We wish to state our outrage and strongest opposition to the Home Office plan to house 550 men seeking sanctuary in our country in the claustrophobic, cramped, prison-like conditions of the Bibby Stockholm barge. We call for a radical rethink of the project and urgent development of strategies that respect the human realities of people coming here to seek asylum.

The barge now docked in Portland harbour was designed to accommodate 200 people. The plan to pack 550 into the facility is inhumane and dangerous. Small cabins intended for one, with one small desk, one small wardrobe are now planned to bunk-bed two adult men for months. Strangers, probably without common language, each carrying emotional and mental distress from the necessity to flee their homeland and everything familiar, will be roomed together in claustrophobic conditions. The location is a harbour distanced from daily town life, in bleak, marginalised isolation. Security processes at exit and entry invoke feelings of imprisonment. The mayor of Portland herself denounces the project: “The Bibby Stockholm is not a suitable place to house asylum seekers. It is still not too late to stop this. Human beings belong in communities.”

The Firebrigade Union, representing the vast majority of UK firefighters and emergency control staff, noted with outrage that the government recently legislated to scrap vital fire safety measures for asylum seeker accommodation in the UK. It has denounced the barge accommodation as a cruel and reckless approach to welfare of asylum seekers, that puts them and firefighters’ safety at risk. Narrow doorways, narrow corridors, only two exit gangplanks, too small a gathering collection point outside, make any evacuation a high-risk nightmare. 

Many local people interacting for months with asylum seekers already based here, whom we have got to know, passionately contest the idea that horrifying accommodation will have any weight discouraging people from desperate routes to reach the UK. Men asylum seekers known to the Beyond Borders Totnes & District network have come here for safety and survival. All would return in a moment to their families, friends, culture, to all that is familiar, to their sense of who they are – were it not for persecution, violence, death threats or war which compelled them to escape.

The men housed in hotels are sons, brothers, fathers - grief-ridden, missing their wives, children, families, missing having a home, a job, a viable means of living – robbed of these by violence, persecution and intolerable conditions. They had no choice but to leave. They want to contribute, collaborate, work, and anchor safe lives with community connection. We have been consistently impressed by their kindness, dignity and willingness to offer time, energy and skills to voluntary community initiatives.

The Home Office informed the first 50 men to prepare for transfer to Bibby Stockholm on Tuesday 25th July. It then became clear that safety checks had been woefully inadequate and neglected. The government was forced to delay plans only because others highlighted the high-risk conditions.

The Home Office justifies the barge as being for those who under new legislation are deemed entering the UK ‘illegally’ – on small boats. Yet among the first transfers are men we know who arrived months ago, and legally requested asylum, as was their right. 

The climate crisis now witnessed on all continents of the world is already exacerbating conditions of conflict, drought, flooding, storms and collapse of livelihood that inevitably force more and more people to seek sanctuary and life elsewhere. As governments fail to lead us through the radical actions and changes needed to stem continuing causes of climate damage, more and more people will be displaced and seek asylum. No Bibby Stockholms will ‘discourage’ this movement. Rather, without active commitment to process applications for asylum more efficiently and swiftly, including appropriate legal support, these prolonged, inhumane conditions strategies will only foster bitterness and disillusion, mental trauma and despair in hundreds of people who already live with us, hoping to become our fellow-citizens at some future point when they gain right to remain, as many will.

We call on the Government to abandon the Bibby Stockholm plans and the Illegal Migration Act, resource swifter asylum processing to end the cruel waiting and uncertainty of thousands trapped in pitifully marginal lives, and develop strategies that foster human respect, dignity and caring among both asylum seekers and among us all, citizens at large, as we witness their distress and efforts, and seek to welcome them into our communities.