Windrush deportation row forces minister out of job

Sajid Javid has been appointed the new UK home secretary in the British government on Monday after his predecessor Amber Rudd resigned over the Windrush deportation row.

In recent weeks British politics has been dominated by the issue after it came to light that many people who came to Britain from the Caribbean decades ago, and in some cases their children who were born in the United Kingdom, were being threatened with deportation unless they could prove their right to live in the country.

Some of those affected arrived as children, travelling on their parents’ passports without documentation of their own, and were now being asked to demonstrate their right to residence. It then emerged that much of the original paperwork had been destroyed several years ago.

Rudd had claimed that the Home Office did not have deportation targets, only to later have to admit to MPs that she had been wrong.

The final straw came when she claimed to have been unaware of the existence of targets, before the Guardian newspaper published a memo about it from a senior Home Office official, and then a letter emerged from Rudd to Prime Minister Theresa May – her predecessor as home secretary – in which she mentioned “ambitious but deliverable” targets for deportations.

Her resignation on Sunday night means May has now had four cabinet members resign in six months. While May will hope Rudd’s replacement with Javid will help draw a line under the issue, other parties are still putting pressure on the government.

Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable said "the trouble is only just beginning" for the prime minister who “owns a lot of this issue” due to her own stint as home secretary, and that “we have one of the big departments of government that is in terrible trouble".

Labour MP Emma Dent Coad pointed out that in his previous role as communities secretary, Javid had failed to act effectively following last year’s Grenfell Tower fire in London, which left 71 people dead.

“Last month Sajid Javid admitted that all those made homeless by the Grenfell Tower fire would not be rehoused within a year,” she tweeted. “His department has overseen nearly 11 months of failure. Now he takes over at the Home Office as we fight immigration issues connected to Grenfell.”

Javid, 48, is a former investment banker who became an MP in 2010 and had previously served as business, culture and communities secretary. He is the first black, Asian and minority ethnic person to hold such a senior position in the British government.

The son of a Pakistani immigrant who arrived in Britain in 1961 with one pound in his pocket, in a newspaper interview before his appointment, Javid said the Windrush scandal was "very personal" to him - "it could have been my mum or dad".

Having grown up living above his father's clothes shop, Javid went on to study economics and politics at Exeter University and then enjoyed a hugely successful career in the world of finance, working in New York after feeling shunned by the interview panel at a leading London company.

In the 2016 referendum over membership of the European Union, like Rudd, Javid supported the Remain side, and shortly before the vote took place, wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper entitled "The only thing leaving the EU guarantees is a lost decade for British business."