Criticism for 'back to Jamaica' offer

Criticism for 'back to Jamaica' offer

A council which offered a battered mother and her two teenage daughters tickets back to Jamaica has been criticised by a High Court judge.

Oxfordshire County Council's decision that the family would be "better off in Jamaica" was criticised as "procedurally flawed" by Mr Justice Maurice Kay.

The authority made the offer after refusing the woman and her daughters' application for accommodation and basic financial support.

They had been forced to move into a refuge in Oxford after the woman's marriage collapsed just months after the family's arrival in Britain.

Nervous breakdown

Accommodation was eventually provided, pending a legal challenge, by order of a judge in June 2002.

Ordering the case to be reconsidered on Tuesday, Mr Justice Maurice Kay said the council had only a "flimsy basis" for saying the family, which cannot be identified, would be better off back in Jamaica.

At the time, the council took the view that it was "reasonable not to exercise its power to provide support" on the basis that the mother and daughters had extended family in Jamaica who could care for them.

The council said a return to the Caribbean would be the best way of meeting their needs and that, if the mother insisted on staying in Britain, accommodation would only be offered to her children.

The judge said the council's view that they would find permanency and security in Jamaica was "speculative".

He went on to describe how the mother arrived in Britain with her daughters in December 2000, four months after marrying a British citizen.

She and her eldest daughter suffered "verbal and physical abuse" at his hands which was so severe that the girl suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be treated in a mental hospital for six months.