- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Two victims of the Windrush scandal, one of them an Indian national, have lost court battles with the UK government over their level of compensation, the Independent reported.
Surjit Kaur, who came to the UK from India as a 22-year-old in 1963, initiated legal action against the home office for not being given a compensatory award for lost work and benefits over the decades.
Kaur, who is 82 now, alleged that she had not been given documentation to prove her lawful immigration status and spent a life of abject poverty with her six children.
While she was not able to work or claim welfare benefits between 1963 and 1997, her husband passed away in 1978, leaving her in a great challenge to raise her kids without any support
From 1963 to 1997, Kaur was unable to work or claim welfare benefits. Her husband died in January 1978, leaving her to look after six children with no access to child support, Our Today reported.
Vernon Venriel, a former boxer, also pursued a legal claim against the department for allegedly refusing to compensate him for losing benefits after he was stopped from re-entering the UK.
According to the Independent report, the 67-year-old Venriel who came to the UK as a child in 1962, was “in poor mental health, unable to work, destitute and homeless” in a decade after he was not allowed to return from a visit to Jamaica in the late 2000s, the court was told.
After applying to the Windrush Compensation Scheme, Kaur got £40,000 under an “impact on life award” but the government said later that she had not produced evidence of being rejected from employment due to absence of documentation.
Venriel, on the other hand, received just more than £103,500 under the scheme and was offered an award worth £29,250 over his homelessness, the Independent report added. However, lawyers of his home office said he had “no entitlement” to compensation for losing benefits.
Judges rejected bids of both Kaur and Venriel for more compensation in two separate rulings issued recently.
In a ruling on Friday (5), the judge rejected Kaur’s claim saying there was “no failure lawfully to assess her evidence and no flaw” in an earlier review of her case and that her award was “not irrational nor otherwise unlawful”, the Independent report added.
Vanriel, who returned to the UK in September 2018, got a personal apology from former British home secretary Priti Patel over the “shameful” injustice and hardship he and other members of the Windrush generation faced.
He also won a separate court challenge over the home office’s refusal to grant him British citizenship, following his return to the UK in 2021 end.
However, in a ruling on April 28, the judge said that by accepting the settlement, Vanriel “agreed that his claim was at an end”.
