The Home Office’s hostile environment policies appear to have had a disproportionately negative impact on people of colour, a government evaluation of the legislation has shown.
The long-awaited impact assessment of the package of hostile environment measures which were introduced when David Cameron was prime minister, and later rebranded as “compliant environment” policies, reveals for the first time the government’s own assessment of the legislation’s potential risks.
The report published on Thursday shows that Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian and Bangladeshi nationals were most likely to be affected according to the equality impact assessment. Albanian and Brazilian people, despite being among the top five nationalities most commonly found to be illegally present in the UK, were less frequently affected by the measures.
“We note that of the top five nationalities impacted most are identifiable as being from/of brown or black heritage and all five are visibly not white,” the document notes. “The internal data suggests some of the compliant environment measures may disproportionately impact on people of colour.”
The publication marks the first official evaluation of the policies that led to the Windrush scandal, when thousands of people who were legally resident in the UK found themselves unable to work, rent properties, receive NHS healthcare, open bank accounts or travel.
Former home secretary Priti Patel made a commitment to reviewing the hostile environment measures in 2019, when she promised to implement 30 reform recommendations set out in Wendy Williams’ independent investigation into what caused the Windrush scandal.
The policies were devised by Theresa May, who announced in 2012 when she was home secretary: “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” The measures were meant to limit access to work, benefits, bank accounts, driving licences and other essential services to those who could not prove they had the legal right to live in the UK. It emerged subsequently that many in the UK legally were unable to prove their status, and that the Home Office was frequently misclassifying legal residents as immigration offenders.
Mary Atkinson, Campaigns and Networks Manager at JCWI, a migrants’ rights charity, said: “This report lays out in the cold, clinical language of the Home Office what communities of colour have been saying for over a decade: this government’s hostile environment is racist. For the Home Office to admit that its policies have a disproportionate impact on people of colour, particularly on black and east Asian communities, is a watershed moment. This government cannot begin to right the wrongs of Windrush while every single policy that caused discrimination against Windrush victims remains in place.”
The review of the policies looked primarily at the impact they had between the introduction of the Immigration Act 2014 and 2018 when some policies were paused or amended in the wake of the Windrush scandal, as it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly caught out by hostile environment measures.
During that period the Home Office shared 448,800 individuals’ records with other government departments, and as a result 63,786 individuals were affected by compliant environment policies; the most common actions were having a UK driving licence revoked or a letter being sent to their employer advising them that they may not have the right to work in the UK.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Evaluating the compliant environment is vital to ensuring that both its rules and its protections work effectively. Steps have already been taken to improve safeguards and ensure individuals who are lawfully in the UK have appropriate protection and do not experience difficulties demonstrating their entitlement to work, benefits and services.”
Previous external studies into the working of the hostile environment have flagged similar concerns. In December 2018 the National Audit Office found that hostile environment policies did not provide value for money for the taxpayer.
An Institute for Public Policy Research report in 2020 found that the hostile environment policy had fostered racism, pushed people into destitution, wrongly targeted people who are living in the UK legally, and had “severely harmed the reputation of the Home Office”.
Campaigners have frequently warned that requiring landlords, doctors and employers to perform immigration checks could lead to racial discrimination. The high court found in 2019 that requiring landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants was unlawful and racially discriminatory because it caused landlords to discriminate against British citizens from minority ethnic backgrounds and against foreign nationals who had a legal right to rent. However, the Home Office later won an appeal against the ruling.
