The Children of the Windrush: Social Inequalities across Multiple Domains of Life

Abstract

The Windrush scandal refers to the mistreatment of British citizens, notably those born in the Caribbean and arriving in Britain as children between 1948 and 1971 (the so called ‘Windrush generation’), who were wrongly accused of living in Britain illegally. Despite widespread awareness of their plight, we know little about the lives of the children of the Windrush. Here, we examine social inequalities among this group in five life domains: education, employment, occupation, housing, and health. Our aim is to provide an overview of the different types of social inequality experienced by the children of the Windrush. We fit a series of logistic regression models on a 5% sample of the resident population of England and Wales from the 2011 Census. We examine two outcomes per domain and analyse both baseline and adjusted levels of inequality among three generations (the G1.5, G2, and G2.5) of the children of the Windrush. We find evidence of inequality in each life domain, with variation by sex (men of all generations are uniformly disadvantaged) and generation (G2.5 men and women are the most disadvantaged). Our multi-generation, multi-outcome study provides evidence that inequality among the children of the Windrush generation is both pervasive and persistent.