King’s Speech

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich on her maiden speech. It is also the end of an era, with the departure from our Benches of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, who is a legend in his own lifetime, with his constitutional expertise.

I want to mention the immigration issue that faces this country, because the vast numbers of people that have come into the United Kingdom in recent years simply cannot be integrated at the rate that they are coming in. In the year to June 2023, the gross number of immigrants arriving in the United Kingdom was 23,000 people a week. How can we integrate 23,000 people a week? It is utterly and completely impossible and we have no meaningful, effective means of dealing with this throughout the country. We are creating vast ghettos, and we do not really know what is happening within them. Recent attempts to get control of this are floundering. Boats continue and have not been stopped—indeed, we have little idea who is in them—and the gangs have not been smashed. The reason for that, of course, is that the incentive to come here, using boats as one example, faces no meaningful deterrent, as 95% of those arriving have remained. In the absence of any meaningful deterrent, the Government have been trying, and the Minister has been working very hard, but the truth is that he has been playing catch-up throughout this process.

I fear, and the noble Lord, Lord Faulks and others have mentioned it, that the decisions announced in Moldova over the last few days will have little impact, because of what we have brought into our national law. They are only recommendations; there is nothing in a treaty and there is nothing in legislation.

There is a massive cost to taxpayers. We talk about the plight of many of these people, and that is fully understandable, but we do not talk about the plight of the people who live here and who are paying for it. For instance, a couple of years ago, we were taking a couple of hundred pounds a year off somebody’s heating allowance, yet people who come into the country in boats are in centrally heated hotels, fully fed and taken care of. There is a fundamental unfairness, and it is a breach of the social contract between the people and the state. I have tried to get the figure as to what all this is costing. My personal opinion is that it is about £10 billion a year, and maybe the Minister in his response can tell us, but I believe that there is a fundamental underlying dishonesty in the way mass immigration is being dealt with by successive Governments and Parliaments, and it will have to stop.

I want to say just one thing about the union. In recent days, we have seen potential candidates for the Labour leadership, should a vacancy arise, talking about going back into the European Union. We had a referendum 10 years ago and, whatever our views on that referendum, the fact is that a decision was reached, whether we like it or not. If one is prepared to take away that decision now, to go back on it and perhaps consult the people—maybe not—what is the argument against the Scottish National Party, which says, “We want another referendum”, having had one only 12 years ago? If we are prepared to have one for Europe, we are opening the door to a break-up of the union.