“This should never have been allowed to happen” declared Amber Rudd at the start of her extraordinary response to a situation she described as “heartbreaking”.

Her statement addresses many issues, but never quite gets around to revealing how she and Theresa May allowed it to happen – and why they were unforgivably slow to respond to numerous detailed, disturbing accounts from those affected by the mistakes of the Home Office.

“All members of this House will have seen the recent heartbreaking stories of individuals who have been in this country for decades struggling to navigate an immigration system in a way they never, ever should have been,” she said on Monday.

It is remarkable that she finally decided that the victims’ stories were heartbreaking. For six months, the Guardian has been contacting the Home Office almost on a weekly basis to outline the horrendous problems being experienced by Windrush victims – people battling with homelessness, unemployment, the suspension of their benefits, the denial of NHS cancer care.

There was no acknowledgement from the department that serious mistakes had been made and there was never the slightest suggestion that anyone there found the accounts heartbreaking.

Each call elicited only dry statements for quotation, mostly advising victims to seek legal advice – which they were unable to afford, having been pushed to near-destitution by the department’s actions.

In the space of eight days, the government has executed an astonishing reassessment of its relaxed attitude towards the profound suffering of a generation of Windrush citizens.

Last Saturday, Downing Street’s position was that this issue was sufficiently trivial that there was no need to agree to a formal request from the 12 Caribbean high commissioners for a meeting with the prime minister to discuss the Home Office’s treatment of its elderly citizens at the Commonwealth heads of government summit which began last Monday in London.

Within hours, it became clear that this rebuff had been a terrible miscalculation. Rudd was forced to appear at the Commons dispatch box to make the first of two comprehensive admissions that the Windrush generation had been treated “appallingly”.

Theresa May was then forced to make three separate apologies on the issue. The first one, to Caribbean diplomats on Tuesday, was not exactly heartfelt – she said she was “genuinely sorry for any anxiety caused”, which has a ring of an “I’m-sorry-you-are-cross” apology. But, by the time she got to her third apology on Friday night, she was at least edging towards a recognition that lives had been ruined by the policy she created. She was still saying that she wanted to do “whatever it takes” to “resolve anxieties” (as if all the pain caused by the Home Office was merely a bit of needless fretting by those affected) but she did finally concede that there had been “problems”.

The mother of Dexter Bristol, who died last month trying to sort out his immigration problems, was unimpressed by the prime minister’s contrition. “This is racism,” she said.

Rudd devoted some time to a distasteful buck-passing exercise, listing Labour initiatives aimed at tackling illegal immigration, missing the point that the key injustice of the Windrush tragedy is that people who were here entirely legally have been hit repeatedly by her department’s actions.

To audible gasps in chamber, she claimed: “This is a failure by successive governments to ensure these individuals have the documentation they need and this is why we must urgently put it right.” No one believes that. The link between May’s flagship hostile environment policy and this scandal is simply indisputable.

Rudd also tried pointing out that the term “hostile environment” had been used by two Labour home secretaries, choosing to glide over the fact that it was May’s explicit vision to create a radically-hardened immigration system that has caused all this misery.

But, alongside the politics, some positive initiatives were announced. The 20-strong Windrush taskforce announced last week appears to have doubled in size to a body staffed by 50 experienced immigration workers.

Significantly, Rudd stated that the term Windrush meant “everyone that arrived in the UK before 1973 who were given settlement rights and not required to get any specific documentation to prove these rights”.

Windrush victims have spent months, sometimes years attempting to gather documentary proof that they were in the UK before 1971, impeded by the fact that documents had been destroyed, primary schools turned into flats and relatives who could help died long ago. Rudd has now acknowledged, almost in passing, that none of this was required.

“It is abundantly clear that everyone considers people who came in the Windrush generation to be British. But, under the current rules, this is not the case,” she said. It is worth noting that this has not been abundantly clear in the least to Home Office staff in the new toughened environment; a whistleblower last week described workers having a “gotcha” attitude towards people struggling to get their papers in order.

Windrush victims will welcome Rudd’s announcement that she wants “to enable the Windrush generation to acquire the status that they deserve – British citizenship – quickly, at no cost and with proactive assistance through the process”. But some are understandably sceptical about how things will work in practice. There is widespread cynicism about the promises which have been announced so belatedly.

One victim who wasted years of her life trying to work out why officials were telling her she was an illegal immigrant – after more than 50 years in the country and decades paying taxes while working for her local council – said the pledges were reminiscent of those made after the Grenfell Tower fire. “The government is making promises which then get forgotten once the interest dies down,” she said.

The Guardian has published interviews with more than 20 Windrush victims, each case profoundly disturbing in its own way. Many of these people have contacted the Guardian to express anger at the government’s ongoing handling of the crisis. Rudd appeared to reference some of the cases published here in her statement.

But she said nothing that offered clear reassurance for those such as cancer-sufferer Albert Thompson, who arrived in the UK a few months after the cut-off date. The Home Office press team was unable to clarify whether he would be getting the NHS radiotherapy he has been waiting for since last November.

Without naming the paper, she appeared to acknowledge the impact of the Guardian’s reporting, recognising the role played by “media outlets who relentlessly exposed the situation that these individuals had been on the receiving end of. It is their extraordinary work that has led to this sea change in terms of the protection of the Windrush cohort”.