Windrush victim ‘hospitalised’ over stress of compensation battle with Home Office
A Windrush survivor has criticized delays in the compensation scheme and claimed the Home Office’s failure to communicate about her husband’s claim left him hospitalized for stress.
Hetticia and Vanderbilt McIntosh, both 70, moved to England in the 1960s when they were just six years old, but were forced to return to the Caribbean in the late 1970s after they were both mistakenly denied new British passports.
The couple and their children were traveling back and forth between the UK and the Caribbean before the couple were finally issued new British passports as the Windrush scandal emerged in 2020.
Mrs McIntosh was refused compensation three times and eventually received an offer of £40,000 this year, but her husband received “zero offer”. He said the devastating moment they had to leave the UK “changed the whole course of their lives”.
It also affected his health after he was hospitalized for 17 days on 10 October 2025 due to stress, which he thought was related to the ongoing saga with the Home Office. He said: “My heart was pounding and my pressure was rising rapidly. At one stage it was over 200.”
The McIntoshes were initially issued British passports as children after a government recruitment drive led to thousands of Caribbean women migrating to the UK to combat a shortage of nurses.
Ms McIntosh’s Barbadian mother worked at Manchester Royal Infirmary, while Mr McIntosh’s mother, from St Lucia, worked as a midwife in east London.
Although they were initially issued British passports and had built a life together, including two children, the couple were both rejected when they were about to renew their British passports. Ms McIntosh was disowned in 1978 because her birth country, Barbados, had become independent from Britain.
Mr McIntosh suffered a similar fate in 1984, following St Lucia’s independence from Britain in 1979. Ms McIntosh was advised to obtain a Barbados passport and was subsequently granted indefinite leave to remain.
But Mr McIntosh, who worked in quality and assurance in the paint industry, lost his job because he could no longer prove that he was a British citizen and had no other form of identification. The couple had to move their three British-born children to live with their grandparents in an overcrowded house.
After living in the UK for almost his entire life, Mr McIntosh was later forced to return to his native Saint Lucia with his British-born children to find work.
This short-term visa restricted them from working, receiving healthcare and, most importantly, meant they had to return to the Caribbean every six months.
This is despite the fact that their parents were also part of the Windrush generation and had been naturalized in the UK since the 1960s without any problems.
Ms McIntosh said: “I was going through the normal life cycle of school and university and working and as far as you are British I never thought we had immigration issues. Our parents settled here and bought property.”
When the Windrush story emerged in 2018, the couple applied for compensation but were told they were “not entitled to an advance payment” and had “lost their status” because they had been out of the country between 1985 and 1993.
This merely added “insult to injury” for Ms McIntosh, who served as a physical education instructor in the British army and described feeling “used and abused” because “all we know is Britain is our home”.
Ms McIntosh was not offered the tier three prize of £40,000 until January this year after receiving two nil prizes. But Mr McIntosh was offered nothing. He is appealing the decision.
Ms McIntosh explained that the level three award is given to people who have been affected for months, weeks or a year, while the McIntoshes have been affected for decades. They would not compensate them for job loss and loss of access to healthcare.
Mrs McIntosh has been a petition He called for justice and called for the home secretary to fund free legal representation for all people claiming Windrush compensation.
Mr McIntosh said: “We gave them everything they needed to know to give me an award and it hurts when they do all that research and then they come back and all that trauma comes back again, they don’t say anything.”
Pensioners now living in Manchester are now calling for a national investigation into the Windrush scandal, saying “some people died without getting compensation”.
A Home Office spokesman said: “This government is working to ensure that justice and compensation for the victims of the Windrush Scandal are delivered as quickly as possible. Some cases are more complex than others, but we will always work with each individual to provide them with the support they need.”
In the 1960s, the “Windrush generation”, British citizens mostly from the Caribbean and West Indies colonies, were brought to the UK to fill the jobs gap and rebuild the country after World War II.
At the time, the government failed to pursue proper documentation of these individuals’ legal immigration and citizenship.
Since then, the livelihoods of these citizens have been disrupted; More than 83 people were deported, wrongfully detained, and some were even left homeless.
