Windrush revelations won’t stop coming

Analysis: Little by little, holes in the hostile environment are emerging and, says May Bulman, each shows a department in disarray

Jamaican immigrants welcomed by RAF officials after the ex-troopship HMT 'Empire Windrush' landed them at Tilbury in 1948 (PA)

The Home Office has come under the spotlight a number of times this year for a series of embarrassing contradictions and U-turns – exposing nothing less than a department in disarray.

The Windrush scandal broke in April, revealing that people who had been in the UK for decades had been wrongly targeted by immigration officials, with some detained and deported.

Shortly after, the then home secretary Amber Rudd claimed there were no deportation targets – only to admit less than 24 hours later that some immigration officers did use targets for the number of people they should deport. She resigned days later, admitting she had “inadvertently misled” MPs.