Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Richard Tice Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes]

I will deal with those points in order. On the question of population, the ONS is clear that net migration is likely to fuel a rise in the UK population to 72.5 million by 2032. For most of my childhood and adolescence, the population was somewhere around 57 million, 58 million or 59 million. We have never at any point in our history had a population of anything like 72.5 million. The growth has been dramatic, taking place within a generation and a half. We can never build infrastructure to cope with that kind of growth. No Government could. It is not about whether the Government are Labour or Conservative or from a fringe party—by that I mean the Liberal Democrats, of course—it is about the public service being funded in a feasible and tenable way.

Of course it is true that many of the people who come into the country do great things, and of course it is true that our population has people from all kinds of places of origin who contribute immensely to our wellbeing and welfare. However, the truth is that the healthcare visa scheme was a palpable and absolute failure. If we look at the number of vacancies in that sector during the period I have described, it barely moved. It fell slightly, but by nothing like the number of people who were brought in. That leaves the question: what are these people doing now, and what did they do shortly after they arrived? My estimation is that many of them never intended to work in the healthcare sector and were brought into the country by businesses which never intended to work in it either. That is just one example of how the arguments about the economy and the value to the economy need to be re-examined and challenged.

I spoke earlier about the economic cost that people bring as well as value; what I did not mention, and must also be considered, is the displacement effect that migration has on investment in skills. When I was skills Minister, I helped to rejuvenate the apprenticeship system—under my stewardship we built the biggest number of apprenticeships we have ever had in modern times. I did that because I believed in investing in vocational, practical and technical competencies, not only to fulfil economic need, but because many people’s aptitudes, tastes and talents take them in that direction. However, if we say to businesses, “There is no need to invest in training or recruitment and retention, because you can bring people in from abroad to do those jobs”, what possible incentive is there for them to eat into the number of people who find themselves outside the labour market?

I feel particularly for young people. The number of so-called NEETs—those not in education, employment or training—is stubbornly high and has gone up to around 1 million now. Those 16 to 24-year-olds deserve better than a system that says, “We won’t train you; stay on benefits, because there is someone elsewhere who will do the job you might be trained to carry out.” That is not good Government. It is not reasonable or responsible.

We have to displace immigration and invest in skills, rather than the opposite—exactly what we have been doing for so long under successive Governments. Hon. Members will notice that I make no apology for the record of previous Conservative Governments. I am being absolutely frank: this has been a failure by the whole of the political establishment. Indeed much of that establishment, drawn as it is from the liberal classes, misunderstands the argument entirely. The hon. Member for Lichfield boldly and accurately drew attention to the gulf between the views and opinions of a very large number of our constituents and those who populate organisations such as the Migration Advisory Committee —it is a murky group; I never know quite who is on it or how they got there, but they certainly do not seem terribly sensitive to the kind of arguments that the hon. Gentleman advanced when he talked about the frustration and fears that people feel about the scale of migration for economic reasons.

Let me also say something about the social consequences. The hon. Gentleman, in his opening remarks, touched on the fact that societies work when they cohere—when they have a shared sense of belonging that draws people together and mitigates the differences that inevitably prevail in a free society. That shared sense of belonging is itself dependent on change being relatively gradual. Of course, everywhere changes, and our individual lives change too. We can cope with so much change in a human span, yet we have seen towns and parts of cities in our country alter beyond recognition. It is hard to reconcile that with the maintenance of that sense of belonging.

We need to be able to absorb people, and we need to be able to welcome those people, knowing there is something for them to integrate into. Yet, in some parts of Britain, there is a precious little left to integrate into. It is not fair to the indigenous population, nor is it fair to the incoming people, because it cheats them of their chance to gain that sense of belonging, that sense of Britishness, that the hon. Gentleman rightly identified as critical to our communal wellbeing. He is right that some people are frightened to say that. I have never been on the Clapham omnibus—you might have been, Dr Huq—but I can imagine what the people on it are like, because they are probably rather like the people on the Spalding omnibus, or even the Boston omnibus.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

I urge the right hon. Member to enjoy the pleasures of taking a bus to Clapham—it is a splendid experience.

[Sir John Hayes]

I would like to think that the hon. Gentleman, who is my constituency neighbour, spends more time in Lincolnshire than Clapham. I am sure he does. Perhaps, though, we could have an outing on the Clapham omnibus together.

When I go about my constituency, and I imagine this is the same in Lichfield and many constituencies across this House, I hear the frustrations; a feeling of resentment that so much harm has been done by so many people in power who have been oblivious to that harm. The last Government very belatedly, after overtures from people such as me and the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson)—when he was still in the light, before he went into the shade—clamped down on some of those abuses. They cut the number of work visas in a range of sectors and they reduced the number of dependants that students could bring.

It was preposterous that students could come and bring their families, was it not? When people go to study somewhere, they do not go in order to bring their family; they go specifically for an academic purpose. That ability was curbed, and it had some effect on overall numbers, but it was too little too late. It was not sufficient, and it took a lot of hand-wringing to get to even that point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) on opening the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee.

We all want to do things well—I am sure that is an ambition shared by all hon. Members—and immigration done well can be a great thing. It is what I call smart immigration, where we welcome people from across the world, with the skills required, in numbers that can be absorbed into the existing population. We welcome people who want to integrate, work and grow within communities, and learn the language. That is a great thing, and we have a long history, until the last 25 years, of actually getting that right.

When we are looking at strategy and planning our constituents expect us to do a good job, so when we look ahead to the next 20 years and see that population growth of some 10 million people is forecast—give or take; let us call it half a million a year—and the vast majority of that is through inward migration, we want to say, surely, “How will we plan for that? Where is the infrastructure? Where are the homes, doctors, hospitals and everything else?”

In a sense, the challenge that the Government currently face—there are many, which we all recognise—is dealing with the existing challenges. I suspect that there is very little real planning. The Government are planning to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, but that will barely alleviate the existing population’s housing challenges, let alone half a million more people coming to join our population every year over the next five years and beyond. I fear that for the next 20 years we are going to make the same mistake as the huge one we made 20 years ago.

If we had had this sort of debate in about 2005 and someone had said, “We’ve got a good idea, folks: let’s increase the population by 10 million people over the next 20 years”— give or take, about 17% of the then population—I am pretty sure that smart hon. Members would have said, “If so, we have to build the infrastructure, the houses and so on.” Someone would probably have asked, rightly, “Will that make us all better off?” The role of the Government in this great place is to make our constituents better off.

If something is planned for and delivered well, great results can be achieved. But if there is no proper planning, as happened, regrettably, under the previous Conservative Administrations—various shades of Liberal Democrat—uncontrolled migration and the situation of the last couple of years are the result. In one year, there was almost 1 million net inward migration and in a second year almost three quarters of a million. That is completely uncontrollable, and it puts huge pressures on the population.

The thing to focus on to bring people together in this sensitive debate is population. If we want population growth, we must plan for it, make sure that it is going to make everybody better off and then deliver it. The interesting point, of course, is that our population has never been bigger; according to official numbers, it is a whisker under 70 million people. We are not short of people in this country. There are, give or take, 7 million or 8 million people who are economically inactive and over 5 million people on out-of-work benefits. Surely, before we say, “We need another half a million people a year, every year, to provide the labour for the various services we need to fill”, we should be training and skilling up our own people.

[Dr Arthur]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for the sensitive way he is navigating through this. However, is it not the case that people defined as economically inactive include those who are retired? Is he suggesting that we go around the golf courses and bingo halls in our constituencies and get those people into the workforce, building houses for us? Is that the solution to the economic problems in this country?

[Richard Tice]

The point is that life expectancy has grown and the pension age is growing because we are healthier. That is a great thing. People enjoy work—work is a great thing. However, the real point is that there are some 5 million-plus people not of retirement age who we need to get back into the workplace. We want a world-leading benefit system that looks after the genuinely vulnerable and sick as well as the genuinely unemployed who are looking for work. I would have thought that we could all agree on that.

Let us look at what really did work well: back in the ’80s and early ’90s, net inward migration was about 30,000 to 50,000 a year on average—in some years, there was a little bit of net emigration. It was working well. People came to work and integrated—and guess what? Our economy was growing at 2.5% to 3.5% a year. Everybody was getting better off. We had real per-person wage growth, above the rate of inflation, of some 2.5% per annum in the 1990s.

We now have no GDP growth but significant population growth through inward migration, so we are all getting poorer per person. That is one of the challenges that we all face. If we know that the system worked back then, maybe we should be willing to learn the lessons of history. That was a time when there was no immigration debate, interestingly. Until about the early 2000s, immigration was not an issue because it was working well, with numbers that could be sensibly absorbed. People were getting richer—and that is a good thing.

My view is that we are not short of people, and the anxiety of those who signed the petition is that population growth is too great. We cannot cope with our existing population, and there is a need for pause—perhaps a policy of net zero immigration: one in, one out. About 400,000 people leave the UK every year; we could welcome a similar number in—that will ebb and flow—as long as they are highly skilled and highly qualified where we have shortages, while we train our own people.

Back in the ’80s, the interesting thing was that our healthcare system, the NHS, was working very well—

[Carla Denyer]

It was funded very well as well.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Order. Through the Chair, please.

[Richard Tice]

It was working well, and we had people coming from around the world to help the NHS—but we were training our own, and that was a great thing. That comes back to the point that what has happened in the past 15 years is the complete failure to deliver for population growth at every level. The madness of the cap on training our own people who want to be nurses or doctors—it is absolutely ludicrous. We encouraged businesses in that by saying, “You do not need to invest in training. You can just bring in people from overseas.”

What happened? That brought in low-skilled, lower-cost labour from overseas, and we were told by the authorities, the ONS and the Office for Budget Responsibility or its predecessors, that that would be a good thing for the country. Now, we have been told by the OBR, which has just caught up with things, that lower-skilled and lower-cost labour never contributes financially to the economy more than it takes out.

[Sir John Hayes]

This is in anticipation of our trip to Clapham, perhaps. Another economic point that has not been made so far in the debate is that if we allow for the kind of incoming populations that the hon. Gentleman described, we stultify the economy. Instead of investing in technology, in labour saving, or in creating the high-tech and high-skilled economy that makes us competitive across the globe, we reinforce an economy that has high levels of labour—usually unskilled and lowly paid labour—and we weaken our productivity and competitiveness. That is precisely the other economic effect that that policy has had over time.

[Richard Tice]

The right hon. Member makes a splendid economic point, which I was coming on to, because this is basic economics. If we have a labour shortage, employers have one of two choices. They can either say, “I need to pay higher wages”, which reflects what the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) was indicating earlier. Or, if they cannot afford that labour, they will essentially be saying, “I need to invest in capital equipment, which is more productive”, and that is what happened: in the ’80s and ’90s, businesses were investing in capital equipment. That is why we became ever more productive and why we got richer. That is the key thing.

From a legal migration standpoint, if we implement it well, with the highly skilled and highly trained going to where they will contribute to various sectors, it is a good thing and hugely welcomed across the country. That takes us back to where I think things were some 25 to 35 years ago. Done badly—like anything in life—we end up with problems. That is why we have ended up in the situation we are in: because of the failures of the previous regime.

That is the issue of legal migration. With competence of delivery, it should be sortable, but the British people are very anxious about the pressures on housing and public services, and that is driven by the pressures of population growth. The challenge for this Government is to try to deal not only with the huge problems that they inherited, but with the potential population growth. In a sense, if the Government said, “Well, we can’t cope with population growth, because we need to deal with the current challenges”, that might make life easier for them. Otherwise, the Government will be constantly chasing their tail and might never catch up.

That brings me to the issue of illegal migration. I would have thought that we could all agree that if something is illegal, we should stop it. In many ways, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about having to do something well: one has got to be competent, and occasionally it requires a bit of courage.

Interestingly—credit where credit is due—under the Labour Administration in the 2000s, we had significant numbers seeking asylum and we had significant illegal immigration, which was then not on boats but in lorries and vans and such, and the Government were doing a good job. They were catching people and saying, “Thank you very much for your application, but you are an economic migrant and have come here illegally. We are going to thank you but say no, you can’t stay.”

The Government were removing some 40,000 people a year and were assessing asylum applications in two to three weeks, with a couple of weeks for an appeal. The decision was made and either the person stayed or returned. In 2004, I think, the acceptance rate for asylum seekers was about 18% to 20%. That percentage is now somewhere in the 70s.

We have a history of being able to do things well. I think that is what the British people want.

[Dave Robertson]

I note the hon. Member’s comments about how things worked in the ’80s and ’90s. For most of that time I was not very old, but to his point about asylum success rates being different then and now, in both of those decades the UK was subject to the European Court of Human Rights, so does he agree that if there has been a change, it is probably not because of the Court?

[Richard Tice]

I think the fact was that the Government were assessing people quickly and promptly. I suspect that what we did not have back then—I may be wrong, and if so, I stand corrected—is a huge industry of lawfare that had grown up, as it has now, but I could be wrong on that. I think it comes back to the issue of competence.

Having been stopped from coming illegally primarily in lorries, people are now coming on boats. What the previous Government utterly failed to do, having had no strategy whatsoever, was stop the boats. There is a history of other nations stopping the boats, and the tragedy, as a previous speaker said, is that by not stopping the boats, people are dying. Last year was a record year—I think the figure of 69, give or take, was mentioned.

The current policy is the worst of all worlds. It is my opinion, having studied it and read it in great detail, that the 1982 United Nations convention on the law of the sea gives us the legal right to pick people up out of boats and safely take them back to France. Under that same treaty there is a legal obligation on our good friends the French to do exactly that. They have a legal obligation that they are failing to fulfil. We know that it works because the Belgian authorities pick up boats that try to leave its shores. They take them back and the whole thing is stopped very quickly. What that requires is competence and political courage, which we have not seen anything of in the last six years by either Government.

The Government have a strategy at the moment, and I hope that the Minister will address it in his remarks, which is to smash the gangs and pray that that will stop the boats. But the evidence so far—some seven or eight months into this Administration—shows that the numbers are some 20% higher than in the comparable period. We know that last year some 36,000 people came across on the boats.

This is costing the country billions and billions of pounds. It is quite hard to get a sense of how many billion, because it is being spent in so many different ways, but it is costing the country billions of pounds. It has also led to the destruction of thousands and thousands of jobs in hotels across the country in the hospitality sector. It has also put significant extra pressure on housing: some 150,000 have come across on boats; very few have been returned. There was that successful return of four people to Rwanda at the cost of many hundreds of millions of pounds. The question for the Minister is: how long will the Government carry on with this policy of smashing the gangs before accepting that it is not working and that it will not work? That is a very important question that I have previously asked the Secretary of State, and we are still waiting for an answer.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time; it is very generous of him. I have some figures that I hope will help him. He asked how much it is costing. What we do know is that £3 billion was allocated to housing asylum seekers in hotels. That is an average of about £8 million a day—£8 million that could be spent on the desperate, the needy and the dispossessed in our country.

[Richard Tice]

I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, but I think the real number is many billions higher. Of course, the cost could be £10 billion a year—that is almost 10 times the winter fuel allowance, just to put it in perspective.

There is another issue here: the degree of illegal working going on in this country is completely off the scale. It is often unreported on. For example, 40% to 50% of all fast food deliveries, give or take, are now being done by people on sub-accounts. They rent the accounts from the original account holder, who they find on Facebook, at a cost of £50 or £60 a week. Why would someone pay someone else for a sub-account on a delivery company website if they were able to get an account for free? There can be only one reason: those people are working illegally.

If any Members enjoy the pleasures of fast food deliveries, I suggest they look at the person delivering their food and compare them with the picture of the person who was supposed to deliver it. Very often, they will see that it is not the same person. The scale of illegal working has the sad effect, which I have seen and spoken to people in certain towns about, of suppressing the wages of genuine British workers who want to earn a good living, and were earning a good living, by delivering fast food on bikes, e-bikes or whatever. Again, there is a serious lack of fairness; it is completely unjust.

There is a strange thing going on, and it is happening in my constituency of Boston and Skegness and elsewhere. I am talking about illegal legal migration. It is a racket and massive business. People are coming here on a visitor visa and when they arrive here, they go to a high street shop—they do this in Boston—where they get told how to fiddle the numbers on the form to show that they were here pre 2020. By doing so, they can subscribe under the EU settlement scheme, even though they have never been here before. That gives them a national insurance number for overseas, which entitles them to work, and soon after that it entitles them to claim benefits. We have ended up with a level of illegality up and down the country much greater than anybody dare talk about. I hope everybody agrees that it is incumbent on this Government to ensure competence in enforcement, because that will stop this level of abuse. It is suppressing the wages of British people, and it is adding huge pressure on housing demand, when there is a critical housing shortage.

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh in the Chair]

I welcome you to the Chair, Dame Siobhain; it is lovely to see you.

We have to get on top of the illegality, while recognising that legal migration done well is a very smart thing to do. Done badly, as it has been in recent years, it has led to the massive challenges and the concerns that tens of millions of people across the UK have.

In summary, I think this is about doing things well. It is about stopping illegal migration by doing the job properly, and being smart about how we motivate our existing population and getting people skilled up and back into work, so that we do not need to rely on large amounts of inward migration when we are paying huge amounts of money for people to stay at home. That cannot be smart, good government. I think any Government, if they do this well, will have the gratitude of the British people. I think the British people just want someone to do this job properly.

Oral Answers to Questions

Richard Tice Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right to raise this matter, for both Basingstoke and towns right across the country. Town centres were blighted by a 60% increase in shop theft in the two years before the election, as well antisocial behaviour. That is why tackling town centre crime will be at the heart of the crime and policing Bill, introduced tomorrow.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

Does the Home Secretary agree that it would be a better use of Greater Manchester police officers’ time if they actually policed the streets and prevented crime, rather than visiting grandmothers’ homes to discuss a Facebook post?

[Yvette Cooper]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman missed the discussion on this earlier. We have been clear that the central priority for policing set by this Government is neighbourhood policing, to tackle town centre crime, challenges across the country and serious violence, including violence against women and girls and the knife crime devastating young lives. We have made those priorities clear to police forces right across the country as part of our policing reform and our new legislation.

Southport Attack

Richard Tice Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the circumstances of this awful case, and I join him in sending our condolences for the terrible loss of life in Sheffield earlier in the week. He has made an important point, and has made it in a very powerful way. The tech companies do have a responsibility to keep their users safe, and where there is content such as that which he has described, I do not think any right-minded person thinks it should be available to be viewed. The Government have a working relationship with the tech companies, and I have listened carefully to what my hon. Friend has had to say. I will raise it with colleagues across Government, and we will see what we can do about it.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

The Prevent learning review of the Southport horror is shocking. It reveals a series of massive failures, to the point of gross negligence by people in Prevent. However, it also uses some crucial words: it refers to factors that

“make him susceptible to being drawn into terrorism.”

That appears to indicate that the review has found that the killer was a terrorist. I therefore think that the Government and the Crown Prosecution Service need to be crystal clear with the British people. Are they now accepting that the action of this monster was a terror incident?

[Dan Jarvis]

The hon. Member has asked me to be crystal clear, so I will be. The perpetrator has been found guilty of a terrorism-related offence, and will therefore be considered to be a registered terrorist offender. He will be subject to the associated sentencing procedures, and will be treated as a person convicted of an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000.

Extremism Review

Richard Tice Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

So this report that has just been leaked was commissioned by the Home Secretary after the Southport horrors last July. The truth is that it has come out and all the recommendations have basically been immediately written off by the Home Secretary. Does that not confirm that the people in her Department are completely out of touch with her wishes and those of the British people?

[Dan Jarvis]

Not at all. The hon. Member is simply not correct. This work was being progressed before the dreadful incident in Southport. I am sure, and I certainly hope, that he will appreciate that Secretaries of State will routinely commission advice from civil servants. Some of the recommendations of that advice will be accepted and agreed; some will not, but it is routine practice in government to ask civil servants to look very closely at particular issues. Ultimately, it is for Ministers to decide, and Ministers will decide.

Southport Attack

Richard Tice Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member’s question gets to the heart of the problem. He is right that the responsibility for this appalling and barbaric attack lies with the attacker, and he needs to face the consequences. He has committed the most heinous crime. However, we have to ask questions on behalf of the families. There should have been a network of responsible agencies, and the inquiry needs to look at why, ultimately, so many agencies together failed to identify the scale of risk, and to take the action that was needed. Part of the challenge is that it can be too easy for each agency to think that somebody else is addressing a particular bit of the problem. There needs to be a much stronger approach to what happens between agencies. That is what the inquiry must look at.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

I think the vast majority of the British people agree with the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, who has said repeatedly that when these horrific crimes take place, more information needs to be put out sooner to avoid an information vacuum. However, that is in conflict with the need to avoid prejudicing a fair trial. Does the Home Secretary agree that it is incumbent on this House to find a way to overcome or reduce that conflict, so that we get more information sooner?

Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Richard Tice Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. The inquiry identified that half a million children are victims of sexual abuse every year. The majority of cases are, sadly, within the family—a betrayal by those from whom children should be able to expect protection. However, as he said, there have also been huge betrayals in residential homes and other institutions, including faith institutions—the Church of England and the Catholic Church—as well as wider grooming online and on the streets as part of these terrible crimes. So yes, we will change the law, strengthen sentencing and make grooming an aggravating factor, because the punishment should fit this terrible crime.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

There is much to welcome in the Home Secretary’s statement, but she has resisted six invitations from hon. Members to confirm that the Government-supported local inquiries will have statutory powers. Instead, she is relying on the duty of candour, responsibility and accountability, so let me try it a different way. Is the Home Secretary 100% certain that the duty of candour, responsibility and accountability is equivalent to statutory powers?

[Yvette Cooper]

What we need to do is to ensure that the crimes are investigated and that there is proper follow-up in those areas where things have gone badly wrong—and we know that there are some areas where things have gone badly wrong. The first stage has to be for the police to have full powers to pursue these crimes and to follow wherever the evidence takes them in order to put perpetrators behind bars. Frankly, that is where they should be to protect children and keep them safe.

We also need to ensure that where things have gone wrong, there are sufficient powers to be able to get to the truth and sufficient ability for local organisations to do that, so that no one can hide from accountability, run away or obfuscate, or use bureaucracy to get away with providing the answers, the justice and the accountability that victims need. That is why we have set up a new programme of work to look at how we can strengthen the powers available and the accountability available. Part of that has to be the duty of candour. It also has to include the duty to report, because there have to be stronger responsibilities on people to report child abuse in the first place and we have to make it a criminal offence to cover it up. If the law is not strong enough, we will not get the accountability or the action.

Oral Answers to Questions

Richard Tice Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important question. The Government consider this work to be urgent. We have seen some utterly unacceptable activity, both during and beyond the general election. I hope that work to address this issue will be a shared endeavour right across the House, but the Government are working at pace to address it.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

What actions will the Home Secretary be taking following the news that eight UK companies and organisations have been deemed terror groups by the United Arab Emirates?

[Dan Jarvis]

The UAE is an important international partner for the UK, but of course other countries have their own rules on designation and it would not be appropriate for the Government to comment on their processes. I can say to the hon. Member that extremism has no place in our society and that we work very closely with law enforcement, local communities and our international partners to tackle groups and any individuals who seek to sow division and hatred.

Migration and Border Security

Richard Tice Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The last Government had 14 years—or at least four years, since the EU settlement scheme was introduced—to deal with some of these issues. We take very seriously the need to speed up and improve enforcement of returns for those who have no right to be here. The immigration system and the asylum system can only work and command public confidence if the rules are respected and enforced. That means that if someone does not have a right to be here, there should be proper enforcement. We are working to speed up enforcement, which is why there was a significant increase in returns over the summer, but we will continue to do so, and we will continue to consider what further amendments can be made to improve matters.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

The Home Secretary has quite rightly lambasted the absolute failures of the last Government on mass immigration, but could she comment on whether people in the Home Office will be held accountable for allowing systems and controls to crumble in the last five years, and on whether people in the Office for National Statistics will be held accountable for getting their numbers wrong by almost a quarter of a million people in just one year?

[Yvette Cooper]

Conservative Ministers made policy decisions that they asked Home Office officials to implement. Fundamentally, the Conservative Government need to take responsibility for policy decisions that they made in 2021, which led to a big increase in migration for work, for example, and a big increase in the net migration numbers, at the same time as training was being cut in the UK. That has had damaging consequences for confidence and trust, but also for the functioning of the UK economy and labour market, because we should be doing far more to train people in everything from engineering to construction. There are a whole series of different areas where we should increase training here in the UK.

Police Reform

Richard Tice Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for his service. We will all benefit from having him in the House, sharing his experience and knowledge. The police reform agenda, as set out in the Home Secretary’s speech and the written ministerial statement yesterday, is about resetting that relationship with the police. We want to work with the police. This is not about doing things to the police, but about working collectively to get the very best police service for this country, for today, tomorrow and the years ahead.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

My residents in Boston and Skegness want the police on the streets, preventing antisocial behaviour and crime. They do not want our valuable police resources wasted on monitoring tweets for non-crime hate incidents, threatening and bullying residents, and then that record remaining on a database, which can prevent people from getting a job in the future. It is a complete waste of time. Will the Minister and the Home Office scrap those guidelines as an unnecessary use of valuable time and resources?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

This Government have been very clear about their priorities on policing. In our safer streets mission, we have set out that we will halve violence against women and girls and knife crime over the next decade, we will restore public confidence in the criminal justice system, particularly in the police, and we will introduce neighbourhood policing, which we know to be the bedrock of policing in this country and the area in which most people want to see investment. Those are our priorities, as the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have said, and that is where the focus and attention of the police needs to be.

Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation

Richard Tice Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

For the integrity of any asylum system, it is important that a person who is not granted asylum recognises that they do not have the right to stay in the country. Hopefully they will leave voluntarily; if not, they will be removed. Immigration enforcement, which operates out of the Home Office, is focused on increasing total returns. As I said, they are up 19% on the same period last year, and we intend to double down and carry on.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

In Boston and Skegness, we want the use of hotels by asylum seekers to stop, as is the case across the country. Under the previous Labour Government 20 years ago, processes and applications were dealt with within three to four weeks, including appeals, and only about 20% of applications were granted asylum. When will the Minister and the Home Office get back to the sensible workmanlike processes that worked 20 year ago?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

We are working on it, but, as the hon. Gentleman knows, we have inherited a huge mess with large backlogs that are not easy to clear.