The UK government’s latest wheeze to give the impression of being tough on the migrant boats crisis lasted less than a week, as migrants are removed from the accommodation barge after potentially deadly Legionella bacteria.

Migrants awaiting processing, having travelled to the United Kingdom ‘irregularly’ on smuggler boats across the English Channel started to arrive on the Bibby Stockholm barge on Monday, a floating accommodation bloc which in its past has performed duties including housing the homeless, and oil and gas rig employees in Scotland.

Yet those migrants are now being removed and placed into other accommodation, just five days later, after potentially lethal; pneumonia-causing Legionella bacteria was discovered onboard.

EDITORS NOTE: Picture blurred by PA picture desk at request of the Home Office. People thought to be asylum seekers boarding the Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge at Portland Port in Dorset, which will house up to 500 people. Picture date: Tuesday August 8, 2023. (Photo by Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images)

Although the barge has been fitted out for migration use for the British government to house over 500, just 39 migrants are being taken off today, suggesting the first week has been slow on arrivals. Reports earlier this week state some arrivals were refusing to go onboard, the boat migrants claiming to be very afraid of water.

The Daily Telegraph reports the statement of a Home Office spokesman, who said:

The health and welfare of individuals on the vessel is our utmost priority. Environmental samples from the water system on the Bibby Stockholm have shown levels of legionella bacteria which require further investigation.

Following these results, the Home Office has been working closely with UKHSA and following its advice in line with long-established public health processes, and ensuring all protocol from Dorset Council’s Environmental Health team and Dorset NHS is adhered to. As a precautionary measure, all 39 asylum seekers who arrived on the vessel this week are being disembarked while further assessments are undertaken.

No individuals on board have presented with symptoms of Legionnaires’, and asylum seekers are being provided with appropriate advice and support.

The samples taken relate only to the water system on the vessel itself and therefore carry no direct risk indication for the wider community of Portland nor do they relate to fresh water entering the vessel. Legionnaires’ disease does not spread from person to person.

Legionella, also known as Legionnaires Disease, is a water-borne disease which thrives in warm, stale water — it is dormant in cold, and killed by hot. Because of these conditions, it long ago become associated with the water systems of little-used large structures like redundant hospitals, asylums, and hotels. British government guidance says taps and showers should be run to flush out the water inside weekly to manage legionella risk, and that pipework should be designed to have the shortest route from tank to tap and not have rarely-used branches where water can sit for long periods.

The Bibby Stockholm has been under preparation for its migrant guests to arrive for months, and the actual move-in date was delayed several times, meaning there may have been a period where the facility was active but essentially unused, creating a potential environment for Legionella growth if directions on flushing the water system was not obeyed. This is not, surprisingly, unusual: two hospitals at least in the United Kingdom have had Legionnaires outbreaks this year.

The Bibby Stockholm barge is one of a series of initiatives launched the UK government to give the impression it was getting tough on border control without actually enforcing any border control. One of the parallel programmes, the idea to offshore the housing of migrants while their asylum cases are processed to the African nation of Rwanda has been totally derailed by legal cases brought by activist groups.

Seeking a way around that impasse, the Conservatives this week announced they would stick with the principle, but offshore the accommodation to British-held territory overseas, which would be less subject to court action. That too fell apart within hours, when the military authorities who run the remote mid-South-Atlantic island in question protested through briefings that it wouldn’t be appropriate to have large numbers of unknown travellers living next to a secret military installation.