Hannah and her two teenage children are all HIV positive. Hannah herself is at quite an advanced stage of her illness and very weak. Since fleeing Rwanda in 2002 she and her family have been in severe need of specialist care and accommodation – but a catalogue of delays, problems and errors has left her practically homeless and with no medical support.

Hannah has always complied with the system provided by the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), ’signing in’ regularly as required – but because her visits haven’t always been recorded by NASS staff, she hasn’t met their regulations; even through this is no fault of her own. This has led to her and her children losing out on vital support payments.

In 2004 a typing error caused her to receive a month’s allowance instead of a year’s payment. She can’t get her children in to school because one of them was too ill to attend an interview.

Earlier this year NASS withheld a payment after she missed an interview – a meeting she couldn’t attend because, after registering to sign up for an asylum seeker Application Registration Card (ARC) she and her children were forcibly held at a detention centre.

Hannah receives no allowance for clothing herself and her children, and looks after them –despite her debilitating illness – in emergency accommodation. Her situation is truly desperate, made immeasurably worse by flaws and clerical errors.

From www.refugeecouncil.org.uk