THE Home Office must be stripped of running the “hostile” Windrush compensation scheme as victims are still suffering long waits and underpaid claims, a leading international human rights group demanded today.

In a damning report, US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on Tory ministers to hand over the process to an independent body as the Home Office scheme is “not fit for purpose.”

The scheme was established by an Act of Parliament in 2020 after it emerged that thousands of people who moved to Britain between 1948 and 1971 had been incorrectly classed as illegal immigrants.

Its name comes from passenger liner the HMT Empire Windrush, which brought people from the Caribbean 75 years ago to help fill post-World War II worker shortages as Clement Attlee’s Labour government built the welfare state.

Those subsequently deemed “illegal” by the Home Office — the same government department tasked with handling compensation claims — struggled to find work, housing and access healthcare.

In some cases, people were even deported, despite having lived all or most of their lives in Britain.

Then prime minister Theresa May promised action when the scandal first came to national attention in 2018, but HRW said that the compensation scheme placed an “unfair burden of proof on claimants to show they faced life-altering losses when classed as illegal, resulting in payouts being rejected or delayed.”

Despite the “onerous and complex nature” of the application, there is no also access to legal aid through the process, with its failures “violating the rights of many to an effective remedy for human rights abuses they suffered,” the group’s report stressed.

HRW researcher Almaz Teffra said: “Five years after the Windrush scandal came to light, the Home Office compensation scheme is compounding its injustice by denying claimants their right to redress for the life-altering losses and negative effects it has had on their lives for years.

“The UK government should hand over the scheme to an independent body that guarantees each claimant a fair and independent hearing.”

The Black Equity Organisation backed the call, with chief executive Dr Wanda Wyporska demanding that the department be “stripped of the administration of the scheme.”

She said: “Windrush victims and survivors feared that the institutional prejudice, ignorance, carelessness and inhumanity that drove the scandal would resurface if the Home Office were allowed to manage the scheme and, sadly, that has proven to be the case.”

The report found that victims do not feel they will receive a fair hearing at the department responsible for the scandal in the first place. 

“The Home Office has created a process that is so bureaucratic and complicated that some Windrush victims have died before they could successfully complete it,” Dr Wyporska said.

The department told the BBC that it was “committed to righting the wrongs of Windrush and making sure it will never be repeated,” claiming to have already paid or offered to pay more than £68 million in compensation.

The Empire Windrush was originally a German vessel, the MV Monte Rosa, which was seized in May 1945 as the second world war drew to a close.  

Now a symbol of the birth of British multiculturalism, the ship was first used by the Nazis to promote fascist notions of racial purity and later to deport Jews from occupied Norway and Denmark to their deaths in concentration camps during the Holocaust. 

It sank in the Mediterranean Sea following an engine fire on March 30 1954.