Progress update considers achievements made since March 2020 Windrush Lessons Learned Review
The Home Office last week published an important new independent report by Wendy Williams reviewing the progress the department has made in implementing the 30 recommendations set out in Williams' March 2020 Windrush Lessons Learned Review (WLLR).
The comprehensive new 144-page progress update can be downloaded here or read online here on Gov.uk.
The progress update takes an in-depth look at the Home Office's Comprehensive Improvement Plan (CIP), which was published in September 2020 in response to the WLLR.
Overall, Williams is positive about the progress the Home Office has made in righting the wrongs of the Windrush scandal, but there is still much more to be done.
Home Secretary, Priti Patel and Permanent Under-Secretary of State Matthew Rycroft both said they were pleased by Williams' recognition of the Home Office's progress over the last 2 years, while the Guardian highlighted how Williams found the Home Office has failed to transform its culture.
The Home Office's press release notes that Williams found 21 of her 30 recommendations in the WLLR had been met or partially met. Sky News reported that Williams' assessment is "fairly damning" for the Government as it found only eight recommendations have been implemented in full.
In the report's conclusion, Williams herself says that the Home Office had risen to the challenge of implementing her original recommendations, and it had done so with "vigour and determination".
Williams adds, however: "It is understandable that, in an organisation as large as the Home Office, the scale of change envisaged in my report takes time. I am not surprised, nor indeed disappointed, that in a number of areas my conclusion has been that a recommendation has been 'unmet'."
One significant area where progress has not been sufficient is in the WLLR's recommendation that a full review be carried out of the Home Office's 'hostile environment' immigration policy (now officially called the 'compliant environment').
Wendy Williams said: "[P]rogress in reviewing key policies and guidance, including evaluating the compliant environment (Recommendation 7), has been slow. Positive initiatives that are crucial to enabling change, such as the ethical decision-making model (Recommendation 17), are still in their infancy and have yet to take effect. As a result, I have seen limited evidence that a compassionate approach is being embedded consistently across the department. Given its central significance to the Windrush scandal and the workings of the department, the failure to complete the review of the compliant environment policy will fundamentally hamper the department's efforts to learn lessons and move on constructively. The department should therefore be vigilant in completing these recommendations without further delay to ensure that its strong formative work is established across the whole organisation."
On the WLLR's set of recommendations for the Home Office to achieve more robust and inclusive policy making, Williams finds positive work has been undertaken, but overall progress has not been not sufficient.
The progress update states: "[T]here is limited evidence that the positive developments are being consistently translated into tangible effects across the department. The recommendations are all currently in their formative stages, with limited progress in many of the examples. In others, the plans and timescales for coordinating the policy-making framework are not yet clear. A few of the recommendations show little or no progress."
For the progress update, Wendy Williams carried out a review of 13 immigration case files to consider whether there have been any improvements in immigration casework and decision making since the WLLR.
She finds: "While it appears that adequate decisions have become more likely when the [Chief caseworker unit] is involved, at present this only happens in a relatively small number of cases. Until these changes are introduced more widely, many of the issues I identified with immigration casework in the WLLR are likely to remain. Although small, my case file review underscores this point and suggests there is still some inconsistency in the extent to which caseworkers follow existing guidance, and in the way they consider ethical issues, use discretion or provide the basic essentials of customer service."
Williams notes that complex immigration cases, in particular, continue to be problematic for the Home Office. She found, for example, that decision makers are not always using discretion in decision making when it is available, and decision makers are not always escalating cases for advice or support, even though there are mechanisms in place to do so.
The WLLR's recommendation for implementing diversity and inclusion training for Home Office staff has not been met, the progress update finds.
Wendy Williams states: "What is clear is that the department could and should have made more progress. The lengthy delays led some teams to devise their own local training programmes. While this demonstrates great initiative on the part of the teams concerned, it lacks the consistency and structure which would have allowed the department to benchmark its activity, measure attendance levels and assess its overall effectiveness. This makes it difficult to gauge whether the actions taken will lead to any wider cultural and systemic change. At the time of my assessment, there was no evidence that any such change had taken place. I therefore conclude that this recommendation is not met."
The WLLR also called for Home Office staff to have improved historical understanding of immigration legislation, but Williams finds this has only been partially met.
The progress update states: "The department has developed training covering the history of the UK's immigration and nationality system from 1960 to 2020. […] As of February 2022, the training had been delivered to over 2,000 people in certain areas of the department. […] Overall, I commend the work of the officials designing a comprehensive training package and the progress so far on rolling this out to immigration officials. However, plans for further roll-out, monitoring and evaluation are not well defined. I have seen no evidence of an attempt to assess how much of the knowledge individuals are applying and remembering in practice following the sessions, so it is not possible to comment on whether it is contributing to cultural and systemic change."
Williams added that there was minimal evidence of the Home Office carrying out historical research when considering new legislation.
While Williams does not comment on the contents of the Government's New Plan for Immigration (and subsequent Nationality and Borders Bill), she says the Plan's equality impact assessments do demonstrate a marked improvement over those published before the WLLR.
"This suggests that the department is taking more significant steps to assess the impact of its policies and legislation than was previously the case," Williams said.
ITV News had further quotes from Williams made after the publication of the progress update. According to ITV News, Williams said she was disappointed by the Home Office's progress.
Williams was quoted as saying: "In some areas, the department has shown ambition and a commitment to taking forward my recommendations. But in others I have been disappointed by the lack of tangible progress or drive to achieve the cultural changes required within a reasonable period to make them sustainable. Much more progress is required in policy-making and casework, which will be seen as the major indicators of improvement.
"The department is at a tipping point and the next stage will be crucial in determining whether it has the capacity and capability to make good on its ambitions 'to build a Home Office fit for the future, one that serves every corner of society…[with] a long-term focus on wholesale and lasting cultural change."
Williams also warned that the Home Office runs the risk of another Windrush-style incident occurring, Sky News reported.
Praxis, a charity for migrants and refugees, said in a statement that it was not surprised by many of Williams' negative findings.
Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz, Policy and Public Affairs Manager at Praxis, said: "We are disappointed, but not surprised, by the picture that emerges from Wendy Williams' review of the Home Office's glacial progress in implementing many of her recommendations, which is lacking in senior leadership and focused more on processes than outcomes. We recognise the picture painted by the review of a Department that is failing to embed a more compassionate approach to working with the communities it is meant to serve. We know all too well from our day to day advice work that the Home Office routinely fails to see our clients as human beings first and foremost. Inconsistency remains one of the defining characteristics of Home Office decision making."