Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Debate between Richard Tice and Scott Arthur

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[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—

Independent Schools: VAT and Business Rates Relief

Debate between Richard Tice and Scott Arthur

Monday 3rd March 2025 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) on securing this debate on the back of the petitioners.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck in the Chair]

How many of us were elected to this great place to damage the prospects of our children? I would hope that the answer is none, but that is the direct consequence of this ludicrous policy to tax education. I think we are the only country in the developed world to do so. The unintended consequences are truly shocking. Within a fortnight of the policy coming into force at the beginning of this year, some four schools announced they were closing this summer—over 1,000 children were immediately plunged into uncertainty about where they were going to school and who were going to be their friends. The anxiety that that put on them as children, let alone their parents, should shame everybody in the Government. Tens of thousands of pupils will end up leaving the independent sector—and it is independent, not private, because most independent schools are charities that reinvest their surpluses.

[Dr Arthur]

I have independent schools in my constituency, and the challenges we face with this policy are real, but the numbers people are citing make it difficult to talk about those challenges. People have said that tens of thousands of students are going to move from the independent sector to the state sector, but I do not think anybody really thinks that is going to happen. Those sorts of numbers make it really difficult to have a serious debate about this issue. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that “tens of thousands of students” is perhaps at the upper end of estimates?

[Richard Tice]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because he has reminded me to declare a historical interest. Not only did I have children in independent schools, but I was the chairman of the finance and general purposes committee for a significant independent school over the past six or seven years; I finished just before the election. Even when this policy was announced as a prospect, I saw an immediate drop-off in applications for places at that school, so I can confirm with absolute experience that tens and tens of thousands, if not 100,000, will leave the sector.

Surely, of all children, those whose prospects we want least of all to damage are those with special educational needs, yet that is where the independent sector excels. Let me give a small example from the county of Lincolnshire. I got a letter from a constituent who can no longer afford to send two children, both with special educational needs, to the independent school. They are going to have to go into the state sector, where there is a capacity crisis that we keep hearing about in the Commons. Because of the distance, she cannot provide the travel, so the county council has to provide it. For those two children alone, the annual cost of taxis is £20,000 per child. This is absolute insanity, I would respectfully suggest, Mrs Lewell-Buck—it is lovely to see you.

So we have damage to children and the worst of all worlds. Then we look at the prospects of children in the state sector, and we hear that the policy is going to pay for 6,500 teachers. That is about one teacher in every four or five schools—three, it is thought, in the secondary sector. Seriously? When we look at the extra children who will go into the state sector—the tens and tens of thousands—we see that actually there will be more pressure on existing class sizes and the existing teachers, who will therefore be able to dedicate less time per child in their existing school. The prospects of children are damaged not just across the independent sector, but across the whole of the state sector, under this deeply misguided policy.

I touched earlier on the cost. When the policy was announced, it was to raise £1.5 billion, and suddenly it is £1.8 billion. I suggest it will raise the square root of net zero. The reality is that schools will be recovering input costs, including on capital schemes. The reality is that schools will be losing children to the state sector. The reality is that bursaries will have to be slashed. We have heard about some schools giving hundreds of free places. All these things will put extra costs on to the state sector—the state schools—as well as the pressures on county councils’ taxi budgets, which is ludicrous.

From an educational-quality point of view the policy makes no sense, and from a cost point of view it makes no sense. There was an opportunity for the Government to say, “You in the independent sector are doing some things really well, particularly with regard to special educational needs, so we would like the independent sector to help us a bit more—share some of your expertise. Can you give some more places for special educational needs?” That was the opportunity, and I can tell Members that the independent sector would have welcomed with open arms a request to share expertise with local schools. That would have been the right thing to do to improve the prospects for everybody.

The other right thing to do to improve the prospects for everybody was to adopt the Reform UK policy during the general election, which was to say, “If you can afford to pay a bit more, we encourage you to take your children out of the state sector and into the independent sector,” and to relieve the pressure on class sizes by granting tax relief at the basic rate for those who sent their children to independent schools. That would have improved the prospects for everybody.

Those were the opportunities, but instead we have seen deep ideological socialism, with no evidence whatsoever that the policy will make any difference. It is discriminatory, because if it was logical, the Government would be applying VAT on university fees, because of course universities are elitist. Three or four in 10 youngsters go to university, so surely the same policy should be applied to universities.

Will the Minister confirm that if, when the legal cases go all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights—which some people love and some of us do not—the ruling from that court is that the policy is unlawful, the Government will agree with that ruling and apply it? This policy has no logic whatsoever. It is a tragedy for us all, but most importantly it is an absolute tragedy for children.