Bibby Stockholm delay adds to disarray of Sunak’s ‘stop the boats’ pledge - The Guardian

It should have been the week when another key element of Rishi Sunak’s plans to tackle small boat Channel crossings finally fell into place.

Instead, yet more delays have frustrated the movement of the first 50 migrants on to the Bibby Stockholm. The three-storey-high barge was billed by the Home Office as a way of providing “cheaper and more orderly accommodation for those arriving in small boats”.

The latest delay is understood to have been to allow checks to take place amid fire safety concerns about the vessel, which arrived behind schedule in Portland, Dorset last month.

Yet it is also just one of a number of eye-catching – for better or worse – plans associated with Sunak’s “stop the boats” pledge that have struggled to get off the ground.

While the notion of “offshoring” asylum seekers has its roots in Priti Patel’s stint as home secretary, it was earlier this year, on Suella Braverman’s watch, that the use of floating barges to help slash a £6m-a-day bill for hotel rooms emerged.

It coincides with the less than smooth introduction of another part of the alternative accommodation project, using disused RAF bases in Lincolnshire and Essex to house asylum seekers.

The moves to house as many as 2,000 people at RAF Scampton have been delayed until October, according to the local parish council, while there is still confusion about the use of RAF Wethersfield in Essex. Both have been become a focus for protests by groupings including local residents, anti-racism campaigners and the far right, and have been dogged by legal action from local authorities and unhappiness among Tory MPs.

In the latter case, local people who attended an event convened by the Home Office in the village on Monday night told of coming away feeling even more frustrated because of what they said was a lack of answers.

Looming large over all of the other plans is the flagship project: the plan to fly people seeking asylum in the UK 4,500 miles to Rwanda to have their claims processed.

First announced by Boris Johnson, the project has been adopted with gusto by Sunak and Braverman, even if it has run up against tortuous legal challenges and the criticism of charities, human rights advocates and international bodies such as the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

While the government continues to brief that it is optimistic about an appeal to the supreme court, court of appeal judges delivered a hammer blow in June when they ruled it was unlawful to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing.

One area where the government has been able to point to progress of a sort has been when it comes to the legislative framework that would underpin much of the above.

Last month it defeated the final resistance in the House of Lords to the plans, as the Conservative frontbench saw off five further changes to the bill, including modern slavery protections and child detention limits.

The illegal migration bill, which Rishi Sunak described on Tuesday as the “right, fair and compassionate thing to do”, is central to his “stop the boats” pledge and places a legal duty on the home secretary to detain and remove anyone entering the UK illegally.

But while the bill has overcome obstacles in a way that other components of the government’s migration plans have failed to, it was the focus of an unusually criticial UN statement last month. The UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk and its refugees head Filippo Grandi warned it would have “profound consequences for people in need of international protection”.

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2023-08-01 18:24:00Z
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