From the archive: A 975-day nightmare: how the Home Office forced a British citizen into destitution abroad

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors This week, from 2021: Richard Amoah went to Ghana for his father’s funeral and found himself barred from Britain for two years. Like other victims of the Windrush scandal, he is owed compensation – but what will he get?. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Guardian.
0:07.6	The Guardian Archive Longreach.
0:19.4	Hello, I'm Emilio Gentalman, I'm a reporter with The Guardian,
0:23.8	and I wrote this piece, a 975-day nightmare.
0:28.3	How the Home Office forced a British citizen into
0:31.3	destitution abroad in December 2021.
0:35.5	I've been thinking about writing this piece
0:37.6	probably for about 18 months before it was published.
0:41.4	I'd heard about Richard Amoe's case from his lawyer,
0:46.5	and I think I found it one of the most shocking cases of people affected by the Windrush
0:52.2	scandal that I'd come across. By the time I started writing about him,
0:57.4	I'd already interviewed probably about 50 people who'd been affected by the Home Office
1:02.6	scandal, but there was something about the way that the British government had treated Richard
1:08.9	that really, really shocked me. At the time I wrote the article,
1:13.8	I really wanted to look at why the Windrush compensation scheme was going so badly wrong.
1:20.0	It was really problematic right from the beginning because people felt that the
1:26.0	process of applying to the Home Office to get compensation for mistakes that the Home Office
1:33.3	had itself made was a bit like asking the Home Office to mark its own homework.
1:38.8	I'm right from the beginning, the payouts that were being offered to people whose lives have
1:44.4	been ruined by the scandal were really remarkably low. In this piece, I go into a lot of detail
1:51.6	about how the Home Office tries to calculate how much money people should be paid for the really bad
2:01.6	trauma that was imposed on them when that department wrongly classified them as immigration offenders.
	...

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