Richard Tice MP: speeches

Speeches

• 12 Jun 2025 · Gibraltar · Hansard source

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  I want to probe the question of whether Spanish border officials have an effective veto on the entry of a British citizen from the United Kingdom landing on British sovereign territory in Gibraltar. I just want absolute clarity for everybody in this House: do Spanish officials have a veto or not? Secondly, will the Foreign Secretary comment on the dispute resolution mechanism and whether there is a regular review clause?

• 22 May 2025 · EU-UK Summit · Hansard source

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  Well, the Europeans may well be younger and fitter than me, but the truth is that proximity makes a big difference to the concerns of my constituents. Boston has received a significant quantity of net immigration from eastern Europe, but it has not seen any Australians. There is a proximity issue, but surely it must be right that if the Government are going to agree a deal, they should agree the terms of the deal. We do not know the numbers, the cap or, really, the duration of the scheme—we know absolutely nothing. We are completely at the mercy of the European Union. I invite any hon. Member to spend a day with me in sunny Skegness and knock on a thousand doors. I promise them that not a single person who answers the door will say, “I want a youth experience scheme for Johnny or Judy.”

• 22 May 2025 · EU-UK Summit · Hansard source

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  No, they have not mentioned that at all. Likewise, none of the major logistics firms in my constituency has even once mentioned the so-called delays at the border. This surrender of fishing is completely and utterly inexcusable, and nothing has been gained in return. The second big surrender is that, apparently, we have negotiated theoretical access to some future EU defence fund, but we do not know how much access. We know that we will have to pay a whole load of cash, but we do not know how much—it all has to be negotiated in future. Little has been agreed and everything has been conceded.

• 6 May 2025 · Counter Terrorism Policing: Arrests · Hansard source

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  I, too, pay tribute to the brilliance of our security forces. The Minister has paid tribute to the quality of advice from Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism, and said that he will indeed listen to that advice. Well, that same Jonathan Hall KC last autumn advised that in serious incidents involving terror such as these, it would be better to put out more information sooner in order to prevent misinformation. In order to prevent misinformation, surely the Minister should tell us—and the British people, who want to know—how long these Iranian nationals have been in this country and what their immigration status is.

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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  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.

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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  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.

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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  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.

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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  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—

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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  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.

• 10 Mar 2025 · Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension · Hansard source

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  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.

• 30 Jan 2025 · Proportional Representation: General Elections · Hansard source

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  As we have heard in this Chamber, trust in politics is very important for a functioning democracy, but sadly the data shows that trust is collapsing. At the last general election, we faced the second lowest turnout in the last 100 years, with just six in 10 people voting. That tells us that far too many people do not think voting matters, whereas I hope we can all agree that every vote matters. That is why I pay tribute to the excellent lobbying group Make Votes Matter for proposing and promoting this issue. It is so important. How can we have a situation where only six in 10 people vote? We have the most unrepresentative Parliament in living memory. The governing party has about 34% of the votes cast, but 63% of the seats in this great House. What sort of system is that? It is completely unrepresentative. My good party had 14% of votes cast, yet we do not have even a mere 1% of seats in the Chamber. As for the other smaller parties, the Green party had just under 7% of votes cast, but has about 0.5% of the seats in the Chamber. That is so damaging to trust in democracy. We have 823,000 votes cast for every Reform seat; for the Labour party, it is a mere 23,000 votes for each seat. Voters still come up to me and say, “How does this work?”. People get confused, because as hon. Members have said, we have one system for the general election and another in the devolved nations. Why can we not have a single simple system that we know works, and that is used in so many democracies around the world—a variant of proportional representation? Not only does our system lead to misrepresentation when it comes to seats in the House, but its quirks mean that we have no representation on any Select Committee, despite having 4 million votes—14% of the votes cast. Trust in democracy collapses when something is as patently unfair as that. This issue is so important, and we know we can do better. It is marvellous that Members from the Labour party recognise that. Indeed, at the Labour conference a couple of years back, its members passed a motion to that effect. Fairness is vital. If we do not have it, we have complete misrepresentation of the views of the people on critical issues, such as immigration and net zero, because we end up with a uni-party approach. It cannot be good for democracy if people feel that all their views cannot be represented. They think, “What is the point of bothering? I will carry on with my life.” We all know that more engagement from many people of all ages—young, medium and old—is vital for a functioning and true democracy.

• 18 Dec 2024 · Immigration and Nationality Statistics · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) on securing this debate. It seems to me that there is a dearth of information, or a sort of conspiracy of silence. It seems quite simple; we have been told for decades that immigration is great for this nation, and therefore it seems quite obvious that we should say, “Fine, prove it.” Why do we not suggest proving it nation by nation, so that we know who is genuinely contributing and adding value, or who is maybe costing us money? We can then work out how we improve growth and ensure that smart immigration works for this country. A Government who believe in transparency and high-quality data, which we have heard to be the case on numerous occasions, should welcome the opportunity and the suggestion that we need to know, nation by nation, who is coming here, how much they are contributing, and how much they are costing. In the unfortunate example where they commit crimes, we need to know—nation by nation—who is costing us by way of criminals and why they are not immediately removed. With that quality of data, we can make judgments and decisions about smart immigration to the benefit of all, and to the confidence of all our constituents.

• 9 Dec 2024 · Syria · Hansard source

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  We welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement on this fast-evolving situation. He has referred to the opportunities and risks for the many displaced Syrians who are looking to return to Syria. Will the Government be providing assistance to those Syrians in this country who wish to return to their homeland? Will the Government look to follow the example of European nations such as Germany, which has suspended asylum applications?

• 6 Dec 2024 · European Union (Withdrawal Arrangements) Bill · Hansard source

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  It may be helpful to remind the Minister that the EU’s own expert, Mr Lars Karlsson, said in his “Smart Border 2.0” report that with technology and good will, all these issues could be overcome. However, the politics of Mr Varadkar and the EU overrode that.

• 2 Dec 2024 · Migration and Border Security · Hansard source

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  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?

• 20 Nov 2024 · Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation · Hansard source

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  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?

• 23 Jul 2024 · Immigration and Home Affairs · Hansard source

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  I repeat that smart immigration—working, integrating, speaking the language—is a great thing, but there are serious consequences of uncontrolled mass immigration. As Member of Parliament for this great constituency, my objectives are to attract more business and more investment. The great port of Boston needs to grow and expand, and we want more infrastructure—for example, a new bypass around Boston itself. With these things, my constituency of Boston and Skegness can be great once again.

• 23 Jul 2024 · Immigration and Home Affairs · Hansard source

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  May I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) and others on their excellent maiden speeches? It is a great honour to represent Boston and Skegness, which I believe is the most fertile constituency in the country. I refer of course to the productivity of the amazing agricultural farmland in the constituency. At the heart of it is Batemans Brewery, a fantastic family brewery launched in 1874.

• 22 Jul 2024 · Border Security and Asylum · Hansard source

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  When you take a drug dealer off the street corner, guess what: another one appears, because of the vile drugs trade and the amount of money involved. My constituents in Boston and Skegness believe it is exactly the same with trying the Home Secretary’s policy of smashing the gangs. If she smashes one gang, it is like a game of whack-a-mole: another one will appear and then another one, because there is so much money involved. Here is the point: how long will the Home Secretary give her policy before realising that the only policy that will work is the one she actually started last week, which is to pick people up and take them back to France, which we are entitled to do under international maritime law? It will help British citizens, help British taxpayers and help the French, and it will reduce the magnet factor.