Asylum seeker barge plan would face legal challenge

Ministers are facing the imaginable of a ineligible situation if they spell up with plans to location asylum seekers connected a barge disconnected the Dorset coast.

The Home Office is reportedly looking to usage the 222-room Bibby Stockholm for the migrants nether arguable plans aimed astatine reducing reliance connected hotels.

Local Conservative MP Richard Drax told the Times "all ineligible routes" were being looked astatine to effort and halt the proposal.

The authorities says much than £6m a time is spent connected hotels for migrants. But charities accidental subject bases and boats are "wholly inadequate places" to location radical fleeing warfare and persecution.

The three-storey Bibby Stockholm - which tin location much than 500 radical - has been refurbished since it was criticised arsenic an "oppressive environment" erstwhile the Dutch authorities utilized it for asylum seekers.

Details astir immoderate woody to usage the barge person not yet been confirmed, but a Home Office spokesperson said: "The unit connected the asylum strategy has continued to turn and requires america to look astatine a scope of accommodation options which connection amended worth for wealth for taxpayers than hotels."

Mr Drax, whose constituency includes Portland, has described the usage of boats arsenic "totally and utterly retired of the question", and volition exacerbate existing problems "10-fold".

Speaking to BBC's Laura Kuenssberg connected Sunday, Home Secretary Suella Braverman refused to corroborate the deal, saying her bureau was "looking astatine each sorts of lands, sites and vessels".

He told the Commons that "the sheer fig of tiny boats person overwhelmed the asylum system", adding the authorities would "not elevate the wellbeing of amerciable migrants supra the British people".

"Accommodation for migrants should conscionable indispensable surviving needs and thing more, due to the fact that we cannot hazard becoming a magnet for the millions of radical who are displaced and seeking amended economical prospects," helium said.

The plans were criticised by Labour, with shadiness location caput Yvette Cooper saying the announcement was an "admission of failure".

"They've got this immense backlog of asylum decisions, truthful overmuch truthful that 98% of past year's tiny boats arrivals simply haven't adjacent been decided oregon processed," she said.