There are some Home Office schemes to curb the flow of asylum seekers into the UK in which flaws become more apparent after rollout. Others are quashed before they’ve got going – or turn out to be unlawful.
The latest controversial scheme, to accommodate people on the Bibby Stockholm, a giant barge moored in Portland harbour, is no exception. It’s not clear yet which section of the Home Office rankings it will end up in. Indications so far are not promising.
Could it be like Napier barracks in Folkestone, which continues to accommodate asylum seekers despite severe criticism from the high court and a mass Covid outbreak at the height of the pandemic, but which the Home Office says is now much improved and working well? Or like the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which has been found unlawful in the court of appeal and awaits a further appeal to the supreme court in October? Asylum seekers’ lawyers have already contacted the Home Office raising legal concerns about the barge. Certainly the barge scheme has progressed much further than the ill-fated plan to put officials on jetskis in the Channel to push back small boats, where the government caved in early in the face of a legal challenge to the policy.
The Bibby Stockholm barge is a strong visual metaphor for the government’s “stop the boats” campaign – use a large boat to deter the small boats from crossing. Critics concerned about the fire risks of accommodating more than 500 asylum seekers in 220 cabins have warned that it could become a “floating Grenfell”, while others have said it is reminiscent of 18th-century prison hulks. The problem of using such a strong visual symbol is that if it fails, the tough message could backfire and become a symbol of Home Office incompetence.
The barge will accommodate only a very small percentage of the more than 100,000 destitute asylum seekers the Home Office is currently responsible for supporting. Part of its purpose for the government is to show they are moving away from accommodating asylum seekers in “luxury” hotels.
But the date for the barge to open its doors to asylum seekers keeps being delayed. Its move to Portland from Falmouth, where repairs were being carried out, slipped. And so did the opening date, which was supposed to be shortly after a “media day” to showcase the barge. Asylum seekers were supposed to be moved on to the barge on Tuesday of this week, then it was Wednesday; according to the latest update, that should happen some time next week.
Since the barge was repurposed for UK asylum accommodation, concerns have been raised by Dorset council, the Health and Safety Executive, the Fire Brigades Union and refugee and human rights campaigners. Among their fears is the potential damage to asylum seekers’ physical and mental health from living in cramped conditions – the cabins are of a similar size to the prison cells in which some were tortured in their home countries. Water will be permanently in their line of sight, retraumatising those who may have come close to drowning either in the Mediterranean or the Channel before they reached the UK.
Ministers do not publicly acknowledge the trauma and vulnerabilities of asylum seekers. Doing so would dilute their rhetoric about the steps they are taking to stop them arriving in the UK. But these vulnerabilities have tripped up this government before – and could well trip them up again with the barge plan.
Even when the Rwanda plan was ruled lawful in the high court, before it was overturned in the court of appeal, judges found that nobody should be sent to Rwanda before the specific details of their individual cases were explored, a time-consuming exercise that the Home Office hoped to avoid. The first group of asylum seekers has moved to the Wethersfield military base in Essex, but some have already been removed just hours after arrival due to their vulnerabilities, which make them unsuitable for this bleak and remote location.
It’s difficult to see how the barge plan can work. Instead, the Home Office should go with plan B and speed up the processing of asylum claims, as experts recommend – but perhaps that is not gimmicky enough for this government.
In the end, many refugees seeking sanctuary here will be granted it, simply because they are found to qualify for it under international law. The Home Office has said that after spending a number of months in the Rwanda “pool”, because nobody is being sent to the east African country at the moment, these cases revert to the main asylum pool for consideration in the UK.
Barges, Rwanda, military bases, tents and whatever the Home Office comes up with next – they all feel like a Google Maps error that sends you round three sides of a square to reach your destination, rather than walking there in straight line.
Diane Taylor writes on human rights, racism and civil liberties
