Speeches by Prinsley.

“Can I just make a quick point about digital ID? We have been talking about digital ID as if this is some sort of panacea for dealing with the problem of illegal employment and some immigration difficulties. I would like us, and I do not know if you agree, to sell the idea of digital ID as a much wider benefit to the po…”

“My impression is that the British people are bewildered about why this is so difficult. They cannot understand why a country which is an island, has a navy, a court system, and has a well-recognised system of processing people has been so terrible at this. I am encouraged that the Home Secretary is going to make a new …”

“I absolutely believe that you are. One thing that is obvious is the number of people who are stuck in the appeals system; this is moving on to a slightly different thing. According to the document I was given, we had 7,500 people in the appeals system in June 2023 and by March 2025 we had 51,000 people stuck in the app…”

“That is great. The question then is: what do you expect the time scale to be for this boat problem to improve spectacularly? It is the single biggest political difficulty that many of us experience, and has a political importance quite out of proportion to the actual number of people who are arriving, which I calculate…”

“So what you are telling me is you arrived, you took a little look at this, and then you changed something. That is right, is it not?”

“This is a section on border security. The first question is: why did you commission a review of the Border Security Command so soon after its establishment? Were you concerned that it was not delivering results? How are you measuring the Command’s success and by when do you expect the Command to achieve a significant r…”

“Thank you very much; I have enjoyed listening this afternoon. I come from the medical world, and the point you have just made about performance is absolutely crucial. We have a system in the hospitals where we pay people to come to work, but we do not really observe what it is they actually do. We certainly do not pay …”

“The point about the Passport Office is really well made because it is obvious to us and to the population that the passport situation has been transformed. You send off for your passport on Thursday and it comes back on Monday morning. New passport; fantastic. We would all love to see the performance of all the other b…”

“Will the hon. Member give way?”

“Let me describe the situation in the hospitals. We have about 9,000 graduates of the UK medical schools, and about 9,000 higher professional training slots for people who wish to be surgeons, physicians, general practitioners or whatever. But we recruit about 13,000 to 14,000 international medical graduates into the se…”

“I think that is exactly what is happening at Hinkley Point, and it is coming now at Sizewell in Suffolk, where we will do exactly that.”

“I want to ask a bit about the story of the welders. You said that a welder earns £70,000 a year and a teacher of a welder earns £30,000 a year, so there is no way that we could teach people to be welders in further education colleges. What we need, surely, is a proper apprenticeship system in the welding businesses to …”

“I am Peter Prinsley, the MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket. I am also a surgeon from Norfolk, and I am very interested in aspects of migration as it affects the health service, particularly medical training. Perhaps we can come on to that, but first I have a question about the relationship between a skills policy a…”

“There is a sort of political mood that immigration is terrible and something must be done to reduce it. I do not think that we are sufficiently clear with the public about the trade-offs. A trade-off that occurs to me is that your elderly relatives might have nobody to look after them. I think that is a story that we o…”

“Moving on to the situation with care workers, I am hearing that, because of the fall in the number of care workers coming in from other countries, the care homes are struggling to continue their activities. What is your view on that? Was the instruction to forbid the recruitment of overseas care workers the wrong thing…”

“We have all witnessed the devastating effect of mass drone attacks, and MPs could see for themselves the sinister looking Iranian Russian drone that was here in Parliament only last week. What measures is the Ministry taking to develop a strategy in this country to defend ourselves from such a mass drone attack?”

“Going back to what I was talking about in the last question, could you envisage curriculum content in schools that could be presented to help?”

“I will ask about research, but somebody said that we are looking for needles in the haystack. I think that we have to keep looking at the haystack. It is a haystack. Are there are ways of scrutinising what individuals are seeing? At the end of the day, this is individuals looking at screens in bedrooms. I simply do not…”

“I am sitting here thinking about “1984” and George Orwell and his thought police. It is lovely to see some actual police here, but the problem is that there is a lot of bad thinking going on, isn’t there? There are young people who are effectively having malevolent thoughts put into their heads and we are not able to s…”

“I agree.”