was published 13 weeks late, just before the summer holidays.
The Home Office compensation team will continue to process claims and is unaffected by the decision to end the lessons learned reform project.
As a result of errors by the Home Office, thousands of UK residents who had traveled to Britain legally in the 1950s and 1960s were wrongly told they were immigration criminals, with catastrophic consequences.
In a review of the Home Office’s progress towards meeting these commitments published last March, Williams said only eight of 30 recommendations had been fully implemented and concluded that the department had broken its commitment to ‘to introduce a comprehensive cultural reform.
Anthony Bryan, 64, who was held in immigration detention for five weeks and booked by the Home Office on a flight to Jamaica, the country he left when he was eight in 1965 and has not visited for 50 years, he said he was disappointed that the engagements have been withdrawn.
“I think they want to forget this ever happened,” he said.
A spokesman for the Home Office was asked to comment on the substance of what various sources have told the Guardian, but declined, saying the department did not comment on leaks.
A statement said: “We have already made significant progress on the recommendations, including the creation of the Office of the Independent Complaints Examiner and the appointment of an independent examiner, and by the end of October 2022 we paid or offered £59.58 million in compensation claims.
“We know there is more to do. Many people suffered terrible injustices at the hands of successive governments and we will continue to work hard to deliver a Home Office worthy of every community we serve.”