Theresa May admits responsibility for treatment of victims of Windrush scandal

Theresa May has admitted she was ultimately responsible for the Windrush scandal that saw more than 80 people wrongly deported despite living in the UK for decades.

In an ITV documentary, the former prime minister admitted the Home Office had failed to anticipate the impact of her “hostile” environment on the Windrush generation, who first came to the UK in 1948.

“Should we in the Home Office have had a greater sense of trying to identify whether there were other people, people who were going to get caught up in this way? I don’t believe that question was ever asked. And that’s what lay behind the problems,” she said.

Asked if she was home secretary when this was the case, she said: “I was. And as home secretary, you take responsibility.”

The scandal broke in 2018 when it emerged that the Home Office had kept no records of people from the Windrush generation who had been granted permission to stay and had not issued the paperwork they needed to confirm their status.

It had also destroyed landing cards belonging to Windrush migrants, in 2010. Those affected were unable to prove they were in the country legally and were prevented from accessing healthcare, work and housing.

Many were also threatened with deportation. A review of historical cases also found that at least 83 people who had arrived before 1973 had been wrongly deported.

Mrs May apologised for the scandal, with an inquiry revealing it was both “foreseeable and avoidable.” It criticised “a culture of disbelief and carelessness” in the Home Office.

The documentary, entitled Theresa May: The Accidental Prime Minister, also carries interviews with politicians from across the divide who suggested that she was in the wrong job at the wrong time.

She announced this month she is stepping down as an MP at the election.

Damian Green, her de facto deputy prime minister and leader of the One Nation centrist group of MPs, said she would have been better suited to taking Britain through Covid - and suggested she and Boris should have had reversed roles.

“If you step back and take a historic look at it, Boris should have done Brexit, and then for Covid and all the different demands you needed to get through that, then Theresa would have been absolutely ideal,” said Mr Green.

Former home secretary Suella Braverman, a “Spartan” who rebelled over Mrs May’s Brexit deal, said: “I think history will remember Theresa as a dedicated public servant - who was probably in the wrong job at the wrong time.”

Mrs May also revealed why then-US president Donald Trump took her hand while they walked outside the White House in 2017.

“We literally were just walking along and he said, there’s a little slope around the corner. Take care. And I thought, well, it’s fine. My heels are not that high. I’ll be fine,” she said.

“And next thing I knew, he was holding my hand as we walked up, and of course, I wasn’t able to reclaim my hand before we got the television cameras of the world upon us.”