From Windrush to the NHS: The evolution of the ‘hostile environment’

May Bulman considers the cases that have made immigration policy such a controversial issue in recent years

The Windrush scandal was one of a number to hit the Home Office in the last few years (PA)

At the start of this decade, the “hostile environment” didn’t exist. Several ministers, both Labour and Conservative, had bandied the term around as a potential strategy for reducing immigration, but it wasn’t in the public domain and nothing had taken effect. In the years that followed, however, a stream of policies were quietly formulated with the sole aim of making the UK a hostile place for undocumented immigrants. And ten years on, those two words have come to encapsulate the root cause behind a string of Home Office immigration scandals.

When I started in my role on the social affairs beat at The Independent in early 2017, criticism of the policy was bubbling under the surface. Charities and campaigners would make reference to it when commenting on stories about issues in the UK’s asylum and refugee policy, saying the problems were linked to a thing called the hostile environment. There had been warning signs, such as data-sharing agreements between the Home Office and both the Department for Health and the Department for Education allowing for information about patients and pupils to be shared for immigration enforcement purposes. These were concerning, but the true impact was yet to be seen.

It was in November of that year that it first came under real public scrutiny, when campaign group Migrants Rights Net (MRN) launched a legal challenge against the Home Office over its use of NHS patient data, with campaigners describing it as an “important step forward in the fight to dismantle the hostile environment policy”. A month later, human rights group Liberty launched a legal challenge against the department’s decision to collect data on school pupils’ nationality and country of birth. Both challenges ultimately succeeded in forcing the government into a climb-down.