Yvette Cooper risks another Windrush-style scandal by repeating the mistakes the Conservatives made in implementing a hostile environment for migrants, a former Conservative home secretary has warned.
Amber Rudd, who was home secretary under Theresa May, urged her successor not to rush her response to the asylum controversy, as Cooper rolls out a series of new policies to quell public anger over irregular migration.
Her warning came after a hectic 48 hours during which the home secretary announced a temporary ban on refugees bringing family members to the UK, a new asylum appeals process, and the possibility of housing asylum seekers in warehouses.
This followed five weeks during which the government was largely quiet on the issue, even as Reform held a series of press conferences highlighting record numbers of small-boat crossings this year.
“All of this ‘Speed up, speed up, Home Office’ – that is what leads to Windrush-type consequences,” Rudd warned. “If you go too fast, that is when you make mistakes.”
Rudd resigned after the Windrush scandal in which thousands of people were wrongly classified as illegal migrants, leading them to lose their jobs, benefits and even homes. A smaller number were arrested, detained and wrongly deported to countries they had left decades earlier.
Rudd stepped down after the Guardian revealed she had set herself targets for deporting irregular migrants despite having told MPs that she had not done so. Many at the time blamed the Home Office’s attempts to create what May as home secretary had called “a really hostile environment for illegal migrants”.
Experts and former government advisers liken some of the government’s moves in recent days to the clampdown which May oversaw when she ran the Home Office.
On Monday Cooper told the Commons she would not let those who had refugee status bring their family into the UK until spring 2026, by which time she would have set new rules over family reunions.
She also said she would change the process by which those whose asylum claims have been turned down can appeal that judgment. Instead of going before a court, the government is planning to set up a panel of trained members of the public who will hear such cases, under the guidance of legal professionals.
On Tuesday the home secretary said she was looking at housing asylum seekers in industrial sites such as warehouses as a potential way to end the use of migrant hotels, which have attracted protests throughout the summer.
The prime minister, Keir Starmer, meanwhile hosted a ministerial meeting on Tuesday afternoon to discuss a range of solutions to bring down the number of asylum cases. Downing Street said one of the options being examined was digital ID cards to help keep track of people once they entered the country.
Starmer has also mounted an aggressive social media campaign to get his message across. In one tweet, sent alongside a series of images of young black men apparently being detained, he said: “If you come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return.”
The Home Office has launched its own campaign to contact about 130,000 students and their families, warning them they will be forced to leave the UK if they have no legal right to remain. That move, along with intensified raids on workplaces in an attempt to find undocumented migrants, has been compared to the controversial “go home” vans which May’s Home Office ran in 2013.
Rudd said some of the steps being taken now would not even have been contemplated by May. “This wouldn’t have happened under Theresa May,” she said.
But Rudd said she was supportive of Cooper’s attempts to bring asylum numbers down, saying: “We are in a very different world now. When I was home secretary in 2018, 300 people came across the Channel, and we returned another 300. We now have an industry of people-traffickers which has been set up to get people across on a much larger scale.”
One former Home Office adviser said Cooper’s new regime was a continuation of what the department had been trying for years. “We are not returning to a hostile environment, we never left it,” they said. “It is the definition of madness – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”
Cooper herself has sought to distance her response from that of her Conservative predecessors. On Tuesday she criticised the previous government’s Rwanda scheme, saying ministers had “spent £700m and sent four volunteers after running it for two years”.
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said Cooper’s approach differed from May’s in that she still stressed the importance of compassion, as well as control. But he warned Starmer’s social media posts risked undercutting that message: “There is a real risk that the way things are being communicated by the prime minister on social media does sound like the hostile environment message.”
