The government has still made no compensation payments to Windrush victims and has failed to introduce legislation that would allow damages to be paid, 15 months after Theresa May apologised for the scandal and promised a financial settlement.

The compensation scheme that was announced in April requires legislation before payments can be made; however, the Home Office revealed yesterday that the pressures of Brexit have meant it has not been possible so far to find parliamentary time for the legislation to be debated. Instead the Home Office has announced a temporary fix, which will now allow compensation to be paid, in the absence of legislation.

People waiting for compensation responded with frustration to the revelation that the government has only now made arrangements to make the payment of damages possible. Janet Mckay, whose partner Anthony Bryan spent five weeks in detention and was booked by the Home Office in 2017 on to a plane back to Jamaica (a country he left at the age of eight, and had not visited in 52 years), said it was “strange” to discover that the government had not previously made arrangements to facilitate the payment of compensation.

“Everyone is struggling to fill in the forms. I had no idea they weren’t ready to pay out as soon as the forms were sent in,” she said.

Labour MP David Lammy said the new evidence of delays was staggering. “I welcome the announcement that compensation payments will now be paid to the victims of the Windrush scandal – at least to those who are still alive. However, this also reveals that no such payments have been made thus far, which is deeply yet predictably disappointing,” he said. “It is also staggering that the Home Office is yet to establish any legislative framework for these claims to be processed; it is hard to fathom just how badly the Home Office continues to let down the Windrush generation.”

Omar Khan, director of the Runnymede Trust, the race equality thinktank, said he was shocked that this issue had only now been resolved. “It’s not good enough to commit in principle to compensation if you don’t put in place the levers required to get money into people’s pockets. They’ve had months to get it right. It raises questions about how urgently and seriously the government is responding to this injustice,” he said.

Charities assisting victims to claim compensation say that people are increasingly frustrated at the protracted process. Daniel Ashwell at the Refugee and Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton, which is helping around 10 people to claim damages, said: “The most frustrating thing is that people are still waiting. We see the pressure that this is putting on them; they constantly have this on their minds – wondering when they are going to get compensation. Some of them are very vulnerable.”

The permanent secretary to the Home Office, Sir Philip Rutnam, informed the home secretary, Sajid Javid, that he would ordinarily advise against making payments from the Windrush compensation scheme until specific legislation has been passed. However, given the “importance of putting right wrongs that have been done”, he identified an interim solution, allowing the Home Office to get around the absence of legislation. Javid has subsequently issued a ministerial direction to proceed, which means that the Home Office is now in a position to start making payments.

In a ministerial statement, Javid announced: “The government deeply regrets what has happened to some members of the Windrush generation and when I became home secretary I made clear that responding to this was a priority. The compensation scheme I launched in April is a key part of this response. The compensation scheme has been open to receive claims since April 2019 and the Home Office is now in a position to start making payments.” He said specific legislation giving financial authority for payments made would be introduced when parliamentary time allows.

“I am committed to providing members of the Windrush generation with assurance that they will be appropriately and promptly compensated where it is shown that they have been disadvantaged by historical government policy,” he wrote.