Dear Supporter
I hope you are well.
Apologies for cross referencing as we are sending this update to our related petitions.
I am contacting you to ask for your support with a new petition I have started.
The Home Office want to establish an immigration enforcement centre in Newham in East London, on of the most multicultural boroughs in the UK, which is opposed by the local community and council which would create an unwelcome and unsafe environment for local people and go against the policies of the council in supporting the Windrush generation and against the so called hostile environment . Last year the Home Office misleadingly applied for planning permission, saying that the premises, Warehouse K, would online used for offices to accommodate staff, failing to declare that it would be used as an immigration centre.
I would be really grateful if you were to sign and share the petition as soon as possible as the Home Office is currently conducting a consultation until 20th October.
I am also sharing an article in yesterday's Guardian where Wendy William's author of the Windrush Lessons Learned report criticises the government's failure to act upon the recommendations for the Home Office in her report.
“As far as the review of the compliant environment policy is concerned, there is not the detail, or the speed of activity that I would have expected,” she said. “The timescales and the activities are not ambitious enough and I would expect to see more progress made.
“The department has a choice. It can really embrace my recommendations or it can pay lip service to my recommendations, and not institute that fundamental cultural change,” she told the home affairs select committee. “This is a seminal moment for the department.”
She also expresses concern about the failure to pay compensation to the majority of victims of the Windrush scandal and injustice, 2.5 years down the line.
There are 30 recommendations in the report and had they been acted upon and taken seriously, the Home Office would not have set out to mislead the borough of Newham and would not be seeking to place an immigration enforcement centre in the borough, disregarding the impacts and concerns of those who live there.
Recommendation 8 says:
The Home Offce should take steps to understand the groups and communities that its policies affect through improved engagement, social research, and by involving service users in designing its services.
In doing this, ministers should make clear that they expect offcials to seek out a diverse range of voices and prioritise community-focused policy by engaging with communities, civil society and the public. The Windrush volunteer programme should provide a model to develop how the department engages with communities in future.
The same applies to how it involves its staff in feeding back their information and knowledge from this engagement to improve policy and the service to the public.
October is Black History Month and Recommendation 6 focuses on the importance of the history of black people in the UK and the history of colonialism:
Recommendation 6 – a) The Home Offce should devise, implement and review a comprehensive learning and development programme which makes sure all its existing and new staff learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons. This programme should be developed in partnership with academic experts in historical migration and should include the fndings of this review, and its ethnographic research, to understand the impact of the department’s decisions.
The treatment of the Windrush Generation and their descendants is part of a direct legacy of Britain's colonial past and so this is an important recommendation.
I thank you for your ongoing support.
If sharing on social media we are using the hashtag #OpposeWarehouseK
Kind Regards
Zita