Melvin Collins never expected to spend his retirement surviving on handouts. But after 52 years living and working in Britain, the 72-year-old finds himself reliant on goodwill and generosity to keep food on the table and a roof over his head.

In December, he says, he hit rock bottom. Christmas Day was spent alone in a two-room flat owned by his 92-year-old aunt, Lena, 7,400 miles from his daughter, son, brother, sister, nephews and nieces in Britain.

His festive meal was two ripe bananas, boiled and mixed with butter. The former youth worker, from Walsall, had barely enough money for food, having refused to borrow any more from relatives, to whom he owed 250,000 Jamaican dollars (about £1,500).

But he makes clear he is not asking for sympathy. “I will never, ever – I don’t care how this looks – I will never allow the British to make me feel like a victim,” he says repeatedly when we meet in a guest house on the outskirts of Montego Bay.

His problems began on 7 May 2012. He was going through Gatwick airport using his new Jamaican passport, as well as his older passport bearing the crucial “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) stamp. Instead of letting him keep his old passport, the immigration officer kept it and told him: “You don’t need that, sir.”

To this day, Collins struggles to explain why he walked away so easily from his old passport. Perhaps it was because he had always trusted the British system, or because the immigration officer appeared so determined to keep his passport.

Collins went home, threw his new passport in a suitcase and forgot about it. It was an oversight that came back to bite him. On 22 November 2015, after a six-month break in Jamaica, he was prevented by Virgin Atlantic from boarding his flight back to Britain.

His ILR stamp had not been carried over to his new passport and, with his old passport confiscated, he was not allowed to fly. Like many thousands of people who fell foul of the government’s stricter immigration laws at the time, Collins assumed his ILR would be renewed automatically when going through customs, as it had previously. “It was my lifeline. Once they take that stamp from you … I didn’t know it at the time, but it destroyed my identity.”

Collins, who had worked for Walsall borough council, says he would have ended up on the streets had it not been for his aunt Lena in Cambridge, a town 15 miles south-east of Montego Bay. But he soon ran out of money when his UK state pension stopped paying out because he had not answered letters sent to his home in Walsall.

His appeals have so far been unsuccessful. After a Midlands law firm requested £3,000 to fill out a form, Collins vowed to resolve the situation himself, spending whatever money he had on buses to Montego Bay and endless hours printing forms at an internet cafe. In April 2017, the Home Office rejected his returning resident application, with a cursory explanation that he had gone to Jamaica without an ILR stamp.

Since December Collins has become resigned to spending the rest of his days in Jamaica. He had always planned to retire to his native island, where he left in 1963 aged 16 to join his parents in Britain, but he had never expected it to be in these circumstances.

“I’m really, really, disappointed with the British,” he says, jabbing a finger on the table to underline the point. “I’ve been there since the age of 16. If it was one thing I would have bet my life on, it was that the British system would always be there for me to follow the rules and get back home. Most of my people think that the British are just, they say, ‘Whatever you hear about the British, they’re just.’ But I will never trust the English again.”

He wants the Home Office to allow him the right to return to Britain when he is ready, but he refuses to be seen to plead for his old passport or ask for sympathy, he says. “I want my rights to come back to Britain when I’m ready. I’m not prepared to allow the Home Office to see me on my knees begging to come back to Britain. I don’t need to beg.”