Plans to use more barges is shelved

THE Home Office has shelved plans to procure more barges to hold asylum seekers as the Bibby Stockholm has been beset by problems, delays and disputes.

Ministers last year touted accommodation vessels as a way of cutting the cost of housing migrants in hotels, which has hit £8 million a day.

It is now understood that efforts to secure new barges have been abandoned amid struggles to find ports willing to take them.

It comes as the Bibby Stockholm, the only accommodation barge commissioned so far by ministers, has faced a series of setbacks.

An Albanian asylum seeker died while living on board the barge moored at Portland, in Dorset, in December and is thought to have taken his own life.