The Home Office is on a collision course with a Conservative council and MP, as well as human rights groups, after confirming it will house about 500 asylum seekers on a giant barge off the Dorset coast.
In a statement, the Home Office said the Bibby Stockholm, to be berthed in Dorset’s Portland port, would accommodate single men with “basic and functional accommodation” and healthcare, and would be cheaper than housing them in hotels.
The Home Office was “exploring the use of further vessels to accommodate migrants”, it added.
The decision, widely expected but held up while officials negotiated the use of the Barbados-registered 220-bedroom barge, prompted condemnation from Tory-run Dorset council, which said it was seeking urgent clarification from the Home Office on a series of issues.
Councils will reportedly be paid £3,500 per asylum seeker housed on a ship. However, the Home Office announcement said only that it would consult on “financial support”.
Richard Drax, the Conservative MP for South Dorset, who has pledged to pursue legal routes to stop the barge being moored off Portland, said the 13,000-population port lacked the necessary infrastructure and had not been consulted.
While the barge will have security, as well as catering, asylum seekers are not detained and so will be free to go into Portland. Drax said this would be an issue: “Outside there will be no control over where they go, what they do, in a very sensitive seaside town.”
People would be moved on to the barge “in the coming months”, the statement said, adding that the Home Office was “in discussions with other ports and further vessels will be announced in due course”. The Bibby Stockholm is now moored off Genoa, Italy.
Even if the barge is filled, it will accommodate less than 1% of the approximately 51,000 refugees currently in hotels while their asylum claims are processed.
But amid pressure from Conservative MPs, and anger in some communities, the government has pledged to place asylum seekers in accommodation as basic as possible within international law, as part of what ministers term a disincentive for people to cross the Channel in small boats.
Speaking a week ago, the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, said refugees would be put where possible on boats and in disused army bases, saying the plans would meet legal requirements to ensure that those who arrived were not made “destitute”, but nothing more.
The move comes as part of a wider attempt to disincentivise asylum seekers with a new law that would bar anyone arriving unofficially from ever settling in the UK, even if they have been trafficked. They would instead be deported to Rwanda or other countries.
Steve Valdez-Symonds, from Amnesty International UK, said the barge idea was “just more of the political theatre that the government has created to obscure its gross mismanagement of the asylum system”.
He said: “Anyone seeking asylum in this country should be housed in decent accommodation with proper facilities and, crucially, their claims should be properly and consistently processed.”
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said the barge would be “completely inadequate” to house “vulnerable people who have come to our country in search of safety having fled beatings and death threats in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran”.
Christina Marriott, from the British Red Cross, said: “People seeking asylum need stability, to be able to maintain contact with their loved ones and to feel safe. Docked barges, which are isolated from the wider community, do not offer the supportive environment that people coping with the trauma of having to flee their homes need.”
Bibby Stockholm will be operational for at least 18 months and stay berthed in the port during that time. The 91-metre-long vessel, operated by the Liverpool-based company Bibby Marine, was used previously by the Netherlands to house about 500 asylum seekers in the early 2000s.
It has been used “all over Europe” to accommodate asylum seekers, according to sources close to the Barbados Maritime ship registry, which oversees the use of this vessel. It has a gym, a well-furnished bar and more than 220 en suite bedrooms over three decks.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the barge plan was “a sign of the Conservatives’ total failure to clear the asylum backlog”.
