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How the Bibby Stockholm became a symbol of profit and failur [1]
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Date: 2025-03
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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