Thursday 14 December 2023

The Bibby Stockholm

Social media is a powerful thing and helpful in getting information very quickly. It's really useful in finding the opinions of experts and politicians to help understand what’s happening. However, it’s also dangerous and there’s a lot of misinformation that spreads like a pandemic. So it is with the Bibby Stockholm, the barge parked in Dorset housing asylum seekers. In recent days I noted a lot of stuff claiming it was costing £1.6bn to house just 200 asylum seekers waiting to be processed.

Have a look at this tweet which was typical:

The claim is the Home Office could have bought a whole cruise ship and housed thousands in relative luxury for the same or much lower cost. A lot has been made of Labour’s claim that it was costing a staggering £800 per day per asylum seeker.

The former immigration minister Robert Jenrick (a man I’ve usually no time for at all) got a grilling on LBC from Nick Ferrari about it because he ridiculed the £800 a night figure without knowing what the true figure was:

Yesterday we got some clarity. At a Select Committee hearing senior officials from the Home Office including the permanent secretary Philip Rycroft revealed the true cost of the barge was a little under £22 million.  The contract period to hire the Bibby Stockholm must be about 18 months which gives a daily charge of around £41,000.  This is part of a much larger contract worth £1.6 billion in total.  Jenrick was right about that.

Stephen Kinnock, a shadow Home Office minister, implied that Labour was owed an apology from Jenrick because their figures had indeed been proved accurate:
But Kinnock also links to an article in The Daily Mail which he says was the source of the original story.  Note he is talking about the £41,000 figure while Jenrick is denying the £800 per night cost. In fact, they are both right. The DM article reveals that the astronomical daily charge came from Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, but that was calculated when the barge had just 50 occupants although it has a total occupancy when full of 506. So, she was also correct at the time.

Here's her tweet in response to the news the barge was holding 50 refugees:
But, the true cost per night if and when it's ever fully occupied is about £80 per night, plus berthing charges of £4,500 per day, which adds about another £9 per person. All in all it's about £100 per day, comparable to a hotel.

There is a whole report about it by a charity Reclaim the Sea HERE.

The point about social media is how things get blown out of proportion and things stick in the public mind. Here's a case where three people are all correct but are talking at cross purposes. More important to me is why the government wanted to use the barge at all when one asylum seeker, a doctor from Cameroon apparently, has already committed suicide.

There is little in the way of cost savings and I think it's more likely ministers were under pressure to remove asylum seekers from hotels and guest houses in urban or tourist areas because local residents were getting angry and the problem of the backlog was far more visible.

Shoving them all in a barge in Portland harbour probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Jenrick says he doesn't want people in hotels and they should be in 'more simple accommodation.' In other words, it's to make their lives a bit more miserable and deter refugees from coming. 

The savings are minimal, if indeed there are any at all.
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