THE Tories’ hostile-environment policy has driven racism in society while failing to achieve its purpose of forcing people without status from Britain, a damning report found today. 

The measures, which were widely condemned in the wake of the Windrush scandal, have also forced people into poverty and destitution, according to a study by left-wing think tank IPPR. 

There is “little evidence” to suggest that the hostile environment has achieved its key objective to reduce the number of immigrants without status living in the country, the report claims.

In fact, IPPR analysis of government data revealed that 12,000 more people voluntarily left the country in 2014 compared to 2018. 

Lead researcher of the report “Access denied: The human impact of the hostile environment” Amreen Qureshi said: “The hostile environment is a policy based on ideology, not evidence. 

“Our report finds that it has forced people into destitution without encouraging them to leave the UK, highlighting both its poisonous impacts and its ineffectiveness.

“It doesn’t work for the Home Office, it doesn’t work for people without immigration status, and it doesn’t work for our society.”

The policy, introduced by former home secretary Theresa May, included rules requiring landlords, employers and front-line services to carry out immigration checks. 

This shift in responsibility to untrained professionals “can facilitate discrimination against people from minority ethnic backgrounds because it can lead to new forms of racial profiling,” the report warned.

The policy has also “erroneously” impacted people who have legal status, the researchers found. 

Following the Windrush scandal, which saw British citizens wrongfully detained and deported, the Home Office rebranded the policies as the “compliant” environment. 

However, IPPR argued that most of the measures which caused the scandal are still in place. 

Migrants rights groups renewed calls today for Home Secretary Priti Patel to scrap the hostile environment. 

Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants’s public affairs and campaigns manager Minnie Rahman warned that the impact of the policies have become “more acute” during the coronavirus crisis. 
“This report shows in the starkest terms that if the government was serious about learning the lessons of Windrush, it would scrap the hostile environment without hesitation or delay,” she added.  

Migrant Voice director Nazek Ramadan said: “We’ve worked with thousands of migrants over the last decade, many of them facing unimaginable horrors at the hands of a Home Office that is trying to make them leave.
 
“Yet people stay in the UK because they have no other choice, because it’s not safe for them in their country of origin, because they were trafficked and are now trapped by their exploitative employer, because they have British children who they cannot simply leave behind, because the Home Office threw out its own rulebook when it told them to leave in the first place, because this is their home and it’s wrong to ask them to leave.”

The government has committed to a full review of the hostile environment: a recommendation detailed in Wendy Williams’s review into the Windrush scandal. 

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Windrush generation suffered unspeakable injustices and institutional failings spanning successive governments over several decades. The government is implementing the findings of the Wendy Williams review.”