Family of Windrush man refused UK citizenship sues Home Office

The family of Hubert Howard, a Windrush man who was refused UK citizenship because of the ‘good character requirement’, is suing the Home Office. The family of Mr Howard, who was granted citizenship three weeks prior to his death in 2019, are suing on the grounds that the good character requirement is racially discriminatory.

Mr Howard was still fighting for UK citizenship status as he lay dying in a hospital intensive care unit, prompting a High Court hearing into the Windrush man’s case.

The High Court heard that, despite continually living in the UK for nearly 60 years, the Home Office sought to refuse Mr Howard British citizenship because of a minor offence committed in 2018. It’s understood that he was charged with common assault following an incident at his doctor’s surgery where he grabbed papers from a receptionist.

Home Office reversed position

Although the Home Office reversed its initial decision to deny Mr Howard UK citizenship, his daughter Maresha Howard-Rose continued to pursue the judicial review, submitted in 2019, challenging the government agency’s original decision against her father.

Mr Howard’s lawyers called the Windrush scheme unlawful because the good character requirement for citizenship should have been waived. 

The Windrush scheme was launched in 2018 in an effort to rectify the injustices caused by the government’s hostile environment policy, which wrongly targeted people who arrived legally in the UK from Commonwealth countries prior to 1973.

In the 1980s, the UK government established a programme to register Windrush-generation people, allowing them to obtain UK citizenship regardless of whether they were of good character. There was no obligation for people to register and indeed, 8,000 chose not to do so. Many of these have never been formally naturalised, unlike Mr Howard.

The Windrush man was later classified as being a UK immigration offender.

Good character requirement

The High Court was told that the Home Office’s good character requirement for Windrush people was unlawful and racially discriminatory, ‘because the Windrush generation is disproportionately comprised of black and Asian Commonwealth citizens.’

Mr Howard arrived in the UK as a three-year-old in the 1960s and remained in the country. He worked as a caretaker with the Peabody housing association and was ‘highly regarded’. In 2005, Mr Howard made his first application for a UK passport but was rejected, which prevented him from travelling to Jamaica to visit his seriously ill mother or attend her funeral.

In 2012, he was dismissed from his job because he was unable to prove that he was in the UK legally.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC said: “The impact of the refusal of citizenship over a protracted period cannot be understated. Mr Howard lost a job where he was established and valued, following which he was unable to seek further employment from 2012, resulting in him accruing substantial debt.”

In 2018, Mr Howard was accused of grabbing paperwork from a receptionist at his doctor’s surgery, making contact with her finger in the process. Howard was fined and given a 12-month suspended sentence. The charges meant that his most recent application for citizenship in the UK was rejected in November 2018.

UK citizenship rejections

The High Court was also told that there was no data to indicate how many Windrush applicants had been denied UK citizenship because of the good character rule. However, it’s been suggested that the numbers would be ‘relatively small’.

Representing the Home Office, Sir James Eadie QC, submitted written arguments defending the Windrush scheme, saying that it did not discriminate against the rights of the Windrush generation and that the maintenance of the good character requirement was justified.

He said: “The Windrush scheme was introduced to deal with the unintended consequences for the Windrush generation of the application of compliant environment policies. It was not introduced as a general reform of UK immigration law.”

The case, heard by Mr Justice Swift, is expected to continue in the weeks up to Christmas with a ruling set to be given at a later date.

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