David Davis
MP for Goole and Pocklington · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on putting a Bill in front of the House that has support from literally everybody in the Chamber?”
“The Post Office Horizon scandal highlighted the institutional instinct to find a convenient scapegoat. Innocent people paid the price, while the institution sought to protect itself. If the Thirlwall inquiry asks too narrow a set of questions, systemic NHS failures will go unexamined.”
“Last month’s sentencing of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband exposed the real reasons behind the Scottish Government’s persecution of Alex Salmond. From 2010 to 2022, Peter Murrell abused his position to embezzle almost £500,000 from the SNP to buy luxury items. He used SNP money to buy a £33,000 Volkswagen Golf.”
“The consultants also reported that in the two months since the change infants have been sick but recovered as expected.” The report highlighted deficiencies in staffing levels, leadership and communication, but, in the trial, it was not shown to the jury—they knew nothing of it.”
“One of the nurses let go later described it as “the decimation of the Nursing and Midwifery service”, adding that “eight registered nurses...were replaced with nursery nurses...unqualified staff are replacing qualified staff”.”
“There was little space, cots and incubators were stored in corridors, and mothers struggled to find somewhere to breastfeed their babies. Susan Gilby, the hospital’s chief executive between 2018 and 2022, later described the unit as “dark, dingy and cramped”, providing a “less than ideal” environment to work in.”
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“Yesterday, The New Yorker published a 13,000-word inquiry into the Lucy Letby trial, which raised enormous concerns about both the logic and the competence of the statistical evidence that was a central part of the trial. The article was blocked from publication on the UK internet, I understand because of a court order. I am sure that court order was well intended, but it seems to me that it is in defiance of open justice. Will the Lord Chancellor look into this matter and report back to the House?”
“If we decide to exclude at the point of charge, did my right hon. Friend’s Committee consider whether, instead of this entire procedure, a simple application by the House authorities to a magistrates court for conditions of bail would be more appropriate? That would cover not just this place, but any risk anywhere.”
“I apologise for intervening a second time, but I want to come back to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Sir Liam Fox). He said, quite rightly, that constituents would be penalised by Members being excluded but one risk of providing a proxy vote is that it persuades people they are not being penalised. In practice, as we have seen with the post office scandal, being here and representing people is the important thing that is being stopped by these proposals.”
“The hon. Gentleman is making some interesting points. I have two concerns about the process. The first is about abiding by our long-standing rule of innocent until proven guilty. The second is that the people being penalised by this measure are our constituents, not us. Does he imagine guidelines for the panel that take those two things on board in the way he just described?”
“I will read out the clause in full: “(1) The purpose of this Act is to protect and promote the ability of individuals and organisations to participate in public debate, advance accountability, and speak out on matters of public interest, and to prevent the use of the courts to undermine these rights through abusive legal action. (2) Provisions in this Act should be broadly construed and applied to advance the purpose defined in subsection (1).” I ask the Committee to see that as effectively an instruction to the judges as to how broadly they should interpret the Bill when it becomes an Act. I will press no amendments other than new clause 1 to a vote, because there is consensus on almost everything.”
“People have created a multimillion-pound industry out of oppressing the right to freedom of speech and making London the global capital of that. I could pick a ruder word for it, but I will just say that it is the global capital of SLAPPs. I have one proposal to put to a vote, but first I want to talk a little about the vagaries of the Bill. Throughout all our discussions, the common theme has been, “How will the judge interpret this phrase, or this clause, in the context of what we are trying to do?” We are trying to protect freedom of speech and, at the same time, people’s right to look after their own reputation in court. New clause 1 aims to give judges guidance on interpretation and tell them what the high priority of the Bill is.”
“They are very sensitive about that, but we should also remember that the right to sue for defamation is pretty much a rich man’s right. Very few of my constituents will exercise it, and very few people in this room will exercise it—perhaps one or two are rich enough. Nevertheless, it is important that it is maintained; I accept that without reserve. It is understandable that the Ministry of Justice, in its advice on the Bill, seeks to compromise. I generally agree with compromise, but not with compromise between right and wrong. It has to be said that the Ministry will be being lobbied—with how much effect I cannot say—by the Society of Media Lawyers, including such leading lights as Carter-Ruck, Mishcon de Reya and Schillings, the very people who have created the problem that we are now trying to resolve.”
“I commend the hon. Member for Caerphilly for his Bill. It has been long in the coming, but it deals with a very important problem, and it is brilliant that he has actually brought it to the House. If I may say so, he has managed it in a formidably diplomatic way, given the sometimes quite difficult arguments that have gone on. My unreserved congratulations go to him. The hon. Gentleman has done a brilliant job of outlining the point of the Bill, so I will not reiterate that, save to say that it is a difficult and technical Bill. We are balancing rights—the right to sue for defamation versus the right not to be oppressed and to enjoy free speech—and that is not easy to do. It is a subtle problem. Quite properly, the legal profession, the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice want to maintain that balance.”
“There were two possible approaches to this Bill. One was what we have before us, which is quite complex but seeks to address issues piece by piece; the other was what is known as the Ontario option, which effectively puts in place a parallel to the American first amendment. One of the reasons why new clause 1 is important is that it straddles those approaches. It does not take us down the first amendment and constitutional route, but it does make it clear what we are trying to do.”
“The Minister has now said twice that the Government support the thrust of new clause 1. Given the consensus that we have maintained from the beginning, I would rather not divide the Committee. Alongside me, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill has been the primary driver on this issue since—I cannot remember the actual date, but it was the day after I called for Boris to go. That is the new reference point: not anno Domini, but anno B, after Boris. If the Minister agrees with the thrust of the new clause, and if he will come back on Report with an equivalent that makes it plain to the judges what the Bill proposes, I will not press it—but I do need that undertaking.”
“I raised the first amendment issue, and the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill was responding to that. This is not a first amendment clause at all. The Minister knows as well as I do that, throughout the debate, the argument has been about how the judges will interpret every clause. The fact that the hon. Member for Caerphilly will move the other amendments today indicates that we did not get that balance right in the beginning; indeed, we might have made the problem worse. That is what this is about. As I said, I do not want to divide the Committee if I can avoid it, and I seek an undertaking from the Minister. The alternative is to bring the new clause back on Report and then whip the thing on behalf of our own argument.”
“On a point of order, Ms Elliott. I have listened to the Minister carefully, and my interpretation is that he will seek to resolve this problem before Report. I will therefore not press new clause 1 today and will seek consensus across the board. However, I give notice that if we do not resolve this issue, it will come back on Report.”
“I am afraid that, perhaps for the first time in all this, we disagree on something. The right to free speech and public participation is not new in British law: it goes back to Magna Carta.”
“May I just say to the hon. Gentleman that I have viewed many court cases in my time and I have heard judges refer explicitly on many occasions to the wording of the law, but I have never yet heard them refer to explanatory notes?”
“In many ways, this goes to the heart of the argument that we have had throughout all this. The truth of the matter is that anybody in receipt of normal judicial action in an ordinary defamation case faces distress and expense. A person who receives a lawyer’s letter at the beginning of such a claim suffers, if not a nervous breakdown, then something quite close to it, so this is quite difficult to elucidate. I know that the hon. Gentleman takes that point.”
“Intimidatory social media campaigns, threatening phone calls, not-so-subtle surveillance, hacking—the list goes on and on.”
“The two amendments in my name both seek to do the same thing: to broaden the view of the judge, when they are making a ruling on whether a case is a SLAPP case, to the extrajudicial behaviour outside the court room, included in which is the selection of forum. If someone were to pursue a court case in London rather than in their domestic court, that would be an indication that they were seeking to exploit our laws in pursuit of a SLAPP. In some ways, the point about extrajudicial action is even more important. It is that the actions taken against the individuals on the receiving end of SLAPPs are intimidatory and bullying in a whole series of extrajudicial ways. I should think everybody on the Committee knows about the cases of Tom Burgis, Catherine Belton and our erstwhile colleague Charlotte Leslie.”
“I have just looked with amusement at the selection list. The grouping of amendments under clause 2 reads: “1 [David] + 11 [Davis]…10 [David] + 12 [Davis]” I am not responsible for all of them—the hon. Member for Caerphilly and I are brothers in arms, but not brothers. I agree with every single amendment that he has tabled in his name; they will all improve the Bill. They also demonstrate that the Bill was very flawed before, as indeed was the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, to which there is also an amendment here. I am afraid that that demonstrates that the Government’s original approach was not as thought-through as it should have been.”
“To be clear, I do not think that the Bill, as drafted, meets the requirements. I will not press my amendments to a vote, because they are flawed, but I will table something on Report to deal with the issue. I hope that we can agree on what it should be.”
“When will the Foreign Office and the Home Office abandon their ridiculous pseudo security argument that is preventing the return of Shamima Begum and other women and children from northern Syria? Our allies oppose that policy because they know that it risks turning those children into tomorrow’s terrorists.”
“Given the time, Sir Robert, I will finish with these comments. There have been references to a private Member’s Bill. That is the wrong mechanism for this. A multi-day Second Reading and a many multi-day Report stage are required to take this through and get it right. Once we get it right, unless we are going to accept that we are stepping on a slippery slope, we have to make that the final decision as a Parliament. I was a friend of Frank Field for 50 years. We were close friends and allies on all sorts of things over that time. Like me, he opposed this proposal for a long time and changed his mind at the end. I am honoured to follow him on that course.”
“He was a very wealthy man, and was able to afford a private jet to fly himself and his whole family to Dignitas in Switzerland and go through the process there to deliver what my constituent described as a beautiful death—certainly a painless death. I have come to the conclusion that as long as extremely strict controls are put in place so that no one feels pressurised to end their life, I am supportive of the legalisation of assisted dying. But let us be clear: we must not make the same mistakes as other countries. I am thinking particularly of Canada and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, for example, several people with autism and intellectual disabilities have brought on the end of their life, some of them before the age of 30. That is not acceptable. Similar weaknesses apply in Canada. We must ensure that safeguards are in place.”
“Dr Shipman killed hundreds of people, and doctors then became rather fearful of the legal consequences of doing what I have just described. That, in my view, alters the balance of this argument. Later, Bishop Bill Westwood—some may remember him; he was probably the only Thatcherite bishop in history—became a constituent of mine. He also argued with me that we should change the law to allow assisted dying. I was surprised at that because of his faith. I thought that was really quite material. And then, only a few months ago, one of my constituents talked to me about her father, who had motor neurone disease. He was terrified of getting to the end of his life and being unable to do anything about it, so he told her that he intended to end his life earlier than the inevitable outcome.”
“I am not a religious man, but I have always viewed life as sacred. For most of my life, I have been disinclined to accept the arguments of people who are in favour of assisted dying, but various events have changed my view in the past several years. Some time ago—a long time ago—my mother died of brain and lung cancer in considerable agony, pain and, I suspect, terror, too. I am pretty sure that the doctors in charge of her accelerated her demise. I am glad they did. It was a miserable, miserable time for her, and in my view it was a good thing for her to go more peacefully with an excess of morphine, if you want to put it that way. I suspect that it was the unstated norm to do that in those days, and doctors took those decisions quite properly themselves. But I also suspect that that changed after the Shipman scandal.”
“On a personal level, may I thank the Secretary of State for sponsoring my charity event yesterday for disabled children with SYNGAP1? Of course, I welcome the Government’s funding of 60,000 new school places for children with special educational needs, but we need a fairer funding formula for those resources, and we need a further £4.6 billion just to prevent the crisis in special needs from getting worse, so what steps are the Government taking to ensure that funding is allocated according to need, not postcode?”
“I will return to Yorkshire later, but on the more strategic point, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) quite rightly talked about this issue being a matter of balance, and my hon. Friend is highlighting what we are paying per terawatt-hour for solar power. Other countries, most particularly Germany, that have depended on a balance of solar power and wind have found themselves being let down completely by the system. The Germans even have a word, “dunkelflaute”, for when there is cloud and no wind. They have had years in which they have had serious electricity deficits. So although we all agree that solar power is an important part of the Government’s repertoire, as it were, it is not the overall answer.”
“I will stand to my full height. May I address the issue of the dismissive attitude behind the word “nimbyism”? Many people who live in these parts of the countryside—in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and the rest—moved there because of the environment. They go there for a peaceful retirement, because they would like to work there or because they want their children to grow up in a good environment. It is distinctly unconservative— to use a phrase frequently used at the moment—to dismiss peoples’ property rights as nimbyism. They bought their view. They placed themselves and invested their savings in the environment that we are talking about. When we take it away, we should not just dismiss it as nimbyism.”
“My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech and makes a very good point about tenant farmers. Is not one of the problems the way that we have set up the pricing of these mechanisms, in that it renders tenant farmers completely uneconomical? For some foreign investor with vast investments in the British countryside, it is in their interest to throw tenant farmers out in favour of this policy.”
“It is not more expensive if we look at the dangerous impact on the lives, livelihoods, savings, investments and housing of the people we represent.”
“When it comes to the 3,500 acres that I talked about, they do not know the difference either. As we have heard, the only rule we have is that of the assessors, paid for by the investors in the farm. I support an unequivocal ban on large solar farms on the green belt and the UK’s best and most agricultural land, including 3b land, and strong incentives for developments to use rooftops, brownfield land and poorer-quality, unproductive land. As we heard earlier from my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, the Minister will get the argument back from the Treasury that it is more expensive to use brownfield land and rooftops. The counter-argument is simply this: it is more expensive only in the first element—the taxpayer element.”
“When we look at the energy costs of a photovoltaic cell, we should look not just at the cost here, but at the cost to make it, the coal cost, the cost of oppressing Uyghurs and so on. In terms of the overall policy, we should look at the impact on everybody and on local land and housing values. If the Minister does that, he will come up with a completely different policy. Coming back to the simpler arguments, I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough on his call effectively for a ban on solar farms on green belt and proper, flexible land, which includes 3b land. I live in the countryside in my constituency, and I am surrounded by 3a and 3b land. I cannot tell the difference, and neither can the farmers who farm it. That is where we are.”
“That is understandable—it is what those in the Treasury are paid for—but because the Treasury is so powerful, that overwhelms what ought to affect the decision, which an economist would call a cost-benefit analysis. In other words, what is the cost to the state and to the citizens and individuals who must cope with it? My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough mentioned what happened to house prices, for example, and we know what it does to people’s environments. We have a policy in respect of which the second component has been completely ignored. That is what I mean by the dead hand of the Treasury. When the Minister comes to have the arguments about that in his Department, which I hope he will have, he should talk about a proper cost-benefit analysis.”
“Small scale is fine—even 100 or 200 acres properly placed are fine—but what we are getting now is huge industrialisation of the countryside and that simply is not fine. In my part of the world, I have the villages of Spaldington, Willitoft, Brind, Gribthorpe and Foggathorpe, where there is a plan to basically surround all those people with solar cells, and their future environments are being thwarted by that. I had not intended to talk about the effect of the Treasury, but since we have a very smart Minister here I will make one philosophical point to him. When the Treasury sets out to determine which policy works best—I speak from long, sore experience as a Minister in the past—its driving concern, in essence, is cheapness, low cost and minimising the taxes required to run it.”
“In the event of a serious breakdown of international trade—not even necessarily in the context of a continental war—which has happened a couple of times already through covid and Ukraine, our ability to access food becomes a real problem. We had a rehearsal during covid of some of that. It is not wise. There was a lot of coverage in the papers over the last few days of the King installing 2,000 panels at Sandringham to create cheaper electricity for himself. Do Members know what 2,000 panels amount to? Five acres, or one seven-hundredth of the plan that I have been talking about, and one two-hundredth of the 10,000 acres that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough talked about earlier.”
“I say to the Minister that there is need for some imagination and for us to say to ourselves, “What do we want this to look like in 10 years’ time?” Then, we can design the policies to encourage the industry to deliver just that. I will be brief on the effects on farming because they have been talked through quite a lot. As I believe my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said, farmland is already a solar farm, in that it turns sunlight into food. It is much better, more useful and more flexible and effective than using it for electricity. We now have less farmland in production than we have had at any time since 1945—since the second world war. That date is important in this context because, in these dangerous times, do we really think it is sensible that we have to import almost half—46%—of our food?”
“The one that seems to be most popular today as an alternative is to legislate either to massively incentivise or even to mandate in some cases the use of the roofs of all new buildings—certainly all new industrial buildings, warehouses and barns and, frankly, houses too. Over the last 20 years of energy policy, the Government have changed the economics to make various things different. Solar farms are now more economic than they were 20 years ago and wind farms are more economic than they were 20 years ago. The creation of a requirement to use roofs would engender a new industry. Elon Musk already has new designs for solar cells that look like tiles on buildings. We would therefore do away with the concerns over the aesthetic effect and, if the Government did that, they would become cheaper and cheaper.”
“The proximity of the Drax power station is the reason for the one being proposed in my constituency, and it means that there is a proliferation of solar panels next door in Selby and in the other East Yorkshire and North Yorkshire seats. Five villages are being penalised in my constituency and another five or 10 villages are being penalised in the next constituency and the one after—they are all in one place. As I said earlier in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham, we dismiss such people as nimbys. It is their lives and their life savings—maybe their children’s life savings—that we are damaging. In doing this, we should keep in mind what we might call the importance of individual property rights. There are countless more innovative policies that could be implemented.”
“Imagine how long we would spend considering a planning application for houses for 50,000 people—that would never happen, of course, but that is what we are dealing with. Despite the fact that solar panels change the character, use and appearance of the landscape they seek to carpet, whoever drafted the policy did not have any concept of the rights of local individuals. In effect, because of the national infrastructure rules, the bigger and more damaging the project, the less say local people have. It is an astonishing perversion of natural justice. Whoever designed the policy also did not take into account the other thought process of the developers: that they would seek to put them near hubs in the national grid, which means that not only do we get enormous solar farms, but we get lots of them in a single area.”
“Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). I felt a sense of horror when he talked about 10,000 acres being under these nightmarish destroyers of the countryside. Of course, the Government’s national infrastructure tracker shows 26 of these huge projects. One such project by a company called Boom Power is close to me in East Yorkshire, and it alone covers 3,500 acres. That is hard for most people to imagine, but that is 2,000 football fields or, as somebody said, about 1.5 times the size of Heathrow airport—virtually from here to the horizon in most directions. While sitting here, I saw that the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) was speaking in the main Chamber; it is about the size of the city of Durham—a city with a population of 50,000 people.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing the debate. It has been apparent from listening to it how important an issue this is. She made a brilliant and comprehensive speech, and other hon. Members have filled in all the details, so I will be fairly brief. The current policy on large-scale solar farms fails to take into account the country’s landscape and environment. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) rightly said in his intervention on my hon. Friend, this is a matter of balance. This policy is badly designed and does not deliver any sense of balance. I suspect that that is largely because of the dead hand of the Treasury, but I will come back to that in a moment. We have heard a series of horror stories, the latest from my old friend, my right hon.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a brilliantly important point, which I had not thought of before, on this question of tax relief—basically, inheritance tax relief. That has meant that vast quantities of the countryside of Britain are owned by people for a single purpose—to avoid inheritance tax—which actually drives the financialisation of the countryside that has driven this policy.”
“I am listening with interest to the hon. Gentleman. Does he agree that if we increase the incentive, up to the point of mandating in some cases, for the use of brownfield sites and roofs and so on, that is likely to alter the economics, with people like Elon Musk and others investing in more cost-effective and more easily used photovoltaic cells for that purpose?”
“I was the Minister who took through the House the Bill that created the ISC. At the time, the intention was that it would evolve to become a very powerful Committee, but it did not absolve the entire House from some responsibility. Two elements are involved here. One has just been mentioned by the hon. Gentleman—the Prime Minister’s appearance before the Committee—and the other is minimal redaction of the reports that the Committee creates. One of the problems we have encountered in recent years is excessive redaction of those reports. Has the hon. Gentleman any views on that?”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. May I address the iterative issue that the Minister and he both raised? It is not just the development of technology that is important here; it is also about the development of other countries’ security systems. For example, the Germans are putting in place laws that require end-to-end encryption—the very thing that we were worried about—so we will have to manoeuvre over the course of the coming years to make sure that what we do fits not just with the technology companies, but with what our allies are doing.”
“The Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which this Bill amends, was in effect the replacement for that. It was not a terrific improvement, but it was an improvement. As I say, the Minister’s approach to this Bill has been much more democratic, much more open and much more valuable.”
“I start from the perspective that we are highly likely to regret some elements of this Bill within the next 10 years, and I will come back to that in a moment. I will also start by commending the Minister for Security, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), for his approach. It has not always been like this. The real precursor of this Bill was the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, all stages of which was taken in one day because the Government of the day claimed it as an emergency, even though they had spent three months thinking about it and even though they took nine months to implement it afterwards, such was the emergency. As a result, I challenged it in the High Court, and it was struck down.”
“The Executive should not wield the power to order the surveillance of Members of this House at their sole discretion. The very senior judiciary should provide a vital check on that power.”
“At the very least, I would change this proposal to require that the Prime Minister secures the approval of a Supreme Court judge before signing off on any warrant permitting the interception of a Member’s communications. That would take the process completely outside the normal approach under which the Investigatory Powers Tribunal and all the machinery around it routinely says yes to requests, day in and day out. Calling for, allowing or permitting the interception of the communications of a Member of this House or the other place ought to be something clearly extraordinary in the life of a Prime Minister. A Supreme Court judge is far more likely also to have the authority required to face down poorly justified demands, which has not always happened in the past.”
“This Bill will do nothing but further undermine people’s trust in bringing serious matters to our attention. The Horizon scandal, Mid Staffs, sweetheart tax deals with large companies, the mistreatment of prisoners by the British Army, involvement in rendition and torture, and dishonest briefings for immoral wars—every single one of them was brought to our attention by a whistleblower who, in many cases, faced criminal prosecution if they were discovered. Are people likely to continue blowing the whistle with a loosening of the Wilson doctrine? I do not think so. If I had my way, I would amend the Investigatory Powers Act to prevent communications to and from Members of Parliament from being intercepted at all.”
“We are here to hold the Government to account, not the other way round. The relationship between constituents and their elected representatives is sacrosanct. It is the bedrock upon which our representative democracy stands, and constituents expect that, as they should. But it is not just constituents who rely on the sanctity of their communications with Members. It is truer and more obvious today than at almost any time in my 30-odd years in this House that, in doing our job, we deal with campaigners—think of the sub-postmasters—journalists, whistleblowers, victims of injustice who may be terrified of being identified and, of course, other Members of Parliament, and that is just a few. They all trust us to keep what they tell us absolutely rock solid, private and confidential.”