Seven Years, £127 Million and 66 Deaths: The Windrush Compensation Scheme, Examined

The Immigration Act 1971 gave anyone already settled in Britain on January 1, 1973, the right to stay. But many were never issued papers proving it, and the Home Office kept no register. When successive governments built what Theresa May, as Home Secretary, called a “hostile environment” for illegal migrants, requiring landlords, employers, banks and hospitals to check immigration status, people who had lived lawfully in Britain for half a century suddenly could not prove it.

They lost jobs, homes, pensions and access to cancer treatment. Some were detained. Some were deported to Caribbean countries they had left as children. In September 2018, Mr. Javid told Parliament the Home Office had identified about 164 people who had been detained or wrongly removed. Eighteen cases were classed as severe, and three of those 18 had already died.

After reporting by The Guardian and others in late 2017 and early 2018, the dam broke. Amber Rudd, then Home Secretary, apologized on April 16, 2018. Mrs. May, by then Prime Minister, apologized to Caribbean leaders the next day. Within a week, the government announced a documentation scheme, a task force, an independent review and the promise of compensation.

A slow start that set the tone

The scheme was built quickly and launched badly. When the National Audit Office examined it in May 2021, it found that the Home Office had estimated each claim would take 30 staff hours to process. The real figure was 154. The department had said it needed 125 full-time caseworkers; at launch it had six. Claims went through 15 separate steps before payment could be approved, and half of the cases checked for quality had to be sent back.

The results were visible in the numbers. By the end of 2019, the scheme had paid just over £62,000 across 36 claims. By the end of 2020, it had paid £2.9 million. Even after the December 2020 overhaul raised the minimum award to £10,000, the scheme had reached only 19% of its expected claimants and paid £14.3 million to 633 people by March 2021.

In September 2020, the scheme’s own head of policy resigned, describing it as racist and saying it lacked genuine concern for the victims. In November 2021, the Commons Home Affairs Committee said the scheme had a “litany of flaws,” including an “excessive burden” of evidence on claimants, and called its design a “damning indictment” of the Home Office. It recommended moving the scheme to an independent body. The government refused, arguing a transfer would delay payments.

The years of retreat

Wendy Williams’s Lessons Learned Review, published in March 2020, concluded that the scandal had been “foreseeable and avoidable” and that the Home Office had shown “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness” on race. Priti Patel accepted all 30 of its recommendations.

Three years later, her successor began to unpick them. In January 2023, Suella Braverman dropped three: reconciliation events with victims, a migrants’ commissioner, and stronger powers for the borders inspector. In June 2023, the Home Office unit set up to drive reform was disbanded. A Windrush victim, Trevor Donald, took the government to court, and in June 2024 the High Court ruled that abandoning the commissioner and inspector recommendations had been unlawful. The judge found the Home Secretary had failed to consult and could not justify the discriminatory effect on Windrush victims.

In September 2024, after a tribunal ordered its release, the Home Office published a report it had commissioned and then shelved, on the historical roots of the scandal. It found that immigration laws passed in 1962, 1968 and 1971 were designed in part to “reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin.”

A new government, a new commissioner

Labour came to office in July 2024 promising, in Yvette Cooper’s words, to “turn the page.” It pledged to restore the Windrush unit, appoint a commissioner, speed up payments and, if the scheme kept failing, “overhaul it entirely.”

Some of that has happened. The Rev. Clive Foster, a Nottingham pastor, became the first Windrush Commissioner in June 2025. A £1.5 million fund for community groups helping claimants opened in April 2025. And on January 15, 2026, the most significant changes since 2020 took effect, applied retrospectively to existing claimants:

• Claimants challenging a decision can receive up to 75% of their expected award while the review is pending.
• Lost workplace and personal pension contributions, and retirement savings drained during hardship, are now compensable for the first time.
• Claims from people aged 75 and over are prioritized, alongside those with serious illness.
• Immigration fees paid by people who could not prove their status are refunded, and awards account for wage inflation.

“For too long, victims who challenged their compensation decisions faced agonizing waits with nothing in their pockets,” said Mike Tapp, the Home Office minister. “That ends now.” Mr. Foster said it meant “people will receive more money, faster.” At the time, the government said £128 million had been offered to 3,842 claimants and more than 94% of cases had been concluded.

What the numbers say now

Concluded, however, does not mean compensated. Of the 9,495 claims closed by March 2026, about a third, 3,256, were found eligible for payment. Nearly two-thirds ended without one. Another 2,264 remained open, including 566 still awaiting a first decision.

Campaigners at the Black Equity Organisation call it the lowest success rate of any major British redress scheme. In 2024, researchers at King’s College London compared it with the Lambeth children’s home scheme, where 79% of applicants succeeded, and the Post Office Horizon shortfall scheme, where 73% did. The Windrush figure at the time was 22%.

Critics point to the design. The Windrush claim form runs to 44 pages, more than four times the length of the Lambeth form and three times the Post Office one, according to the Black Equity Organisation. Claimants must produce evidence of losses stretching back decades, often from the very records the Home Office failed to keep. There is no independent appeal: reviews are carried out by the Home Office itself, and then by the Adjudicator’s Office. And unlike Post Office and infected blood victims, Windrush claimants get no state-funded legal help.

That last gap may matter most. Research by JUSTICE, the University of Sussex and the law firm Dechert, covering 10 cases, found that the average award was £11,400 when claimants applied on their own and £83,200 once they had a lawyer. One claimant who applied alone received nothing; with legal help, the offer rose above £80,000.

Hetticia McIntosh’s husband, Vanderbilt, received five nil awards before he was offered £1,100 for loss of employment. Their three children, born British citizens, could not grow up in Britain because their parents had no papers. “Injustice has been compounded rather than compensated,” she told JAM Radio this summer.

Running out of time

The Windrush generation is old. Those who arrived as young adults in the 1950s and 1960s are now in their 80s and 90s. By January 2024, 53 claimants had died after submitting claims. By September 2025, the number had reached 66. In his first formal letter to ministers, Mr. Foster wrote that many victims believe “the Home Office is waiting for us to die off.” He said he did not share that view, but called the scheme “opaque and unjust” and the process “overwhelming and retraumatizing.” In February 2026, he described himself as “a man in a hurry for justice,” adding: “Time is not on our side.”

Families can claim on behalf of a relative who has died, but estate claims add another layer of evidence and probate. The scheme offers up to £1,500 toward legal advice on probate, and nothing toward the claim itself.

The Jamaican dimension

Jamaica supplied more of the Windrush generation than any other country, and Jamaica is where many of those wrongly removed were sent. Yet claims from Jamaica-based and Jamaican-national victims have been a small share of the total. Home Office data to December 2023 showed 491 claims from Jamaican nationals, against 6,476 from British nationals, many of them Jamaican-born.

In November 2023, Martin Levermore, the scheme’s independent adviser, devoted a report to Jamaica. He found that the British government had run a two-phase media campaign on the island from October 2022 to March 2023 and set up a local landline to help claimants fill in forms, but that the line was “not widely known.” He called for a continuous stream of communication through trusted local partners. Kingston has pressed the issue at diplomatic meetings: in May 2023, Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith urged “timely completion” of redress. Mr. Foster has called the scandal a Commonwealth problem, and campaigners say people who were deported, or who left and were locked out, remain the hardest to reach.

The verdict: what worked, what didn’t

What could have been done better

Most of the fixes now being demanded were proposed years ago. Taken together, the reports from the National Audit Office, Parliament, Ms. Williams, Mr. Levermore, JUSTICE and the commissioner point to five lessons:

1. Staff it before you open it. Launching with six caseworkers when 125 were needed guaranteed a backlog that the scheme never fully recovered from.
2. Take it out of the Home Office. Parliament recommended an independent body in 2021. The government said it would cause delay. Five years on, the delay happened anyway, and trust never returned.
3. Fund lawyers from day one. The Post Office and infected blood schemes did. The evidence suggests legal help multiplies awards several times over.
4. Shift the burden of proof. Where the state lost or never kept the records, it should not demand that elderly victims produce them. Fixed-sum or presumption-based awards, like the £75,000 Post Office option that 97% of Horizon claimants took, would have been faster and fairer.
5. Go to where the victims are. A campaign in Jamaica that ran for six months, years after launch, is not outreach. Victims abroad need permanent help on the ground, through trusted local partners.

What happens next

The next test comes on October 30, when the Windrush National Organisation holds its conference. Mr. Foster’s open letter, signed by about 78 people, including David Lammy MP, Baroness Lawrence, Martin Forde KC, who advised on the scheme’s original design, JUSTICE, Linklaters and Dechert, asks ministers to use the occasion to commit to funded, independent legal support for every claimant, with a published timetable. Petitions calling for the same have gathered about 65,000 signatures.

The Home Office says it has thanked the commissioner for his recommendations, “many of which we are already implementing.” Its next set of official compensation statistics is due on December 31.

Seven years ago, Britain told the Windrush generation that money could not undo what had been done to them, but that it would try. The scheme it built has, slowly and under pressure, become more generous. Whether it becomes fair, before the people it was built for are gone, is the question that remains.

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Sources: House of Lords Library, “Windrush scandal and compensation scheme”; House of Commons Library briefing (June 2026) via JAM Radio; National Audit Office, “Investigation into the Windrush compensation scheme” (May 2021); Home Office press release, “Greater and faster compensation for Windrush victims” (15 Jan 2026); Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Jamaica (Apr 2019); PoliticsHome (Sep 2018); UNISON (Jun 2024); Leigh Day (Sep 2024); Civil Service World (Jun 2024); PA via Newark Advertiser (Sep 2025); VisaVerge (Feb 2026); The Community Reporter (Jun 2026); King’s College London (Feb 2024); JUSTICE (Aug 2026); Black Current News (Oct 2026); CBC Barbados (May 2023); The Gleaner (Jan 2026).