UK

Windrush victims: the injustice continues

JUNE 28, 2025

A new report has found that Windrush scandal victims got less compensation due to a lack of legal advice funding. Dr Jo Wilding, who led the report, explores why.

“All I can say, and say very strongly, is that people need help. They need legal help. This is not an exercise that an ordinary man on the street, after being traumatised and having to go through what they’ve gone through in their personal lives can get their head around, filling in forms, and then the bureaucracy… and the fact for me, the fact that they don’t talk to you.” – Sonia, Windrush claimant

Sonia’s words, “People need legal help” neatly sum up the findings of a research report on the need for legal representation in the Windrush Compensation Scheme. The research was a collaboration between the charity JUSTICE, solicitors’ firm Dechert LLP, and me at the University of Sussex.

The research team reviewed 17 case files – ten from claimants who initially applied alone and were later represented by a lawyer; seven from claimants who, because of mental or physical health conditions, dementia or street homelessness, could never have applied alone. We also interviewed the lawyer and, where possible, the claimant in each case, to understand exactly what a lawyer does in these cases that makes a difference.

The average compensation offer without a lawyer was £11,400. With a lawyer, the same claimants received an average of £83,200 – more than a seven-fold increase. The largest single increase was from zero to £295,000. Yet every one of the claimants in our study received legal representation only as an act of charity, either from a private law firm running a pro bono service with law centre supervision, a student law clinic or a law centre doing the work either free or with philanthropic funding.

Other compensation schemes, like the Infected Blood Scheme, Lambeth Children’s Home Redress Scheme and the Post Office Horizon Shortfall Compensation Scheme, include some funded legal representation. The (previous) government argued that legal representation was unnecessary because the scheme was designed to be “as clear and simple as possible”. But the claim form alone is 44 pages long (compared with eight and ten pages, respectively, for the Horizon and Lambeth schemes). The Scheme Rules occupy another 52 pages and the current (18th) version of the Guidance runs to 105 pages.

For some claimants, the claim could only progress with specifically an immigration lawyer. Sonia and Andre were refused compensation on the grounds that they were not, in fact, entitled to live, work and access health care in the UK at the relevant time. They had to sell their house and leave the UK because of the denial of the right to work, and were repeatedly given six-month visitor stamps at the airport, instead of being admitted as returning residents. Since there was no application form for returning resident status, only a conversation at the airport on arrival, there was no record of their asking to be readmitted. Sonia had to repeatedly fly to and from the UK during her children’s education, at enormous expense, to avoid breaching her ‘visit’ restrictions.

Their lawyer, an immigration specialist, had to set out in detail the legislation in place at different times in their lives, their place of residence at those times, and the status which they should, therefore, have been recognised with at each point. Likewise Patricia was originally denied compensation because the Home Office misunderstood its own rules and believed she was not ‘lawfully resident’ at a time when in fact she had the right to be in the UK.

The Home Office has commented, in response to the report, that it provided £1.5 million funding for community groups to provide advocacy support for claimants. The Working Group wholeheartedly supports that provision, but our research shows that advocacy support can only complement, not replace legal representation. No amount of community group advocacy can resolve those legal issues around immigration status and eligibility.

The scheme is fundamentally evidence-based. Claimants have to prove that (1) they had the right to be in the UK and the relevant time but (2) they were unable to prove that right and (3) they suffered some financial or other loss which was caused by that inability to prove their status. No provable loss and causation – no compensation. But those chains of historic events can be difficult to evidence.

In theory, of course a claimant or a community group could request files from a local authority to show that they were refused housing assistance, or from the Department for Work and Pensions to show that they were denied a social security benefit – and indeed one of our participants had made his own Subject Access Requests – but receiving the file is only the first step, as one of the lawyers explained:

“That housing file, you get hundreds of disclosures. And when you’re looking at housing files from 2003, 2002, they have very sort of basic IT systems. So there’s a lot of inference… But I found that having sort of a good understanding of housing or homelessness law because of the Law Centre, and that’s our bread and butter, we knew what we were looking for in terms of specific language. So, anything to do with ‘Part 7’, we know that’s a homelessness application. So, the initialisms or acronyms they were using, we know what they mean in a lot of these spots where they just come across as Gobbledygook.”

That interpretation of evidence and its significance was one of the most important roles lawyers played. Similarly, it took a lawyer to recognise that the disclosure files were often incomplete, and to go back to the public authority several times, in some cases, until they had the full file.

Often, though, the file no longer existed because of the passage of time. One claimant, Chioma, was refused compensation for the denial of housing assistance because the Home Office found ‘no evidence’ that she made a housing application 20 years earlier. The lawyer had to contact the local authority to ask how long they retained housing application files; the answer was 12 years. The lawyer eventually obtained evidence about the housing difficulties from a previous solicitor (which the Home Office had never looked for) and argued, on the balance of probabilities, that Chioma had most likely been refused housing assistance because of her (misunderstood) immigration status.

Funding needs to cover both representation and the costs of obtaining evidence. Although the scheme guidance says that medical evidence should not routinely be required, it was relevant in ten of the cases we reviewed. One claimant, Jason, paid £1,500 out of his interim compensation to obtain a psychiatric report, which contributed to an increase of almost £100,000 on the initial award, but for which he was not reimbursed. Other claimants had their decisions made without medical evidence because they could not afford it, even where the decision-maker had indicated that medical evidence was desirable, but where the Home Office had declined to commission and fund medical evidence itself (despite the Scheme rules allowing it to do so).

The research offered a unique opportunity to compare the same case with and without a lawyer, when the questions for the decision-maker were identical – as opposed to different but similar cases, or the same case on application and appeal. That meant we could draw clear conclusions about what lawyers do on cases that makes a difference both to the client’s experience and to the outcome of the case – with some wider relevance for understanding the importance of legal representation beyond just the compensation scheme.

For some of our claimants, though, there was never any possibility of their claiming without a lawyer. Ravi and Sheldon were both identified as needing their immigration status resolved via the Windrush scheme while they were in hospital with serious Covid complications, and unable to be released because they were homeless. The Law Centre lawyer who helped with that then also made their compensation claims. For Ravi, the lawyer even had to help him to set up a bank account to receive the compensation payment. Clive and Marcus had also been street homeless at times, while Marcus also had dementia, as did Winston.

Yet funded representation does not exist even for this group, who desperately needed the compensation money they received to be able to live the rest of their lives with dignity and care. We do not know how many more elderly and vulnerable Windrush survivors are still unrepresented and not receiving compensation.

We end with just one recommendation: implement funded legal advice for the Windrush Compensation Scheme, to cover both the legal representation and the sourcing of evidence like medical reports.

To that end, we encourage MPs to put forward questions in Parliament, to put down an Early Day Motion, and to meet with the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Treasury to push this forward. With the long overdue appointment of a Windrush Commissioner, Reverend Clive Foster, this is a moment of opportunity.

The report People need legal help: The value of legal representation in the Windrush Compensation Scheme is available here.

Dr Jo Wilding is Associate Professor in public and migration law st Sussex University and a barrister at Garden Court Chambers.

Infographic images (Dechert’s design team) c/o author