THE TORY government must end the hostile environment now before more British citizens are caught in the Home Office’s “net,” Labour demanded yesterday.

Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy accused the government of trying to “slip out” an announcement of a pause in certain aspects of the hostile environment just minutes before England’s World Cup clash with Croatia on Wednesday evening.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted after the match that it was “disgraceful to sneak” out the news of pausing some Home Office practices while the football was on.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott urged the government to “look again at setting up a hardship fund” for members of the Windrush generation and demanded a “total review” of the hostile environment, warning that otherwise “the Windrush generation will not be the end of it in terms of unfairness and cruelty.”

On Thursday, Mr Lammy asked an urgent question of immigration minister Caroline Nokes, who said the government had “introduced a temporary pause in the proactive sharing of data” with other organisations including “banks and building societies.”

He replied that when Home Secretary Sajid Javid took up his post “he said he wanted a decent system, a fair system, a system that treated people with respect.

“Is it respectful to slip out this information during what was yesterday a World Cup spectacle? Is it respectful for her department still to not be able to tell us how many people have been detained?”

He also asked if she would “confirm that we will no longer be asking teachers, nurses, doctors and landlords to act as the country’s border enforcement in the months and years ahead?”

Ms Abbott said Labour welcomed the “limited measures” announced, but said ministers “do not understand that very many of those people have got into considerable debt” as a result of the hostile environment.

She said that “if the government wants to be seen as acting in good faith, it must review its decision not to have a proper hardship fund.”

Ms Abbott also said the Home Office needed to “take out those elements [of the hostile environment] that have caused so much misery to people who are actually British citizens.

“Ministers have to understand this will not stop with the current cohort of largely West Indians.

“As time goes on, there will be cohorts from all over the Commonwealth, south Asia and west Africa caught up in the net of the hostile environment.”