Why is one of Liverpool's oldest companies putting 500 refugees on an offshore barge?

Exclusive: Steve Rotheram, the metro mayor, accuses local firm Bibby Marine of ‘profiteering by inflicting misery’

Dear members — Liverpool is easy to love for a myriad of reasons. But occasionally, we have to publish a piece that makes us feel rather less upbeat about this city. We recently started investigating the Bibby Stockholm, an accommodation barge owned by Liverpool company Bibby Marine, that is going to be used to house 506 refugees. Yes, it’s likely conditions will be cramped — since there are only 222 single-bed bedrooms, each bedroom will house two to three refugees. But there’s more at stake here than discomfort. When the same barge was used as an immigration detention facility in the Netherlands in the 2000s, two North African men died of illnesses amid accusations of poor health treatment. 

Editor’s note: Usually, on a Thursday, our content is paywalled halfway down to encourage new subscriptions. Today, as we feel this article details a concerning story in the public interest, we are making it available for free. We would urge readers on the free list however that journalism like this can be expensive to produce and we are still working with a tiny team on a shoestring budget. If you are able to support us by signing up as a paid member for £1.25 a week, please do so today to help us do more of this kind of reporting. It simply isn’t possible without having large numbers of paying subscribers.

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Your Post briefing

Jared Skeete — the 19-year-old who was arrested after throwing fireworks at police during February’s anti-asylum seeker protest in Knowsley — has been sentenced to three years in prison. Skeete “snorted ketamine in front of the line of riot police as he shouted abuse at them during the disorder outside the Suites hotel”, Liverpool Crown Court heard. Skeete, who pleaded guilty, shouted “Why are you protecting the scumbags, you big gang of dickheads?” at police, and also said to an officer: “What are you going to do, you silly little sausage?”. The Post covered the protest — which saw a police van set alight — in-depth at the time, speaking to asylum seekers who told us their lives in the town had changed “180 degrees”. We have since reported that residents at the hotel have been attacked and threatened in the town in the wake of the protest, including two men attacked at an ATM machine and others struck with batons. When shown footage of himself, Skeete initially denied it was him, but then expressed shock, saying it was “like a movie”.

Would you expect to be criminally prosecuted for putting your feet on a train seat? If not, don’t mess with Merseyrail, who prosecuted an 18 year old passenger heading from Liverpool Central to Town Green in January, for assuming an overly relaxed travelling position. Under Byelaw 6(8) — which states that no person “wilfully interfere with the comfort or convenience of any person on the railway" — a prosecution was brought, despite no clear evidence that anyone’s comfort was interfered with. 

Leading Scottish ultra marathon runner Joasia Zakrzewski was disqualified after finishing third in the 2023 GB Ultras Manchester to Liverpool 50-mile race, after it emerged she used a car for 2.5 miles. The 47-year-old GP, who has represented Team Scotland in the marathon at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, was tracked on GPX mapping data covering one mile in one minute and 40 seconds. For reference, the world record for a mile is three minutes and 43 seconds (and the world record setter wasn’t in the middle of a 50 mile race). A friend of Dr Zakrzewski said she had felt sick and that she was sorry for any upset. “She has cooperated fully with the race organisers' investigations, giving them a full account of what happened,” he added.

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Post Picks

🏗️ Tickets for the Liverpool Brick Festival — a celebration of all things LEGO — are on sale now, if you want to bring out your inner child/architect. It’s on Saturday 10 June, and includes all of the following and more: speed building competitions, large scale displays, activities, traders selling loose bricks, new LEGO sets, a dedicated building area. More here.

🎶 The sound of Detroit in the heart of Wirral with hip hop duo (they used to be a trio) Slum Village at Future Yard. The group rose to prominence in the 90s as they forged a path into the underground Detroit hip hop scene. That one’s on Friday night, and tickets cost £22.50. 

🚌 And one for fans of over-indulgence: take the Brewery Bus tour of Liverpool: visiting four breweries, tasting 12 craft beers (we assume these aren’t full pints…) and eating one pizza over the course of a four hour bus journey. You’ll also be learning about 150 years of beer-making history. Book here.

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Why is one of Liverpool's oldest companies putting 500 refugees on an offshore barge?

Of all the myths that Liverpool holds dear, welcoming refugees is among the most cherished. Local politicians are fond of describing Merseyside — rightly or wrongly — as a sanctuary for asylum seekers. So it has come as a bit of an embarrassment that a local firm with 200-year-old roots in the city has accepted a government contract for housing refugees on a giant barge, a scheme that has been condemned as “inhumane and wrong”.

Bibby Marine has been contracted by the Home Office to accommodate approximately 500 asylum seekers onboard the Bibby Stockholm, an enormous vessel that will be docked on the south coast at Portland Harbour, Dorset. The ship is usually hired by construction businesses who need lodging for workers on remote ocean projects, like gas plants and oil terminals, but is being repurposed as temporary accommodation for refugees while their asylum claims are processed.

An accommodation barge owned by Bibby Marine, a Liverpool company that will house approximately 500 refugees. Photo: Bibby Marine.

The contract will reportedly earn Bibby Marine £15,000 per day for 18 months, but the government argues that the current spending on hotels to house refugees is unsustainable, and says barges like this are much cheaper per head. So far, though, the public reaction has been scathing. A chorus of politicians and refugee charities have condemned the company, among them metro mayor Steve Rotheram who accused Bibby Marine of profiteering by “inflicting misery”. 

Speaking exclusively to The Post, Rotheram said:

“It’s entirely possible that some of the refugees the government wants to dump on these ferries arrived in the UK after making the deadly journey across the Channel, risking their lives and suffering unimaginable trauma to do so. These people are human beings and deserve to be treated as such, not cast out onto disused vessels. Any company that profiteers from inflicting misery through this dog whistle policy should take a long, hard look at themselves.”

Bibby Marine has not responded to Rotheram’s comments, but replied in a statement: “We can confirm The Bibby Stockholm has been chartered to provide a housing solution for those in need of accommodation in the UK.”

Steve Rotheram, the metro mayor, accuses Bibby Marine of “profiteering by inflicting misery”. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

The Home Office is reported to be negotiating an additional deal with Peel Ports, the operator of Mersey, Wirral and Sefton ports, to house refugees — although Bibby Marine’s name has not been mentioned. 

So what do we know about the Bibby Stockholm? 

The vessel will be brought into action soon, at the earliest next month. Asylum seekers will not be detained onboard, but nonetheless “robust” monitoring will be enforced, according to the Home Office. Refugees will be free to come and go, but a welfare check would be made if someone has not returned to the site by 11pm. The government says this is not a curfew.

The plan has invited comparisons with prison hulks of the 18th century, when old ships were converted into makeshift jails and failed, unsurprisingly, to earn a reputation for delivering restorative justice. Hence why Alan Gibbons, deputy head of the Liverpool Community Independents party, described the plan as “extremely disappointing”, telling us: “Prison ships are inhumane and wrong.” Last week, a protest was also held outside the offices of Bibby Marine by the group Solidarity Knows No Borders Merseyside. Twenty demonstrators, including Nina Houghton, called on the company to reconsider its deal with the government. “People are going to fall ill,” she said. “Lives will very possibly be lost.”

Julia Savage, who works at Asylum Matters, a refugee charity serving the northwest, says barges are a deeply flawed policy. “We know from other places where this approach has been tried that it would have incredibly damaging effects on people’s mental and physical health, and cut people off from essential services,” she explains. “People fleeing trauma especially need human dignity, stability and community whilst they are trying to rebuild their lives.” Conditions in similar facilities have been criticised for overcrowding. A recent report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Immigration Detention highlighted inadequate healthcare, safeguarding, legal support, food, cleanliness, and fire safety.

Campaigners are especially worried because when the Bibby Stockholm was deployed to Holland in the 2000s as an immigration detention facility, two North African men died — one of heart failure and another from a liver infection — amid accusations of poor health treatment. There were also reports of rape, fire safety failings and abuse by prison guards. There will be security guards in Dorset, but as mentioned earlier, refugees will not be imprisoned onboard. A better use of taxpayer money, Savage tells us, would involve easing the asylum process backlog, which currently includes around 161,000 people. This might reduce the daily bill of £6 million for housing refugees in hotels across the country.

Portland Harbour in Dorset, where the Bibby Stockholm will be moored. Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images.

Bibby Marine, which is responsible for supplying and maintaining the barge (but not managing the refugees), describes the Stockholm as “luxury living”. There’s a gym, bar, restaurant and games room. There will, however, likely be a long queue for the treadmills: 506 single adult male refugees will be housed onboard — a figure that seems surprising given a recent company brochure puts the vessel’s capacity at 222 single-bed rooms. That would mean, in its future configuration for refugees, two or three people will be placed in every room. Most asylum applicants wait for more than six months to hear about their case (for many it can be over a year), which is a long time to be stuck on a barge several miles from the nearest large town in a room with one or two other strangers.

“They are by no means prison rooms,” said a staff member at Bibby Marine when we got in touch, citing the Stockholm’s most recent deployment for the Italian military. “It’s not The Ritz, but you wouldn’t go in and think, ‘Oh my God, this is awful’.”

Bibby is obviously keen to clear up what they see as the various misconceptions about the vessel, but so far those efforts have been unsuccessful. One suspects the Home Office might not have the same appetite to argue the case for Bibby Stockholm, however.

That is because this vessel is meant to be unappealing. The Home Office wants this barge to deter future asylum seekers, and government ministers have been open about this. Comparisons to prison hulks are probably welcome, if not by Bibby Marine, then by Westminster. Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, said he wanted to prevent the UK from “becoming a magnet for asylum shoppers”, who might be attracted by the prospect of staying in “expensive hotels”.

Whether a policy of deterrence will work is another matter. The Home Office’s own research, according to a leaked document from 2020, has found that refugees “have little to no understanding of current asylum policies and the economic conditions of a destination country”. This means they are unlikely to know whether they will be put up in expensive hotels or grim offshore barges.

As Ewan Roberts, the manager of the local refugee charity Asylum Link, puts it: “Hotels aren’t ideal but barges are even worse. It’s a retrograde step that is ultimately going to cost more money. What else will have to be put in place for the mental health crisis they are going to create?” He cited the example of Napier, a former military barracks in Kent used as a refugee camp, where in 2021 there were seven attempted suicides and seven incidents of serious self-harm. “This solution,” he said, referring to the barge, “is very poor and likely to harm people.”

An estimated 52,000 asylum seekers came to this country last year. Fewer than one per cent of them will be housed on the barge. It’s an extremely lucrative contract for Bibby Marine. But at what price?