Richard Amoah went to Ghana for his father’s funeral and found himself barred from returning to Britain for two and a half years. Like other victims of the Windrush scandal, he is owed compensation – but what will he actually get?
Eight months ago, the events that shattered the life of Richard Amoah, 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 Amoah’s unhappiness, after a series of disastrous government mistakes left him destitute on the streets of Ghana’s capital, Accra, for two and a half years.
As they process Amoah’s claim for compensation, staff in Vulcan House, the Home Office’s 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 pay out?
