What impact does the Hostile Environment have?
The Hostile Environment deters people from going to the doctor for fear of racking up a huge bill or being reported, detained and deported. It deters undocumented migrants from reporting crime to the police. It deters undocumented migrants from reporting unsafe working conditions or exploitative employers. It reduces the options for renting a home and pushes people into poor quality or even dangerous accommodation, at the mercy of their landlord.
Hostile Environment policies also make doctors, landlords, teachers and other public sector workers responsible for immigration checks. These policies encourage and incentivise us to be suspicious of each other and undermine trust in our public services.
There is no evidence that the Hostile Environment achieves its stated aim of forcing people out of the UK. But there is an extraordinary amount of evidence of the damage being done.
The Right to Rent scheme requires landlords to check the immigration paperwork of potential tenants. If they rent a property to someone without the right paperwork, they face huge fines or even imprisonment. But there is effectively no consequence for taking the ‘low-risk’ option, opting for white people with British passports.
The result is that the Court of Appeal has found it could take black, Asian and ethnic minority people and migrants up to twice as long to find a property to rent as a white British person.
The Government should be doing everything in its power to end discrimination and racism. Instead, it says the discrimination caused is ‘worth it’ for the sake of the Hostile Environment. We’re fighting this at the European Court of Human Rights – find out more and support the case.
Who is impacted by the Hostile Environment?
We are all impacted by the Hostile Environment, which increases racial discrimination and asks us to be suspicious of each other. At JCWI, we believe Britain can do better than this.
Those most affected are people without status in the UK. Most of the undocumented population in the UK is made up of people who came here legally, but subsequently lost their status, very often through no fault of their own. Some make the difficult decision to leave an abusive partner or an exploitative employer, even though it means they will lose their immigration status. Others grow up assuming they’re British, only to be told that they aren’t, even though they’ve never known any other country. And some fall out of regular status because they can’t afford the skyrocketing fees to renew their visa or to challenge an incorrect decision made by the Home Office.
No matter our nationality or immigration status, we all deserve to be treated with dignity and humanity.
Take action: Join us to fight for fairer immigration rules
How did the Hostile Environment cause the Windrush scandal?
The Windrush generation are people who arrived in the UK from Caribbean countries between 1948 and 1973. They were British subjects and many children arrived here on their parents’ passports. Fast forward to 2012, when the Hostile Environment was introduced, and many of the Windrush generation, now in their 60s or 70s, lacked the documentation to prove their right to remain in the UK. This was made worse by the fact that the Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing cards and other records – in spite of warnings of the problems this could cause.
The Home Office told the Windrush generation they must prove they had lived in the UK since before 1973. The Home Office demanded at least one official document from every year they had lived here. Attempting to find documents from decades ago created a huge, and in many cases, impossible burden on people who had done nothing wrong.
In 2017 it started to emerge that hundreds of members of the Windrush generation had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights. Coverage of these individuals’ stories began to break in several newspapers, and Caribbean leaders took the issue up with then-prime minister, Theresa May.
The Home Office has argued the Windrush scandal was an accident – but an independent report in March 2020, the “Windrush Lessons Learned Review”, makes it clear – this was the inevitable result of policies designed to make life impossible for those without the right papers. The Home Office has promised to learn the lessons of the scandal, but the only way to stop it happening again, is to scrap the Hostile Environment.