‘They wanted help, we gave them a prison boat’
As the migrant barge left Dorset, openDemocracy explored life on board the Bibby – and the failed policy that cost millions
Levana Coker had recently moved to Dorset, on England’s south coast, when she first saw the advert in her local Job Centre. It was for a housekeeper at a large-scale accommodation site, she said, £11.50 an hour for the first month, rising to £12 per hour after that. Levana was training to become a dog groomer but needed a job to stay afloat until she qualified. She applied, and was duly accepted.
It was the summer of 2023. Levana didn’t realise it at first but the job was on the Bibby Stockholm, the controversial barge that would go on to house a total of 901 asylum-seeking people in Portland, a small island attached to the mainland by a narrow causeway.
“I got the job before Bibby even moored,” Levana told openDemocracy. “I thought our role was to help people – that we were there to support people who needed our help.
“But in fact, it just felt like a bit of a let down. This whole thing was supposed to help the asylum seekers to integrate into the community, it was supposed to be a cheaper and healthier way to do that. They came here for help and I wanted to help.”
The reality on board the Bibby was far from the supportive home that Levana had imagined it would provide for vulnerable people. “This barge to us is death,” is how one Iranian asylum seeker described it. “It was a prison boat,” Levana agreed.
When Labour swept to power in the summer of 2024, it announced it would not be renewing the Bibby contract. The barge had become a symbol of the Conservative government’s crackdown on undocumented immigration through increasingly punitive policies aimed (unsuccessfully) at deterring people from making dangerous small boat journeys across the English Channel.
The Bibby’s final resident left on 26 November last year, the barge was towed away from British shores in January, and it has since receded from public consciousness as just another cruel nightmare from the Tory years.
Yet, the Bibby’s departure has not fundamentally altered the UK’s approach to tackling undocumented migration. Politicians from across the spectrum continue to raise the spectre of uncontrolled small boat arrivals as a means to explain away the real and imagined crises afflicting British society: economic precarity, the deterioration of public services, and the supposed erosion of “British-ness”.
openDemocracy has spent the past few months investigating the Bibby Stockholm. We filed multiple FOI requests, reviewed contracts, financial reports, government data and audio recordings and spoke to former employees, experts and migrant rights campaigners to find that the barge was only the most visible part of a multi-billion-pound industry of opaque global corporations, contractors and subcontractors with anodyne names, all of whom profit off the fear-mongering around migration and borders.
The financial outlays and opaque contracts are just part of the story. Lost amid the sabre-rattling by politicians and the performative cruelty of cramming asylum-seeking people on a floating prison are the human stories of idealistic young people like Levana, who signed up to work in these facilities to help the vulnerable, only to find their faith shaken.
“It was like we were shoving them into a concentration camp,” she said.
The prison boat
In early 2023, the UK’s immigration system was described as being in crisis. A lack of safe and legal routes into the UK meant that the year before, more than 45,000 people had landed on British shores after making the perilous journey across the Channel from France in a small boat.
Although they accounted for only 3.5% of the approximately 1.3 million people who immigrated to the UK in the year to June 2023, these asylum seekers became useful scapegoats for Conservative politicians who’d been elected on promises to cut immigration.
Not wanting to be seen as overly lenient towards those who had fled wars, persecution and poverty, the government dragged its heels and the ‘asylum backlog’ spiralled to a record high. By early 2023, 132,000 asylum-seeking people were waiting to hear whether they would be granted refugee status or removed from the UK, with nearly 89,000 having submitted their application more than six months ago.
Those awaiting a decision were housed mostly in hotels and barracks, where they faced poor food, disease outbreaks and deteriorating mental health caused by uncertainty over their future. The British public, meanwhile, was being encouraged by the right-wing presses to become angry at the cost to taxpayers of housing them.
Sian Norris
With its efforts to resolve all these problems by offshoring people to Rwanda floundering in the courts, the government announced a new policy: people who arrived into the UK irregularly would be housed on the Bibby Stockholm.
The plan was confused from the outset. On the one hand, ministers were branding the Bibby as a deterrent: a form of accommodation so unwelcoming that it would halt arrivals into the UK as people would not want to be housed there. On the other, they had to manage criticisms that the barge was inhumane, leading to a PR campaign that resulted in multiple media reports celebrating it as a great place to live, with residents offered food and leisure facilities.
The reality was somewhere between the two. “[People on board] only really had their rooms to hang out in,” said Levana. “I remember seeing photos when I was working there, either staged or from before the barge came to Portland, of what looked like a luxury cruise but I know, I’ve worked there, it was very different.
“The men were smooshed together,” she continued. “Like sardines. Obviously it was better than them being on the streets but it very much reminded me of a prison. They felt very trapped.”
The vessel had a capacity of 500 and the government gave Dorset Council £1.7m over the duration of its stay in the port, as well as a one-off grant of almost £380,000 intended to support the extra demand for council-provided services created by the influx of asylum-seeking people to the area over the following 18 months.
It is not known how this figure compares to the total amount that the Home Office paid a private firm for sourcing and managing the Bibby Stockholm – with the government department having refused to answer openDemocracy’s questions on the final cost.
We do know, however, that contracting the Bibby was just one strand of a £1.6bn deal between the government and Corporate Travel Management North (CTM), the child company of an Australian international travel and logistics firm. The agreement – the Home Office’s largest active contract, public spending expert Tussell told openDemocracy – charged CTM with sourcing and managing asylum accommodation, transport and meals in the UK.
A spokesperson for CTM confirmed: “The contract signed with the Home Office in April 2023 states the projected whole life contract value, rather than guaranteed spend. As with many government contracts, it specifies a maximum financial limit which can be procured over the contract term. However, contracts and spend is limited to the actual demand for services which CTM appreciates can change over time and as policies evolve.
Reprimanded for kindness
On board the Bibby, the men’s routine appears to have been tightly controlled. Although the men were allowed off the barge, Levana told openDemocracy, they were reliant on an hourly shuttle bus that ran from the barge to Weymouth, the nearest big town.
If they missed their dinner slot, they risked going hungry. If they missed their laundry slot, they had no clean clothes. But, sticking to her first instinct that her role was to help people, Levana went out of her way to make sure the men got what they needed.
“I would do a bit of extra laundry if the men did not bring their laundry bag down for their slot,” she said. “Otherwise they would have to sit in their dirty clothes. I would go and get an extra pillow if they needed one. I would chat to them, just chatting and being friendly. Why wouldn’t you be a nicer person, or at least not be against these guys. They’re refugees!”
Levana’s employer, Catering Energy, had been sub-contracted by CTM North to manage the day-to-day running of the barge. Catering Energy is the UK face of Dubai-based Atenas Group, formerly Connect Catering. The UK’s business register, Companies House, shows that Atenas and Catering Energy share the same directors: Bernard Gerdy, Aleksej Kovtunenko and Hugo Lopes.
Levana said she received no training on how to engage with people who had recently experienced trauma, which was the case for many of the men on board, something Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz, Policy and Public Affairs Manager at migrant rights charity Praxis described as “alarming.”
“It is highly likely that asylum seekers aboard the Bibby Stockholm will have experienced some form of trauma prior to their arrival in the UK, including violence, persecution, and displacement,” she said. “Traumatic experiences can seriously impact our mental and physical health, as well as making it more difficult for individuals to trust others. By ignoring the potential impact of past trauma, management are putting both staff and residents at risk by not giving either the right tools to avoid distressing situations.”
The men were smooshed together like sardines. They felt very trapped.Levana, who worked on the Bibby
Instead, Levana was reprimanded for being welcoming and supportive of the asylum seekers stranded on the barge, and warned by managers that not all the residents were “stable”.
Levana shared an audio recording with openDemocracy, which she says is of her receiving an informal verbal warning from a senior manager at Catering Energy during a meeting on the barge a few months into her employment.
The audio contains shocking content: the manager warns Levana that she must stop being so friendly with the Bibby’s residents as doing so puts her at risk of being “raped”.
“I’m a man, I see, I read a lot of body language, I’m a body scanner. What I saw there, especially when you two left – you guys, I can tell you are at risk right now with these guys,”he said “Don’t expose yourself at all. I don’t want you to be raped, that’s the outcome I see, that’s the real outcome I see here and I’m not joking.”
Elsewhere in the recording, Levana’s manager states that her safety is his biggest concern. He claims her body language is putting her safety at risk, and suggests she puts a camera on herself and watches the footage of her interacting with the Bibby’s residents.
“You will see the way people look at you, you are seen as a piece of meat right now. You are too friendly and too easy,” he said. “You are too easy for these guys, because you are too friendly and smiley and polite and they see it in a completely different way.”
Levana said she made the recording because she was worried about the meeting and wanted to have evidence of the accusations. openDemocracy played it to a second former employee, Bella Basstone, who confirmed the manager's identity.
A second man on the call, whom Levana says is another senior manager, also chips in during the conversation, saying: “Some of the ways you expose yourself, not all the [service users] are stable and we need to make sure your safety is protected.”
Levana was furious at being given the warning. “Just showing a tiny bit of human kindness and we weren’t allowed to do it,” she said. “Getting a verbal warning just for talking to people and treating them like human beings. Of course there might be some bad people but most of the men were really polite, they would offer to help you.”
“Such comments are indicative of harmful racial stereotypes that are in direct opposition to a trauma-informed response,” said Praxis’ Whitaker-Yilmaz. “With staff holding such views, it is difficult to see how there can be any trust between them and residents. If the Home Office is seriously concerned about reducing harm to both staff and residents, trauma-informed training and hiring practices should be a foundational health and safety measure."
Bella, who worked alongside Levana on the barge, described how management would make comments about the ways residents “would see women and stuff, like pieces of meat”.
Like Levana, Bella had applied for a job at the Bibby when she saw it advertised at the Job Centre. “I was a stewardess, but I basically did everything!” she told openDemocracy. “I was in the kitchens, and on reception. I looked after room assignments, listened to complaints, just like being on hotel reception really.”
They might not have received trauma-informed training, but Levana and Bella were exposed to the daily distress of the men on board, many of whom had arrived on small boats. “A lot of the men would tell me they were scared of the barge sinking and they would drown,” Bella said.
“One man was from Algeria, he was a boxer,” Levana said. “A really manly man, [whose attitude would have been that] men don’t cry. He broke down in the Bibby, because he was made to feel like he was in prison, that he was illegal.”
In December 2023, Leonard Farruku, a 27-year-old Albanian, died by suicide while on board the Bibby. “He was really sweet,” said Bella. “It was really sad.”
“Every day the survivors we work with are terrified of ending up in places like this,” Sile Reynolds, head of asylum advocacy at the NGO Freedom from Torture, told openDemocracy. “Cramped and dangerous conditions can be profoundly retraumatising, worsening despair, anxiety, and depression of those who’ve already suffered so much.”
Hostility on board
Staff on the Bibby were openly prejudiced against the asylum-seekers on board, Bella and Levana told openDemocracy. “It wasn’t a nice environment. It was quite hostile,” Levana said. “People judged them just for the colour of their skin, for their religion or where they came from.”
Her testimony matches residents’ complaints data that openDemocracy obtained from the Home Office via Freedom of Information laws. Eight complaints were made about staff using discriminatory, derogatory or rude language when talking to residents.
One complaint accuses a staff member of saying that “their taxes are paying for the migrants’ food”, while another says a staff member shouted: “We people in England work hard and pay tax to provide you with food and accommodation, you are not allowed to complain about food and accommodation, you are in debt to us.”
Director of Survivor Leadership and Influencing at Freedom from Torture, Kolbassia Haoussou, described the comments as “a direct result of years of toxic misinformation, the demonisation and scapegoating of refugees.” That demonisation has “had a real and very negative impact on our society.”
“Refugees just want a chance to recover, to rebuild their lives and become members of their local communities,” Haoussou added. “Most people in this country are caring and compassionate and they want our government to give refugees a fair chance. Politicians have a duty to make sure that refugees in our communities are protected and made to feel welcome.”
Other complaints describe staff members being “abusive and rude”, “bullying and discriminatory” and saying “disrespectful things”. One raises concerns that residents are treated unfairly “based on ethnicity”.
Sian Norris
Bella was a Muslim and says that she, too, experienced prejudice from staff members. She told openDemocracy that a senior manager made derogatory comments about her faith, including telling her that she should remove her hijab to hear better after she struggled to hear something he’d said.
Home Office complaints data revealed that alleged staff rudeness and racism were not the only issues residents faced. The majority of the complaints related to the food provided on the Bibby.
One man, who said he is allergic to milk, potatoes, meat and fish, complained that the catering team’s refusal to respect allergies had left him unable to eat and “dying from pain”. He said he had “not eaten properly for 18 days”, and was being forced to buy his own food using the £8.86 weekly allowance that the government gives to asylum seekers, who are banned from working while their claims are decided upon.
Other complaints said the food had “bugs” and “human hair” in it. One asylum-seeking man from Afghanistan complained that “the food is not very fresh” and mentioned portion sizes – a frequent complaint from other residents.
Levana sent openDemocracy photos of undercooked chicken, black mould on salad leaves, green mould on white bread, a bug on some cauliflower, and an eyelash in a portion of porridge, all of which she said were taken on board the Bibby.
“Bugs in the food, mould in the food, the food was not really sanitary,” Levana confirmed. “If it wasn’t raw, it was overcooked. Mould in the salad. You wouldn’t give prisoners food like that, and these are people we were supposed to be helping.”
Many of the complaint logs referenced how men were going hungry as a result of the food’s quality, or small portion sizes. Residents described how asking for more food caused the situation to escalate: security “pushed and squeezed” one man who asked for extra bread and “shouted at” another who requested a snack outside of the dinner period.
We put all the allegations made in this article to the UK Home Office but have received no response.
A spokesperson for CTM responded that "the two formal complaints raised relating to food were fully investigated by Dorset Council and no further action was deemed necessary. All menus were regularly updated, culturally and allergy sensitive." However, the complaints in question were made to Migrant Help and recorded by the Home Office, and the data provided by the Home Office indicated there were many more than two food-related complaints.
The hostility on board quickly left Levana wanting to quit and find work elsewhere. Her dog grooming training course was going well, and she knew that she would soon be in a position to start her own business. But she stayed on until December 2023, chiefly because she thought it was important that there were staff on board who treated the residents with respect.
“I felt like I stayed in the job longer than I needed to because only a couple of us weren’t against these guys,” said Levana. “I thought, if I am not working here, who is going to help them out?”
Catering Energy did not respond to our request for an interview. But we did ask the parent company in Dubai repeatedly to comment on the Levana’s and Bella’s allegations. The company did not respond.
The profits
Ten thousand miles away from Portland, the man at the head of CTM North’s parent company lives in “the most expensive house in Brisbane”. It’s a waterfront display of wealth that stands in stark contrast to the poor conditions on the Bibby – and to Levana and Bella’s hourly wages.
Self-made Australian businessman Jamie Pherous, who founded Corporate Travel Management in 1994, acquired Yorkshire’s Redfern Travel in 2016 and rebranded it as CTM North. It was in the same year that he bought the land to build his four-storey, luxury home.
But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, the tourism sector was badly affected and CTM’s global and local bottom line was hit hard. Analysis of CTM North’s annual reports reveal that pre-tax profits fell by more than 40% between 2019 and 2021, dropping from £14.2m to £8.3m.
Diversifying its offerings to the state in 2020 helped keep the business afloat. While the company had held public contracts in the UK before, it became a major supplier to the British government, striking deals to contract out Covid quarantine accommodation and provide a technology platform to allow citizens to book and pay for them, as well as emergency reparation flights and England’s scheme for tracking Covid cases. From there, it signed contracts with the Department for Education, the Serious Fraud Office, the Ministry of Justice and National Audit Office. CTM North’s director was awarded an Order of the British Empire, and in 2022 the firm won a contract with the Scottish government to manage the accommodation of Ukrainian refugees.
By 2023, its annual report showed a 90% increase in profits. Then, in April of that year, CTM North won its biggest ever contract with the UK Home Office to “manage the needs of asylum seekers in Great Britain”, including on the Bibby Stockholm. Shares in the company jumped 12% after it was revealed it had been awarded the deal, which had the option for a one-year extension. CTM North’s annual report described the work as “relating to the UK government’s ongoing humanitarian projects”.
“Disguising the lucrative work of penning up homeless foreigners on a floating prison camp as ‘humanitarian’ work is an insult to the British public’s intelligence,” said migration rights expert Zoe Gardner. “The role of the state is to provide the services that the country relies on, not to funnel public wealth into the hands of private profit-making companies.”
“The contract award from the Home Office was a maximum financial limit for accommodation and not only related to managing the needs of Asylum Seekers,” said a CTM spokesperson.
The description of asylum accommodation as a “humanitarian project” does not fit in with Levana’s recollections, either. “It was hostile,” she said. “There was no humanity, no compassion,” she said. “I know that it was all about money, that it was about finding the cheapest company to do the work. But they should have got people who cared.”
As well as Catering Energy, CTM North sub-contracted various aspects of the everyday running of the Bibby Stockholm to various other organisations, including Portland Port and Landry & Kling – a US-based organisation that does not have to publish its financial returns in the UK or the States.
openDemocracy requested a full list of the contractors from the Home Office, after CTM advised on its website that such a list had been provided to the UK government.
The request was refused, on the grounds it would prejudice commercial interests. A further request for an interview with CTM was also refused, although a spokesperson did provide a statement, saying: “Corporate Travel Management (CTM) has a strong track record of providing travel management services for the UK government.
“Under the Bridging Accommodation and Travel Services contract, CTM is predominantly responsible for sourcing and managing accommodation solutions in line with the current government’s policy framework and requirements. When contracting accommodation, we always consider individuals’ security, health, and wellbeing needs.”
‘War is a nice hedge for us’
Although CTM appeared to be going from strength to strength, it soon ran into trouble as protests against the Bibby spooked its investors.
Future Super, a self-described ethical fund manager, withdrew its investments from CTM over concerns about its asylum contract in July 2023, the month before the first residents boarded the barge.
By February 2024, CTM had linked a shortfall in earnings from the contract to the political environment, saying that in a “perfect world we would have all assumed a dozen cruise ships going by now but right now that’s not very acceptable politically”.
One year into running the Bibby, in August 2024, CTM confirmed the contract to provide temporary accommodation on barges had significantly underperformed. By this point, the new Labour government had announced it would not renew the Bibby contract, and that residents would eventually leave the barge by January 2025.
Discussing the disappointing results, Pherous told analysts: “If there is a war, it’s a nice hedge for us.”
We put his comment to Tim Naor Hilton, chief executive of Refugee Action. While unable to respond to it specifically, he said: “The asylum accommodation system is rotten to its core. It is defined by huge taxpayer-funded payouts for company directors and shareholders while people seeking asylum live in often horrendous conditions.
“We need a revolution in social housing so we can have a system where everyone in our society can live in a safe and secure home, including people seeking asylum.”
CTM told openDemocracy that Pherous’s comment makes no reference to the Bibby Stockholm or Home Office contract.
Levana understood what it meant to work directly with people who had fled the wars described by Pherous as a “nice hedge”. She spoke daily to residents who had lost friends, family and loved ones to the humanitarian crises that CTM was meant to be supporting. Their stories shocked her.
“One young man, he had walked from his country with his friend, and then they came over on two separate boats, but he never saw his friend again,” Levana remembered. The story is underscored with a sense of horror. “You can only imagine what happened. They walked to France together, they drank puddle water. To this day he still doesn’t know what happened to the other boat.”
The contrast between Pherous’s comments and Levana’s highlight the problems with the creeping privatisation of the UK’s previously public infrastructure. As immigration lawyer Petra Molnar told openDemocracy on a recent podcast: “There is this relationship between a turn to the right, anti-migrant sentiments, and the private sector stepping in and offering these so-called solutions to assist with this kind of move towards controlling migration more and more.”
The Bibby may have left Portland, but it remains a stark symbol of the UK’s asylum industrial complex. Anonymous corporates sign giant government contracts with little thought to the vulnerable people they are supposed to support, while their profiteering denies the minimum wage staff they employ the training and resources to provide adequate services.
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