At least 23 Bangladeshis have been able to confirm their British citizenship under the UK government’s Windrush Scheme, set up in the wake of an immigration scandal last year.
Bangladeshis had emerged as one of the nationalities affected by the scandal involving Commonwealth nationals wrongly denied their citizenship rights in Britain. In an update to Parliament on Thursday, UK home secretary Sajid Javid confirmed that 23 Bangladeshis were able to confirm their nationality as British under the scheme. Most of them (13) had arrived in the UK before 1973, when the immigration rules had changed, while the others had either arrived later or were a family member of the so-called “Windrush generation”.
“On May 24, 2018, I issued a Written Ministerial Statement to the House setting out the Windrush Scheme, which ensures that members of this generation, their children born in the UK and those who arrived in the UK as minors will be able to apply for citizenship, or various other immigration products, free of charge,” Javid said in his letter addressed to the Chair of the Commons’ Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC).
“These are individuals who approached the Taskforce to request confirmation of their status, and were issued with a document to confirm the British nationality they already possessed,” he said.
The immigrants referred to under the bracket of “Windrush generation” relates to a ship named Windrush, which brought Jamaican workers to UK shores in 1948. The scandal emerged last year as many, including Bangladeshis, who arrived as children around that period were struggling to access state services or even threatened with deportation because they did not possess any documents to prove they arrived in Britain before 1973.
The UK Home Office had set up a Windrush Taskforce in April 2018 to deal with a backlog of thousands of such cases, with the home secretary providing regular updates to HASC Chair, Yvette Cooper, on the progress of the scheme. In the latest update, the minister confirmed that as of the end of December 2018, a total of 3,406 people have been granted citizenship under the scheme.
The UK government has already made a formal apology amid uproar over the scandal last year, with a compensation scheme planned for those affected by a failure to have their citizenship rights recognised.
"I can reassure members that my department remains entirely focused on righting the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation," Javid notes in his latest update.