Contractor for Bibby Stockholm asylum barge overcharged government by £118m

The contractor responsible for the Bibby Stockholm asylum barge and quarantine hotel rooms has admitted to overcharging the UK government by an eyewatering £118m.

The Australian company, Corporate Travel Management (CTM), announced that it’s making arrangements to pay back the money.

However, there’s a question we’ve got to ask here. Namely, how is there so little oversight of the government’s use of private contractors, that they can overpay £118m to just one company without noticing?

Corporate Travel Management

CTM has several years of dealings with the UK government. For instance, the travel company had a hand in flying UK residents back to the country and quarantining them back at the start of the pandemic. Unfortunately, this means that we also have several years of ‘financial irregularities’ to get through.

The Bibby Stockhom, which the Tories leased from CTM in 2023, stood empty by November 2024. It faced massive protests and scandal over the appalling conditions on board (including Legionella in the water system), its estimated costs, and the naked racism of keeping male asylum seekers in prison-like circumstances.

The Tories refused Freedom of Information requests on the cost of detaining asylum seekers in inhumane conditions. However, a National Audit Office investigation eventually pegged the total cost at around £34.8m.

Labour finally ended the Bibby Stockholm contract in January 2025. However, Labour then struck a new deal with the company in April 2025. This new £550m contract consisted in an agreement for CTM to provide asylum hotels and transport.

Accounting ‘anomalies’

Then, in September 2025, CTM was forced to stop trading on the Australian stock exchange due to ‘anomalies’ in its accounts.

The travel agency reportedly knew that it had overcharged the UK government to the tune of £54.6m by 2022. This was mostly made up of charges for quarantine rooms in hotels. The board made letter arrangements to pay back the clients it had wronged, and considered the matter resolved.

In November 2025, it revised that total up to £77.6m, and announced that it had become:

aware of a suggestion that the letter agreements may not, in fact, be authentic. […]

This contradicted the position understood and relied on by the board.

Likewise in November, the company’s ex-UK chief executive, Michael Healy, stood down from his post. CTM found Healy to have breached his contract, and dismissed him in December. The company’s CEO and founder, Jamie Pherous, also happened to step down in February 2026.

Where was the oversight?

Auditors from accounting firm KPMG carried out a forensic investigation of CTM’s books. This unearthed more instances of overcharging and erroneously retained funds. As such, on 23 April, CTM revised its estimate of the amount it overcharged the UK government up to a grand total of £118m.

A Home Office spokesperson confirmed that the department would also conduct an internal investigation into its eyewatering CTM overspending.

But, while the UK government scrabbles to account for its ridiculous incompetence with just one company, the public is left with yet more questions.

How many other companies have overcharged the Tories and Labour to a similar degree? How much public money has been pissed away on over-inflated private contracts? And, of course, how is the Home Office operating with so little oversight that this could happen in the first place?

Featured image via the Canary