Home Office officials are told to call asylum seekers ‘customers’ by civil service training programme sent to thousands
- Civil service programme advises on language when referring to asylum seekers
- Training scheme for 16,000 urges immigration staff to show more empathy
Home Office caseworkers should call asylum seekers ‘customers’, according to an official training programme offered to thousands of civil servants.
Officials should use the terminology rather than referring to claimants as ‘cases’ or ‘subjects’, the programme says, as part of a move to combat mistakes made in the Windrush scandal.
One slide in the training programme says: ‘In some areas, such as enforcement, individuals may not be receiving, or asking for a service as a customer, but we should still look at how we can recognise the human face of all people who come into contact with the Home Office.
‘This might be as simple as referring to them by their name.’
Officials should use the terminology rather than referring to claimants as ‘cases’ or ‘subjects’, the programme says
The Windrush generation was named after the ship that brought over one of the first groups of West Indian migrants invited to the UK in 1948 to help rebuild post-war Britain. It later emerged hundreds of people had been wrongly detained, deported or denied legal rights
More than 16,000 civil servants have taken the course, the Guardian reported at the weekend.
The scheme was devised in the wake of the Windrush affair, which emerged in 2018.
The scandal saw thousands of innocent migrants targeted under the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, which was meant to be aimed at illegal immigrants.
A series of training schemes and other programmes have encouraged Home Office staff to see the ‘face behind the case’ following a highly-critical independent review.
Published in 2020, the review found ‘elements of institutional racism’ in the way people who lived in the UK entirely legally had been wrongly targeted.
A Home Office spokesman said: ‘All UK Visas and Immigration case-working staff are required to complete our ‘face behind the case’ training to ensure that we have a fair immigration system.’
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