“No matter what I do or what I say, no matter how many passports I’ve got, people will say to me: ‘You’re a Paki’,” Fazal Karim explains. “Me, I feel Asian British. I don't know anything different apart from the life I’ve had here. When people go to America and France on holiday, I look at Pakistan like that. I haven't been there for 60 years. I have never been back. I never could get back. I had no passport.”

We meet Fazal Karim on 18 October 2018 through Bolton Citizens Advice. He came to the advice agency after his benefits were stopped. “He has been screwed over left, right and centre by everyone: the Home Office, his previous solicitors, and the benefits agency,” the bureau's immigration services manager, Gail Lyle, tells us. “You name it; and he's had a slap off each and every one of them.”

Karim came to the UK from Pakistan in 1969 at six years of age. His mother had died, his father had remarried and the family had left for England. Karim was left behind because he was ill and unable to travel on the date of departure. When he finally joined his newly reconstituted and resettled family, he discovered he didn't fit in. “I felt pushed out, excluded, and so I ran away from home,” he remembers. The boy ended up in a children's home and remained in care in various homes in the Peterborough area until he was 19 years of age. “I was looked after by the state,” he says. “My life has been documented since the day I came here.”

But this was not good enough for either the DWP or the Home Office. Karim had been in receipt of tax credits, and was advised to switch to Universal Credit. After an eight-week wait, the DWP refused his application on the grounds that he didn't have a right to reside in the UK. He had always worked; however, he lost his job over his newly disputed immigration status. He ended up losing his benefits and was left with no right to work. “I spent a year and a half with no benefits, no job. Nothing,” he recalls. Karim reckons to have spent “£20,000 to £30,000” on lawyers and Home Office fees trying to resolve his immigration status.