Home Office refusals of Turkish residents spark new Windrush comparison

Turkish nationals on European Community Association Agreement (ECAA) visas are being refused permanent residency in growing numbers — and the rejection letters are full of mistakes, invented requirements and ignored hardship cases, according to The Guardian. The spike in refusals is concentrated among applications lodged from September 2025, and it has drawn accusations that the Home Office has failed to absorb the lessons of the Windrush scandal.

The hard numbers are stark. Between January and June 2025 the UK granted settlement to 3,378 ECAA applicants; the same window in 2026 produced just 745, a 78% collapse. Successful outcomes have plunged from the usual several thousand to a few hundred since January, while administrative reviews — where the department re-examines its own refusal — climbed from 145 in 2025 to 395 between January and mid-August 2026, per a freedom of information request. Lawyers handling these cases told The Guardian that applications filed from last September are now blowing past the normal six-month wait.

The paperwork itself is the problem, critics say. One window cleaner was told his business wasn't legitimate because he had no social media presence — a requirement that doesn't exist. Another applicant had his days outside the UK miscalculated, with the Home Office wrongly claiming he'd exceeded 180 days in a 12-month period, and a refusal that was later overturned falsely stated he hadn't submitted complete bank statements. A woman who began cancer treatment in Turkey after being diagnosed during a Covid-era trip, when the NHS restricted such care, was rejected for supposedly choosing that treatment — even though her medical team warned that transferring care carried significant clinical risk. After a review, the Home Office held firm in October and told her and her three young children they should leave the UK.

David Lammy, the former foreign secretary and MP for Tottenham, said his constituents' lives had been devastated by what appears to be a sudden policy shift. He invoked Britain's most infamous immigration scandal directly: “I can't help remembering the Windrush scandal when I hear these terrible stories. The Home Office needs to urgently revisit and consider the Lessons Learned review. This is entirely unacceptable. I would like to see justice for Britain's Turkish-origin community.”

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood set the tone last year at Labour conference, warning that solving the crisis might mean questioning “assumptions and legal constraints that have lasted for a generation and more.” Lawyers say ECAA cases used to be routinely approved under guidance on compassionate circumstances, and that things turned harsher for applications lodged from last September. Many of those refused arrived within the past seven years and built businesses here — including one woman denied because her father's terminal Alzheimer's in Turkey had been “known for several years,” so her absences weren't an “urgent unforeseen situation.”

The Home Office insists nothing has changed. “There has been no change to how ECAA settlement applications are considered,” a spokesperson said. “Every application continues to be considered on its individual circumstances, in line with the published rules and guidance.” But that sits awkwardly with the independent Windrush review, whose recommendations — clearer guidance on the burden of proof, more direct contact with applicants, revised criteria for vulnerable cases — were accepted by then-home secretary Priti Patel. As refusal letters stack up and reviews climb, the question hanging over the department is the one Lammy asked: whether it ever learned anything at all.