Richard Tice
MP for Boston and Skegness · Reform UK · United Kingdom
“Congratulations to the Government on doing what I have been urging for seven years, which is to take this strategic national asset into public ownership. What is needed now is a comprehensive, bold vision for the blast furnaces. I am concerned about the talk about more electric arc furnaces.”
“The dictionary definition of gerrymandering is the manipulation of boundaries to suit a particular party, and decision after decision after decision in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and many, many more have, surprisingly, been the local Labour party’s proposal.”
“East Midlands Railway has cut replacement bus services on a stand-by basis when there is not sufficient railway capacity in peak season. I am concerned that that is because it is deliberately cutting any form of expenditure before going over to Great British Railways.”
“There is complete chaos at the National Energy System Operator. Whistleblowers are phoning politicians to express their concerns about blackouts. Independent investigators have had to be appointed, and NESO had to cut the interconnector for exports, without notice, in order to guarantee supplies.”
“While his own MPs may have sent him off without resorting to VAR, I have some good news for the Prime Minister: under his tenure, 76% of England football matches have been won, which is the greatest, most successful record of any Prime Minister in history.”
“Despite being a foot taller than her, I somehow always found myself looking up to her. When she phoned, I always stood up on my toes: incoming—beware! That was Ann. We will miss her dearly. Also, the Scottish whisky industry has lost a very discerning customer.”
The complete record
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“I congratulate the Secretary of State on the changes announced today to cut unnecessary waste and bureaucracy. We all know and agree that healthcare should remain free at the point of delivery and, of course, that the NHS needs reform. Just last Saturday, I was in a care home in Boston with a lady—an expert—who knows Melanie Weatherley, and she was telling me about the unnecessary processes within NHS England on the frontline that constrain good care in care homes, impose unnecessary constraints on ambulances and block A&E wards. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the changes and reforms will include unnecessary processes on the frontline in care homes?”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. We congratulate everyone involved. It is worth remembering the voluntary nature of so many of the emergency services and the RNLI. The volunteers from the RNLI Skegness rushed out of their homes and businesses to man the lifeboat, which was away for almost 11 hours, putting themselves in harm’s way with extraordinary bravery. We should never forget that.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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—”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Will the Secretary of State confirm how many SEND children are forecast to have to leave the independent sector and go into the state sector because of the imposition of VAT on fees? What will be the cost of that to the taxpayer?”
“We were told by the previous Administration that with the new green lane and the Windsor framework, all would be glorious—it could be the best of both worlds. Did the previous Administration mislead the House?”
“The right hon. Gentleman said that it is up to a sovereign nation to look after its own borders and determine its own checks. Does he accept that there has been trade diversion within the United Kingdom? If so, does he accept that it is within the Government’s remit to use article 16 or drop the checks to protect trade within our sovereign borders?”
“Does the hon. Member agree that it is quite possible that this ludicrous policy raises the square root of net zero once we knock off possibly 100,000 children not going to independent schools, the recovery of input costs from schools, the closure of schools and the reduction in bursaries because the schools cannot afford to give them?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“Once again, the BBC has got it badly wrong, since 7 October, with its treatment and description of Hamas as a terrorist organisation. Once again, we are told that lessons will be learned. Does the Secretary of State think that the BBC is incompetent, negligent or just riddled with antisemitism?”
“Can the right hon. Member explain why there seems to be a certain reluctance among western leaders to use this capital—the $300 billion or so of Russian state assets in western banks? It could be powerful as part of potential peace negotiations.”
“We in Reform stand united with the whole House in support of Ukraine and all brave Ukrainians against the monstrous tyranny of that most evil villain, Putin.”
“That is why we supported the Prime Minister earlier this week when he made those same commitments. I hope that that 3% will be a firm commitment within five or six years. Peace through strength is vital. As others have said, we all want peace, not least the brave Ukrainians. It must be right to try for a peace deal, however difficult. Most wars and conflicts end up in some form of negotiation —however difficult, tough or tense.”
“I have not even warmed up! I will make a little more progress. Just over 13 months ago, I made a donation to acquire a 4x4 pick-up truck and to fill it with first aid supplies, and I drove it with other volunteers to Ukraine to give it to those brave soldiers on the frontline. I remember meeting the extraordinary technicians who were making the drones, including brilliant, bright children who were helping to develop new drone technology. Tragically, I stood in a cemetery and watched mums weep over the graves of their sons. That cemetery has almost doubled in size in just 12 months. The maxim of peace through strength has stood the test of time—in history, today and in future. That is why in our contract at the election we had 2.5% of GDP on defence spending within three years, and 3% within six years.”
“Putin is a vile dictator. We all know that. My leader has also confirmed that Putin is the aggressor in this war. I was just moving on, in the time allotted, to the issue of how we get to a durable peace.”
“The point about elections is a good one, because any peace deal can only work if it has the support and involvement of all Ukrainians. In the second world war, we had elections in the summer of 1945, before the war had ended, which was completely appropriate then. At some point the Ukrainians will need to be involved in supporting a peace deal, if we get there. A peace deal, however, is only durable—it only works—if it endures. That means we need the security guarantees to ensure that the aggressor will never, ever attack again. It is those security guarantees that we must focus on, all be involved in and ensure that they are a strong, robust deterrent. If we get those security guarantees right, hopefully Putin and Russia will never try such a monstrous activity and invasion ever again.”
“I welcome everything that the Deputy Prime Minister and other right hon. and hon. Members have said, but there is a fatal flaw that has still not been raised. Speaking as someone with 30 years’ experience in the real estate sector, I urge the Deputy Prime Minister and her officials to focus on the single staircase. The 2009 Lakanal House report recommended that fire suppression systems—sprinkler systems—be installed retrospectively in buildings above six storeys. That is the best way to save lives, and I think we need to look at that recommendation again for existing buildings. Future buildings above six storeys can still be designed with a single staircase until 2028; I urge the Deputy Prime Minister to say that that is too long.”
“Does the hon. Lady agree that the Government’s policies have created a hostile environment for family businesses to continue to invest in hiring people and equipment? The damage is that that reduces growth in our economy.”
“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?”
“The British car industry was thriving until the Conservative party introduced net stupid zero, and now we have another car plant at risk; another business struggling and losing hundreds of millions of pounds; and hundreds more British jobs at risk. Does the Minister agree that the automotive industry in the UK will continue to decline until we scrap net zero?”
“Based on the Secretary of State’s earlier comments, is it not now clear that the Secretary of State believes the Government cannot stand behind our brave soldiers in this instance because of our membership of the European convention on human rights? Therefore, surely that is a perfect reason why we must leave the ECHR.”
“The threat to the UK steel industry is not tariffs from the US, but the cost of our electricity. The Business Secretary has previously agreed with me that that is what makes our steel industry uncompetitive, and it is why imports have grown from 55% to some 70% in the last couple of years. So will the new steel strategy, due in the next few weeks, confirm how we will get down the electricity price in this country to make our industry competitive?”