The Jamaica Report: Windrush’s Overseas Reach Exposed and Found Wanting

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update  |  Publication date: 3 January 2024  |  Period covered: July–December 2023

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Key Developments at a Glance

• Independent assessor visits Jamaica, publishing the third Windrush scheme oversight report.
• Report finds Home Office international engagement with Jamaican claimants deeply inadequate.
• Human Rights Watch findings on hostile compensation scheme continue to drive policy debate.
• Jamaica’s constitutional reform committee intensifies public consultations toward republic.
• Reparations debate remains prominent as first-year post-coronation conversations continue.
• Windrush 75th anniversary legacy inspires new oral history and museum projects in Jamaica.

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LONDON / KINGSTON — The second half of 2023 brought a moment of rare official scrutiny to the Windrush Compensation Scheme’s reach into Jamaica itself: a visit by the scheme’s independent assessor that produced a report laying bare the inadequacy of the Home Office’s international engagement with potential Jamaican claimants. The visit, and the report that followed in November, crystallised concerns that advocates had long articulated — that the scheme’s design, administration and outreach were all calibrated for a claimant base in England, with little thought given to those whose stories began and ended on Caribbean shores.

Levermore’s Jamaica Visit: A Damning Assessment

Martin Levermore, who holds the title of Independent Person overseeing the Windrush Compensation Scheme, travelled to Jamaica during 2023 and published his third report in November of that year, making it the first of his assessments to focus specifically on the scheme’s performance from a Jamaican perspective. The report examined the Home Office’s international engagement efforts, the effectiveness of the media campaign conducted in Jamaica between October 2022 and March 2023, and the experience of the approximately 453 Jamaican-nationality claimants on the scheme’s books.

Levermore’s findings were pointed. The media campaign — advertisements placed in The Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer and on Jamaican radio — was assessed as modest in scale relative to the potential claimant population. The report recommended that the Home Office work more closely with the Jamaican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade to reach diaspora communities via their communication platforms within Jamaica and the UK, and noted that a local landline number established for potential claimants in Jamaica represented a positive step that had not been sufficiently publicised. The report also called for greater transparency about the scheme’s outcomes for Jamaican-nationality claimants specifically, including the amounts paid and the proportion of claims succeeding or failing.

The visit and the report attracted coverage in the Jamaica Gleaner and Jamaica Observer and were raised in the House of Commons by MPs with large Caribbean-heritage constituencies. The Home Office acknowledged the report’s recommendations, though advocacy groups noted that acknowledgement and implementation were not the same thing, and that previous oversight reports had produced recommendations that the Home Office had been slow to act upon.

The HRW Legacy: Pressure Continues on a "Hostile" Scheme

The second half of 2023 continued to feel the reverberations of the April 2023 Human Rights Watch report, which had described the Windrush Compensation Scheme as "unfit for its purpose" and demanded urgent reform. HRW had found that the scheme’s complexity, high evidentiary burden and lack of legal aid made it structurally biased against the most vulnerable claimants — precisely those whose lives had been most devastated by the hostile environment. The organisation had written directly to the Home Office calling for the scheme to be placed under independent administration, for legal aid to be provided, and for the burden of proof to be reduced.

Through the second half of the year, Windrush advocacy organisations including Justice for Windrush, Windrush Lives and the Good Law Project continued to press these demands. Martin Forde QC, whose original review of the scheme had recommended independent administration, told Parliament that the process remained "fairly opaque to non-lawyers and to those not used to dealing with documentation," and that legal aid would both speed up the process and protect claimants from re-traumatisation. The Conservative Government maintained its position that the scheme was functioning and improving, while acknowledging that there was more to do.

King Charles, Coronation and the Reparations Conversation

The coronation of King Charles III in May 2023 had reignited the reparations debate with a force that carried well into the second half of the year. For Jamaican advocates and those across the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, the ceremony prompted an instinctive reckoning with the Crown’s relationship to Caribbean history and the question of what acknowledgement — if any — the monarchy was prepared to make of its role in the transatlantic slave trade.

The King had, as Prince of Wales, expressed sympathy with Caribbean communities affected by the Windrush scandal and had spoken of his personal connection to the Caribbean. His accession to the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 had been watched closely by CARICOM leaders, several of whom had publicly stated that they saw Charles’s reign as an opportunity for a reset in the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean on questions of historical justice. By the second half of 2023, however, the formal position of the British government — that it opposed direct financial reparations — had not changed, and the Palace had made no formal statements on the matter.

The CARICOM Reparations Commission pressed forward regardless, maintaining its ten-point plan and building the diplomatic architecture for what it hoped would be formal bilateral negotiations. Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations was among the most active voices, citing the wealth generated by Jamaican sugar plantations for British landowners, the payments made to slave owners at emancipation in 1834 — which were only fully repaid by UK taxpayers in 2015 — and the enduring structural disadvantages faced by Jamaican communities as grounds for a comprehensive programme of reparatory justice.

Constitutional Reform: Jamaica’s Consultations Continue

Jamaica’s Constitutional Reform Committee continued its work through the second half of 2023, building toward the landmark report it would publish in May 2024. Public consultations were held across all fourteen parishes, and diaspora engagement sessions — bringing in voices from Jamaican communities in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada — were a notable feature of the process. The committee sought input on a range of questions: the structure of a future republic, the role and selection of a president, the retention or replacement of the Privy Council as the final court of appeal, the reform of the Senate and the protection of fundamental rights.

For the diaspora in Britain, the consultation process was a reminder that Jamaica’s constitutional future is not only a matter for those living on the island. Many Jamaicans who came to Britain as children in the 1950s and 1960s — the Windrush generation and their contemporaries — retain deep emotional and familial connections to the island. Their interest in whether Jamaica becomes a republic, and on what terms, is not academic. It touches questions of identity, belonging and the terms on which they understand their dual connections to Britain and Jamaica.

The 75th Year: Its Legacy in Culture and Memory

The 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush’s arrival in June 2023 had generated significant cultural output — documentaries, exhibitions, oral history projects and community events — that continued to reverberate through the second half of the year. In Jamaica, the anniversary had prompted reflection on the complexity of what the Windrush generation’s departure meant for the island: a loss of human capital and family structures, but also a source of remittances, transnational connections and cultural exchange that endured across generations.

New oral history and museum projects in Jamaica, some supported by Jamaican diaspora organisations in the UK, set about documenting the stories of those who left, those who remained and those who returned — building an archive that the island had not systematically undertaken before. For scholars of migration, identity and the Caribbean postcolonial experience, the 75th anniversary year opened a window onto a history that had too often been told from the perspective of the destination rather than the departure point.

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Sources for this report include the Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, GOV.UK (Third Independent Person report on the Windrush Compensation Scheme, November 2023), Human Rights Watch, Free Movement, the House of Lords Library, CARICOM, Jamaica Information Service, the Electronic Immigration Network and constitutionnet.org. This report was researched and published on 3 January 2024.