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.