British Olympic star Joslyn Hoyte-Smith's Barbados-born brother says £100,000 payout for Windrush scandal is not enough because he cannot buy his own home

By Jacob Thorburn For Mailonline 12:48 03 Aug 2021, updated 13:08 03 Aug 2021

Lorenzo Hoyte, 64, derided the six-figure offer after he was refused mortgage funding for a Wakefield property in 2005 because he did not have a UK passport
Barbados-born Hoyte has lived and worked in Yorkshire since he was just 10-years-old, but was not officially recognised as a British citizen until 2018
He missed the chance to see his sister compete at the 1980s Olympic Games and did not attend his mother's funeral overs fear he would not be allowed to return

The brother of Olympic star Joslyn Hoyte-Smith says a six-figure Windrush compensation payout is 'not enough' as the scandal robbed him of the chance to become a homeowner.

Lorenzo Hoyte, 64, derided the £100,000 Home Office compensation offer because the proposal did not take into account the fact he was refused mortgage funding more than 16 years ago because he was not a British passport holder.

Barbados-born Lorenzo, who has lived in Yorkshire since he was just 10, was refused funding under the right to buy scheme in 2005 as he did not have a British passport.

He had plans to buy his Wakefield property, which he still lives in today and is estimated to be worth £160,000.

Lorenzo was never able to watch his sister compete at the Moscow or Los Angeles Games in the 1980s, and worked on temporary contracts for much of his career because he never owned a British passport.

Reacting to the Home Office's offer, Mr Hoyte said: 'I have paid more in rent than what they have offered me. They took away my right to buy a house.'

TRENDING

Yobs threaten journalist on train after she films them yelling abuse

16K viewing now

Rishi Sunak warns normal 'life worries' are not a reason to shun work

10.8K viewing now

Taylor Swift reignites feud with Kim Kardashian by dropping diss track

20.8K viewing now

Lorenzo Hoyte, 64, derided the £100,000 Home Office compensation offer because the proposal did not take into account the fact he was refused mortgage funding more than 16 years ago because he was not a British passport holder

His sister is British athlete Joslyn Hoyte-Smith (pictured above) who won bronze in the women's 4x400m relay at the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980

The Windrush scandal began to surface in 2017 after it emerged hundreds of Commonwealth citizens, many of whom from the 'Windrush' generation, had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights.

The government has since been forced to apologise, however many victims of the scandal are continuing to speak out about the mistreatment they experienced.

Lorenzo was born in the West Indies and moved to Leeds as a child, where he was brought up before moving to Wakefield.

He was offered the maximum compensation fee for Windrush victims' 'impact on life', but says he was awarded nothing for financial loss over the last four decades.

Barbados-born Lorenzo, who has lived in Yorkshire since he was just 10, was refused funding under the right to buy scheme in 2005 as he did not have a British passport

Related Articles

How the Windrush Generation were wrongly classed as 'illegal immigrants', lost their jobs and homes, and were threatened with deportation

1948-70 - Nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain, which in 1948 faced severe labour shortages in the wake of the Second World War.

Working age adults and many children travelled from the Caribbean to join parents or grandparents in the UK or travelled with their parents without their own passports.

Since these people had a legal right to come to the UK, many worked or attended schools without any official documentary record of their having done so, other than the same records as any UK-born citizen.

2012 - The hostile environment policy, which came into effect in October 2012, comprises administrative and legislative measures to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for people without 'leave to remain', in the hope that they may 'voluntarily leave'.

The policy was widely seen as being part of a strategy of reducing UK immigration figures to the levels promised in the 2010 Conservative Party Election Manifesto.

Measures introduced by the policy include a legal requirement for landlords, employers, the NHS, charities, community interest companies and banks to carry out ID checks and to refuse services if the individual is unable to prove legal residence in the UK.

2013 - The Home Office received warnings that many Windrush generation residents were being treated as illegal immigrants and that older Caribbean born people were being targeted.

2017 - Newspapers reported that the British government had threatened to deport people from Commonwealth territories who had arrived in the UK before 1973, if they could not prove their right to remain in the UK.

It was estimated in April 2018 on figures provided by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford that up to 57,000 Commonwealth migrants could be affected, of whom 15,000 were from Jamaica.

The Home Office and British government were further accused of having known about the negative impacts that the 'hostile environment policy' was having on Windrush immigrants since as early as 2013 and of having done nothing to remedy them.

2018 - Questions were raised in Parliament about individual cases that had been highlighted in the press.

On April 16, David Lammy MP challenged then Home Secretary Amber Rudd in the House of Commons to give numbers as to how many had lost their jobs or homes, been denied medical care, or been detained or deported wrongly.

In late April, Rudd faced increasing calls for her to resign and for the Government to abandon the 'hostile environment policy'.

On May 2, Labour introduced a motion in the House of Commons seeking to force the government to release documents to the Home Affairs Select Committee concerning its handling of cases involving people who came to the UK from Commonwealth countries between 1948 and the 1970s.

On April 25, in answer to a question put to her by the Home Affairs Select Committee about deportation targets, Rudd said she was unaware of such targets, saying 'that's not how we operate'.

The following day, Rudd admitted in Parliament that targets had existed, but characterised them as 'local targets for internal performance management' only, not 'specific removal targets'. She also claimed that she had been unaware of them and promised that they would be scrapped.

Two days later, The Guardian published a leaked memo that had been copied to Rudd's office. The memo said that the department had set 'a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18' and 'we have exceeded our target of assisted returns'.

Rudd responded by saying she had never seen the leaked memo.

Diane Abbott MP called for Rudd's resignation: 'Amber Rudd either failed to read this memo and has no clear understanding of the policies in her own department, or she has misled Parliament and the British people.'

On April 23, Rudd announced that compensation would be given to those affected and, in future, fees and language tests for citizenship applicants would be waived for this group.

On April 29, Rudd resigned as Home Secretary.

His sister is former 400m runner Joslyn Yvonne Hoyte-Smith who won bronze at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and gold at the Commonwealth Games two years earlier.

Lorenzo has worked as a welder all his life but was forced to take on temporary contracts because he didn't have a passport.

The grandfather-of-six could not attend his mother or brother's funerals abroad because he was previously not classed as a British citizen.

And he was unable to travel to Moscow in 1980 or the Los Angeles Games in '84 to see his sister Josyln compete for Great Britain in the women's 4x400m relay.

Lorenzo, who was finally granted a UK passport in September 2018, said: 'They [Home Office] have offered me the maximum for the impact on life, but nothing for financial loss.

'The main thing for me is my home. They took away my right to buy a house and have something for my family.

'I've been paying rent on this house since 2000. I tried to buy it in 2005 and the only reason I couldn't buy it was because I didn't have a passport to prove my citizenship.'

Lorenzo said: 'When I tried to travel to see my mum for her funeral I was told if you leave the country you cannot get back in.

'I would like to ask any politician in this country - would you accept £100,000 for living as a third-class citizen for 40 years?

'Would you accept £100,000 not to go to your family's funeral - your mother's your brother's your grandparents'?

'If you would, you can have the £100,000 that I have been offered.

'I'm not going to give up. I will fight for what is mine. My message to Priti Patel is meet me, speak to me. hear my story. If you have got time, right my wrong.

'I'm not going to go away, I'm going to fight with everything that I have got. It is not the money, it is what they have taken away from me.'

A Home Office spokesperson said: 'The Home Secretary has overhauled the Windrush Compensation Scheme, increasing the amount of compensation paid from £3m to almost £27m, with a further £7.1m offered to victims.

'If someone is unhappy with the award they have been offered they are able to ask for a review by a different decision-maker and subsequently by the Adjudicator's Office who are independent of the Home Office.'

Lorenzo said he is hoping to travel to Canada to see his 98-year-old father and to Barbados to see his sister Dolores 81, who he hasn't met since he was five.

The 'Windrush generation' is a phrase linked to the ship Empire Windrush, which brought hundreds of Caribbean immigrants to the UK on June 22, 1948.

According to the National Archives, between 1948 and 1970 almost half a million people left their homes in the West Indies to live in Britain.

Britain was seeking nurses, railway workers and others to help rebuild the nation after the devastation of the Second World War.

The Windrush scandal erupted in 2018 when British citizens, mostly from the Caribbean, were wrongly detained, deported or threatened with deportation, despite having the right to live in Britain.

Many lost homes and jobs and were denied access to healthcare and benefits.

Following public outcry, the UK Government put in place a compensation programme designed to reimburse those impacted by the scandal.

The Home Office initially estimated it would receive around 15,000 eligible claims, but so far 2,631 have been submitted.

But the Public Accounts Committee, after reviewing the Home Office's progress, criticised the approach to redressing the wrongs done to the Windrush generation.

MPs have since warned the Windrush remuneration scheme is too complex, too slow to hand out money and understaffed, with only six people hired to deal with a predicted 15,000 claims.

It is thought the value of the final payments could total somewhere between £90million and £250million.

The cross-party group found that some people had died before their claims were dealt with, while fewer than a quarter of claimants have received a payout.

The 17-page report said that when MPs took evidence in June, only 412 of the 2,367 claims submitted had received a final payment despite the process being open for two years.

In an update to the Commons earlier this summer, Home Office minister Kit Malthouse put the number of people who had been awarded money at 732, with £24 million paid out from the £32 million on offer.

The PAC report also said people were 'still waiting far too long to receive compensation' and that Ms Patel's department had made 'little progress' in processing claims where people had died, resulting in 'future distress' for those families.