King’s Speech

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, for outlining, much earlier today, the challenges that this country has been facing over a period of 20 years in the rapid rates of immigration. I am also grateful—as noble Lords will be, because I will not repeat the speech—to my noble friend Lord Murray, who outlined the number of failed applicants who arrive on boats and are not removed from this country: 41,000 people crossed the channel illegally in those boats last year alone. The deeper problem we have is not stopping the boats, which has clearly failed, but managing the system that processes the applications once they arrive. In practice, the reality, as my noble friend pointed out, is that, really, anyone who arrives on a boat ends up staying, and that is a massive incentive to keep coming.

We know that the cost of this is huge—£4 billion last year on asylum hotels housing those illegal arrivals in the country—and the pressure on the neighbourhoods, the people who have to live near all that, is enormous. It has become unfashionable and the subject of hostility, as we are experiencing on our justice committee at the moment—a matter of irreconcilable difference, some might say—to express any concerns about this whatsoever, yet the public have voted again and again to ask the democratically elected Governments to address it.

It appears that this Government are hopefully going to learn something from the failures of the previous Government, and I welcome the proposals of the current Home Secretary—the best one we have had since the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, of course—and hope very much that they will have the support of her Back-Benchers in the House of Commons and the Labour Benches in this House. They will certainly have mine, because we are already facing really weak productivity growth, mounting public debt and rising pressure on public services.

British people are some of the most welcoming and tolerant in the world. I walked this weekend from the National Gallery to see an exhibition and through Chinatown on the way home, and we went to eat Indian food afterwards. This is the most fabulously tolerant and diverse country, but we cannot sustain the pressure on our resources and the pressure that ordinary people are feeling in their neighbourhoods. We have to listen to people who have told us what they want to happen. We have seen it with the Brexit vote, the vote in 2019 and, again, in 2024, when Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, promised to smash the gangs— I am not saying that in any way to score political points; it is incredibly difficult to stop those boats. But these proposals by the current Home Secretary are reasonable and overdue, and they should be supported. I very much hope that they will be.