Culture Secretary issues warning to voters thinking of defecting from Tories to Reform UK

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has warned Tory voters not to defect to Reform UK and insisted that the Conservative Party is the only party that can reduce immigration numbers.

She told GB News: “Immigration and in particular illegal immigration is a top priority for the Government and not only have we committed to bringing it down, we actually have already made significant progress on that.

“We've seen that we brought illegal immigration down by a third in circumstances where other countries in the Mediterranean have seen their immigration go up by 70 or 80%.

“So I would say to those voters who might be thinking about voting Reform, if you want to get illegal immigration down you need to vote for the Conservative Party, because the only other alternative is a Labour government and they've got absolutely no plan to stop the boats.”

Speaking during Breakfast with Stephen Dixon and Isabel Webster, she defended the Government’s Rwanda deportation policy: “I don't agree with it being a political gimmick…

“We've reduced crossings by the Albanians by over 90% and of course, we're disappointed with the decision by the Supreme Court but we accept that decision.

“And you'll know that we're already taking steps to try and ensure that the Rwanda plan does work.”

On reports that the Prime Minister has told the BBC it must cut costs, she said: “That's why we're also looking at reforming the licence fee. The licence fee, it needs to be fair, the BBC needs to have sufficient funds to support its work, and the system isn't working at the moment because the number of people buying the licence fee has gone down by significant hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the last year.

“That's why my department has already started to look at how can we reform the system to make it fair for licence fee payers, but also make sure that the BBC remains sustainable.”