Prospect
Submitted material:
Daniel Trilling
Entry type: Short listsTTTT
Vicky Spratt
The i paper
Submitted material:
Carolyn Atkinson
Submitted material:
- Rogue Refuges: Charlotte’s story, ‘Two toilet rolls and a washing tablet.’
- Rogue Refuges: The cowboy landlords taking on councils – and winning
- Rogue Refuges: The ‘goldrush’ bankrolling the homelessness crisis.
Freya Marshall Payne
Freya Marshall Payne is a writer and doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is working on a history of women’s homelessness and is especially interested in life-writing, oral history and activism. Freya jointly won the inaugural Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness in 2023. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Guardian, the TLS and Prospect Magazine.
Submitted material:
Daniel Lavelle
Daniel Lavelle writes on mental health, homelessness and social care. He received the Guardian’s Hugo Young award in 2017, and is the author of Down and Out.
Submitted material:
Sanchia Berg and Katie Inman
Sanchia Berg and Katie Inman are reporters at BBC News specialising in Social Affairs. Their investigation Revealing the closed world of family courts described what happens in care cases in the family court, through four individual stories told in detail, using verbatim notes, interviews with families, and court documents. This pioneering work revealed how the acute shortage of resources in health and social care has a direct and permanent impact on families and shed light on the hidden plight of Roma children.
Their shortlisted pieces are:
Paul Caruana Galizia and Katie Gunning
Paul Caruana Galizia and Katie Gunning are co-creators of the Tortoise Media podcast series Londongrad. Their reporting explored how Britain’s leaders opened the country’s doors to Russian oligarchs, welcoming not just money but corruption. And how, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has become impossible for them to keep looking away. Londongrad’s findings led to debates in the House of Lords, a vote in the House of Commons, and inquiries by three different select committees.
Their shortlisted pieces are:
Liberty Investigates: Mirren Gidda, Jessica Purkiss, Eleanor Rose, Aaron Walawalkar
The stories are the work of the Liberty Investigates team – Eleanor Rose, investigations editor, and Aaron Walawalkar, Jessica Purkiss and Mirren Gidda, investigative journalists. Their investigation tells the stories of the 140 who died in asylum seeker housing since 2016, showing a rise in deaths from 4 in 2019 to 48 in 2021
Liberty Investigates is an editorially independent journalism unit based at the human rights organisation Liberty. It aims to expose injustice through rigorous and collaborative investigative journalism. It launched in April 2020.
Their shortlisted pieces are:
Maeve Shearlaw and Christopher Cherry
Maeve Shearlaw and Christopher Cherry are filmmakers at the Guardian. Their investigation On the ground: UK cost of living crisis focused on the people running vital services including food banks, ‘warm banks’, and ‘hygiene banks’ in working class communities ravaged by the cost of living crisis. They are committed to continuing to cover these stories as the UK faces the worst fall in living standards since records began.
Their shortlisted pieces are:
John Phipps
John Phipps is a reporter, critic and editor based in London. He works as a contributing writer for 1843 Magazine and a fiction editor of The Fence. In 2021, he was awarded a prize from the British Society of Magazine editors and was nominated for New Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards. His investigation The lifeboat crew on the frontline of Britain’s migrant crisis highlights the creeping politicisation of once universally admired institutions and the strain that questions around migration have placed on Britain’s communities.
His shortlisted piece is:
Dean Kirby
Dean Kirby is The i paper’s Investigations Correspondent. He has been reporting the news for 25 years. His awards include the Medical Journalists’ Association News Story of the Year for an investigation into PPE supply chain chaos in the Covid pandemic. He has been highly commended for the 2022 Hugh Cudlipp Award for Investigative Journalism and shortlisted for scoop of the year at the British Journalism Awards for his work on the war in Ukraine. His investigation The Prepayment Meter Scandal exposed the national scandal of how debt agents acting for energy firms were using court warrants to break into homes to forcibly fit prepayment meters that leave the poorest families in the cold and dark.
His shortlisted pieces are:
- National scandal of forced installation of prepayment meters
- Prepay meter scandal grows: 99.99% of court warrants are waved through
- Inside the courtroom where it takes minutes to force hundreds of people onto prepayment meters
- Magistrates granting energy firms prepayment meter warrants in ‘private back rooms’ at court
- Prepayment meters: ‘It was so cold my daughter had an asthma attack, but I can’t afford to heat our home’
- Do not give energy firms the right to force entry over prepay meters, courts told
Shanti Das
Shanti Das is a reporter at the Observer. She previously worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times and prior to that was based in New York and Bristol for SWNS, the UK’s largest independent press agency. Her investigative series, Care workers trapped in debt bondage, exposed how migrant workers hired as part of a government drive to plug staffing shortages are being systematically subjected to abuse and illegal recruitment practices.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
- Revealed: Migrant care workers in Britain charged thousands in illegal recruitment fees
- Migrant care workers came to help the UK. Now they’re trapped in debt bondage
- Human traffickers ‘using UK universities as cover’
- MPs demand end to repayment clauses in contracts of overseas health workers
- Live-in care workers ‘have pay docked by agencies to cover accommodation’
- The nurses getting huge bills for quitting the NHS
Stephen Topping
Stephen Topping is a reporter at the Manchester Evening News. His investigation reported on the death of Awaab Ishak due to prolonged exposure to mould, the scandal at Rochdale Boroughwide Housing and the subsequent campaign to change the law in the toddler’s memory. This exposed the culture of blaming tenants for mould and pressed for an urgent change.
His shortlisted pieces are:
- A two-year-old is dead and other children are struggling to breathe
- A forgotten child in the Greater Manchester flats that are full of fear
- No apology, a last minute confession, massive pay rises – the housing bosses who failed Awaab Ishak
- The nasty stench of racism pervades the tragedy of little Awaab Ishak
- After little Awaab’s death the government is now promising change. It can’t come soon enough
- ’72 people died in Grenfell but so little changed… it took another tragedy in Awaab for action to finally happen’
Noel Titheradge
Noel Titheradge is a senior investigative journalist for BBC News based in London. He focuses on uncovering failings in institutional care, abuses of power and social injustices. A former producer at Panorama, he writes long reads and produces and directs documentaries. His investigative series Profits, punches and private equity: Inside Britain’s Children’s Homes uncovered appalling failures at two companies making enormous profits, exposing regulatory loopholes and leading to closures.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Craig Easton
Craig Easton is a photographer exploring issues around social policy, identity, culture and community. In 2021, he was awarded Photographer of the Year at the SONY World Photography Awards and in 2022 was recognised with an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. His project Thatcher’s Children is a long-term engagement with one extended family exploring how successive governments’ social policies have created and maintained the conditions for chronic intergenerational poverty.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Mark Townsend
Mark Townsend is the Observer’s home affairs editor and was previously a foreign reporter for the paper. He is a former British Press Awards news reporter of the year. His investigation The disappeared: how the Home Office allowed the mass kidnapping of children from its care exposed the wilful neglect of the Home Office towards some of the most vulnerable in society. It revealed how, despite taking effective custody of unaccompanied asylum seeking children in an undeclared policy that bypassed parliamentary scrutiny, the government turned a blind eye as young people were abducted.
His shortlisted pieces are:
- Revealed: scores of child asylum seekers kidnapped from Home Office hotel
- ‘They just vanish’: whistleblowers met by wall of complacency over missing migrant children
- Revealed: child migrants racially abused and threatened with violence at Home Office hotel
- The car drew up. The children got in: UK child asylum-seekers’ narrow escape from kidnap
- The children going missing from Home Office hotels
- Revealed: UK’s missing child refugees put to work for Manchester gangs
Quentin Sommerville
Quentin Sommerville is the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent. He has recently been reporting from Eastern Ukraine on the sharpest reality of war, as lived by soldiers and civilians.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Isobel Cockerell
Isobel Cockerell is a multimedia investigative journalist. Since October 2018 she has been a reporter for Coda Story, covering disinformation, the war on science and authoritarian technology. She has written and worked as a radio reporter and video journalist covering politics, migration, LGBTQ issues, environmental affairs and culture for platforms such as WIRED, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Rappler and Eurasianet. She is the founder and producer of Coda LIVE, a new-format live journalism show bringing stories from all over the world to the stage.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
- The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget
- Escaping China’s Surveillance Net
- The Indian migrants lured into forced labor on Mussolini’s farmland
- The Border Industrial Complex