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This article contains a reference to suicide.

A 975-day nightmare, how the home office forced a British citizen into destitution abroad,

by Amelia Gentlemen, read by Lucy Petrie and produced by Hatty Moeah.

Eight months ago, the events that shattered the life of Richard Amoa, a 58-year-old upholsterer from

South London, were condensed into a series of succinct, emotionless paragraphs typed into boxes

on an 18-page form, scanned and emailed to a government office in Sheffield.

Everyone knows you can't put a price on happiness, but it is now the home office's job to assess

the cost of Amoa's unhappiness after a series of disastrous government mistakes left him

destitute on the streets of Ghana's capital Acra for two and a half years.

As they process Amoa's claim for compensation, staff in Vulcan House, the Home Offices Riverside

headquarters in Sheffield will need to address a number of difficult questions.

How should the government compensate someone for carelessly wrecking their life?

What is the correct payment for rupturing family bonds? Can the loss of a stable, happy existence

be remedied with a methodically quantified payout? Amoa is one of at least 13,000 victims of the

Windrush scandal, in which retirement age UK residents who had been born in the Commonwealth

and travelled legally to Britain as small children, were misclassified as immigration offenders.

Hundreds of victims of the scandal were wrongly deported or held in detention centres,

and thousands more lost homes were sacked from their jobs or were denied benefits, pensions,

...