On 26 January, the Home Office confirmed plans to abandon key pledges to the Windrush generation, originally made in response to the 2020 report, Windrush Lessons Learned Review: independent review by Wendy Williams (HC 93, March 2020).

In a widely-anticipated U-turn, the home secretary Suella Braverman confirmed in a written ministerial statement on 26 January that three pledges were being dropped: recommendation 3 (to run reconciliation events); 9 (to introduce a migrants’ commissioner); and 10 (to review the remit and role of the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI)).

The Guardian had earlier reported (on 6 January) that Braverman was keen to renege on the migrants' commissioner post and recommendation that the ICIBI would have increased powers. So far, according to Williams (in her March 2022 Windrush Lessons Learned Review: progress update), the government had only fully implemented eight of her 30 recommendations.

The earlier reports prompted widespread outrage. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, tweeted that Braverman was ‘using the Windrush generation as a political football’. Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party, said: ‘Braverman cannot be allowed to get away with this.’

In response to the 26 January announcement, the ICIBI, David Neal, published a statement, saying: ‘I am disappointed the home secretary has decided not to progress recommendation 10, since this presented an ideal opportunity to take stock and examine a number of issues relating to the independence and effectiveness of the ICIBI’, citing budget stagnation and delays in the publishing of reports as two of the issues which could have been tackled via the recommendation.

The report into the Windrush scandal was set up by Theresa May’s government in 2018, in an attempt to appease critics of its treatment of the Windrush generation. The scandal emerged in 2018 after the Guardian revealed that Commonwealth citizens, many of them Caribbean and part of the Windrush generation, were being wrongly deported by the Home Office.

While May’s government apologised, and her successor, Boris Johnson, accepted Williams’s recommendations, the Home Office has remained tarred by the scandal. After publication of her March 2022 progress report, Williams said she was ‘disappointed by the lack of tangible progress or drive to achieve the cultural changes required’. She claimed that if her recommendations were not accepted, Britain risked another such incident.

This latest Home Office move suggests that Braverman is not heading away from the ‘hostile environment’ policies adopted by May and continued by successive home secretaries. Since the new year, she has made further promises to curb immigration, including the controversial decision to X-ray child refugees arriving in the UK to check if they are lying about their age.