Righting the wrongs of the past for a better future

Client: Home Office

Context
The Windrush scandal gained prominence in 2018, becoming the biggest immigration scandal of our time. It was heavily reported how members of the ‘Windrush generation’ lost out on jobs, healthcare, housing and other services because they were unable to prove their legal status in the UK, and in some cases had wrongfully faced deportation or detention.

Objective
The Home Office has a commitment to ensure that its programme of engagement and communications is effective in increasing awareness of the Windrush Scheme and Windrush Compensation Scheme to all nationalities for whom this issue is relevant: checking whether eligible people are encouraged to apply to the schemes and addressing whether the level of activity is both proportionate to the issue and delivers value for money to the taxpayer.

In December 2019, we were commissioned to conduct an independent review of the communication and engagement programme for the Windrush schemes the Home Office had delivered for affected communities as part of their commitment to right the wrongs.

Approach
In facilitating the review, the Home Office made available a wide range of materials linked to their communications and engagement activity. Wider than this, interviews were conducted with a series of 17 internal and external stakeholders, to further understand the barriers to, and levers for, effective communication.

Our final report clearly set out our analysis of all the materials we reviewed and interviews conducted as well as detailing 8 key recommendations to inform the success of future Windrush schemes communications and engagement activity.