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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“(Urgent Question) : To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs if he will make a statement on Saudi Arabia’s execution of Hussein Abo al-Kheir.”
“We must make it clear to our ally that it must abide by international standards of civilised behaviour; doing so might just save the lives of those who remain on death row.”
“In 2015, the Foreign Secretary’s predecessor, Philip Hammond, intervened himself, successfully, to prevent the execution of a Saudi youth activist, and he prevented many more executions by so doing; that intervention saved Ali’s life. I firmly believe that a stronger intervention over the weekend could have saved Hussein’s life and perhaps more to come. Saudi Arabia continues to be one of the most prolific users of the death penalty, killing more than 130 individuals in 2022. Since 1 March this year, the Kingdom has executed 11 people, including for non-violent drug offences. That goes against Saudi Arabia’s informal moratorium on the use of the death penalty for drug-related offences. Being soft with totalitarian states comes back to bite us, as we know from the Russian example.”
“Hussein Abo al-Kheir had been on death row since 2015. He had been tortured into a false confession and always maintained his innocence. When I was told this weekend that his execution was imminent, I urgently wrote to the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the junior Minister, Lord Ahmad, the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Saudi ambassador to the UK, calling for intervention to prevent Hussein’s execution—I received no formal reply, although I understand that a letter has arrived in my office since I have been in the Chamber. Hussein was subsequently executed. A response given on Tuesday to questions from the Father of the House appeared to suggest that, despite my representations, only low-level attempts were made to talk to the Saudis over the weekend.”
“It is, Mr Speaker. I am sure that, inadvertently, the Minister has not quite led the House properly. The agreement on drug offences was on all drug offences, not simply taking drugs.”
“Correcting that is important, so will the Prime Minister look at the treaty with a view to correcting this parody of justice?”
“Q14. In the aftermath of 9/11, the British Government signed an extradition treaty with the United States with the intention of covering terrorism and other violent crime. Since it came into force in 2003, the US has extradited 83 people to the UK, while we have sent 225 to America. Three quarters of those extraditions have been for non-violent and largely white-collar alleged crimes. There is a fundamental unfairness at the heart of our extradition treaty, as was shown when Anne Sacoolas refused to come here to face trial for the killing of Harry Dunn. That unfairness is compounded by an American system that coerces British citizens and gives them unfair trials. In the last two decades, the American policy has been rather like an international commercial policy.”
“Arguing against the proposal for a new stop and search power (Home Office proposal 5) another officer stated that ‘a little inconvenience is more acceptable than a police state’.” That is a policeman speaking. His Majesty’s inspectorate said: “We agree with this sentiment.” His Majesty’s inspectorate, with all its knowledge—much greater than that in the civil service and the Home Office—think that the proposal is unnecessary and that to keep it is to veer towards a police state. On that basis alone, I say to the Minister, please think again about getting rid of the amendment.”
“What we are looking at here—suspicionless stop and search—has to be restricted or eliminated. If we do not do this, we will be in the same position as some states with which we have no sympathy. Last, I want to reinforce my point with quotations from His Majesty’s inspectorate of police. Inspectors went round 10 police forces asking for their opinions, and right enough, there was a spectrum, but I want to read out a few sentences from their report. They said: “At one end of the spectrum, an officer we interviewed described the current legislation”— that is, the existing legislation, not this Bill— “as providing ‘an arsenal’ of weapons for the police to use, including many appropriate for use in the context of disruptive protests. Consequently, that interviewee”— a police officer— “and many others saw no need for change.”
“In that, we in this House will have no say. That is, again, a critical concern. The most important thing was raised by the hon. Member for Hemsworth: suspicionless stop and search. Stop and search is an abuse of our freedoms, full stop. Being stopped by a policeman and required to strip off, or to empty one’s pockets and bags, is an abuse that we do not allow in this country. Let me be clear: the vast majority of police are responsible, decent and public-spirited people, but the past year has shown that there are also some other people in there. The Sarah Everard offence has been referred to; Couzens was charged with other offences just recently. That demonstrates the danger of handing over unfettered power to people who might abuse it. That is the simple point, and what the state is doing is handing over that power.”
“The SDPOs are still very restrictive for what are relatively simple offences. They involve bans on using the internet in certain ways, bans on being in certain areas, bans on intended protests, and many other restrictions. They resemble control orders, which—remember—are counter-terrorism measures. That is a crude approach. As I said, five years is too long for the criminal offence to be unspent, so I hope that the Government will look at that again, or, if they do not, that the Lords send it back again. The organisation Liberty, which, as I said, came into being because of these sorts of problems with demonstrations in the ’30s, has raised concerns about the possibility of political interference, which is really serious. The Secretary of State may issue “guidance about identifying persons” to whom the police should apply an SDPO.”
“They have removed the possibility that a serious disruption prevention order—one of the most restrictive measures we have short of imprisonment—can be imposed on people who have never been convicted. I say to the Minister that five years after a conviction is a very long time. Most non-violent convictions are spent after one year, so five years is a devil of a long time to allow such restrictions to be put on somebody. The Lords have removed the electronic tagging requirement again. The idea that creating nuisance should lead to someone being tagged is, in my view, a barbaric proposal, and it is gone. An explicit provision that the police cannot use their powers against journalists was carried by about 90 votes in the Lords. That should not even have come up; it is so obvious that that is undermining for us.”
“Friend the Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) made one of the best speeches I have heard in this House for a very long time on something as fundamental as the right to prayer without intercession by the state. That is an issue that is thousands of years old, and he was absolutely right. This is problematic. What we are debating is the outcome of an over-heavy-handed Bill—that is where it starts. We were all outraged by the behaviour of some of the demonstrators—disrupting ambulances and Lord knows what else—and the Government reacted to that, but they overreacted, frankly. The Lords have corrected that, and the Government have conceded on a number of important points.”
“May I start by commending the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett)? I agree very much with what he had to say, but I say to him that, although the laws and the constitution underpinning these matters are, as he said, up to 1,000 years old, much of the tradition of modern demonstrations goes back to the 1930s, when the behaviour of the police towards demonstrators led to the creation of the National Council for Civil Liberties, for example. I know that because my grandfather led more than one demonstration and was arrested—after being baton-charged by the police—for inciting violence. He was sent to prison for six months—although the judge gave him the option of being bound over for six months and not making irritating speeches, and he said he would rather go to prison, so there we are. My hon.”
“The Minister is quite right—that describes exactly what the Government are doing—but he has left out one thing: the conviction is up to five years before. Usually in British law, convictions are spent after a certain period. Non-violent convictions are all spent after one year, but the conviction for causing a nuisance will last five years.”
“Public money was used to obtain polling information relating to some of the biggest policy decisions in a generation. It must be made easily accessible and comprehensible to the public. May I seek your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how the House can make the Government give it the data on the basis of which it appears to have created policy throughout the pandemic?”
“In September 2021, I tried to obtain the information through written parliamentary questions, but on each occasion the Government refused to release the data. I kept pressing, and eventually, in April last year, I was told that a timetable for releasing the information would be available in the spring. That deadline came and went, so I tried again in September, when I was told that the data would be published by the end of the year. Now, three months into 2023, I have still not seen it. About an hour ago, a journalist was told by the Cabinet Office that it had been made available to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, whose Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), is present; but I have not seen it.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Starting early in 2020, the Government spent more than £1.5 million on opinion polls on public attitudes to covid. I feared at the time that opinion polling as much as science was driving the creation of policy, and recent reportage about wanting to “frighten the pants off everyone” leads me to conclude that I was correct in that belief. On 28 July 2020, I submitted a freedom of information request to the Cabinet Office seeking the results of the polling. It was refused on the ground that it was policy advice. That failed, so it was then refused on grounds of cost. I pressed the matter for 18 months, but was unable to get the Government to publish the taxpayer-funded data.”
“I start by unreservedly congratulating my right hon. Friend on what seems to be a spectacular negotiating success. With the Windsor framework, he has succeeded in delivering a deal that eliminates the issues of the Irish sea border and addresses the practical issues in Northern Ireland on food, pets, plants, parcels, medicine regulations and tax rules. Above all, it introduces the extraordinary mechanism of the Stormont brake. I am unaware of any such mechanism in any international agreement, and it seems to me to be a brilliant piece of negotiating insight and imagination. As we do not all know the detail, can he explain to the House exactly how this mechanism will work and what its limitations will be?”
“The covid pandemic exposed several conflict of interest problems in public sector procurement. The Government’s Procurement Bill is an excellent opportunity to address those, but it does not pick up all the issues raised by the Government’s own independent inquiries. What will the Minister do to improve on that?”
“T5. In 2020 we have evidence that the Cabinet Office monitored the journalist Peter Hitchens’ social media posts in relation to the pandemic. In an internal email the Cabinet Office accused him of pursuing an anti- lockdown agenda. He then appears to have been shadow- banned on social media. Will the Minister confirm that his Department did nothing to interfere with Hitchens’ communications, either through discussion with social media platforms or by any other mechanism? If he cannot confirm that today, will he write to me immediately in the future to do so?”
“I very much agree with the Secretary of State on the need for increased defence expenditure if we are to remain a tier 1 power. Nevertheless, in every one of the past 21 years, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have criticised the MOD’s procurement of equipment, poor identification of military needs, poor quality of equipment, slow delivery of projects, an inability to control costs and a corporate culture too traditional and resistant to change. Those are just some of the criticisms. Does he agree that we need to put those issues right if we are to be a tier 1 power?”
“The Secretary of State referred to the allegations in the weekend press about 77th Brigade. I know him well enough to know that when he told us that he gave clear instructions and guidelines to the brigade, which operates only against foreign powers and extremists, he was telling the exact truth. However, will he review the issue and ensure that his guidelines have been followed in all cases?”
“I welcome the Minister’s assertion that there is to be a review of this approach, but I ask him to make it quick. Even the Treasury’s press release today indicates a level of misunderstanding on the part of the officials, claiming a fundamental or absolute right to legal representation. Of course you have a right to representation if you are defending yourself in court, but there is no fundamental right to use legal representation to destroy someone else and shut down free speech.”
“All of them made mistakes. The golden visa that the hon. Gentleman talked about was created just as we were rushing into the collapse of western financial capitalism under the previous Government. We were too soft—”
“London was a wonderful target for that. There were vast flows of money in which they could hide the billions they were stealing from the Russian people and others. At the time, there was pretty slapdash corporate admin—we were talking about that yesterday in respect of Companies House—and, I say this quite brutally, the complete feebleness of the British establishment, by which I mean everybody: both parties; and the agencies tasked with controlling this, the Serious Fraud Office, which has been a waste of space, and the NCA, which has not been good enough. It was created to tackle this but has not been good enough. All those things were happening. I say to the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) on the Opposition Front Bench that it goes wider than the Conservative party. It starts with Blair/Brown and goes on to Cameron/ Osborne.”
“I am going to be brief and speak simply to new clauses 1 and 2, which stand in the name of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), in my name and in the names of a number of other long-standing defenders of justice in Britain. The new clauses, in effect, make SLAPPs near impossible where they are used to protect economic crime. The provisions are far too narrow, by the way, but that is what the Bill demands. I will leave it to him to explain the mechanism, but I want to talk for a couple of minutes about how important this is and how we got to where we are today. The issue dates back to about 2000, or perhaps a bit earlier, when London had become liberalised and the Putin oligarchs and others, including some Chinese people, were looking for places to hide their ill-gotten gains and behaviour.”
“If we can take that gag away and remove those bonds, we will suddenly expose all the things that we need to deal with. We will see the weaknesses I talked about—the SFO and the NCA—and put them right, one by one. That is why we should support new clauses 1 and 2. I talked before about the weaknesses of the SFO and the NCA. We will see those weaknesses and we will put them right, one by one. That is why we should support this measure today.”
“There are court cases going on as I stand here in which people are having their lives destroyed by SLAPPs. The next best is to have it in the Bill of Rights, but we know that that is way down the timetable, for all sorts of reasons. We may not see it before the next election, in which case we will have lost two more years. The new clauses amount to a way of dealing with this criminal—or near criminal—activity in a way that is not susceptible to a finely turned piece of law. I listened with fascination to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) on that point. Getting that right is difficult; getting this right is not, because the greatest enemy of evil is a free press. In our country in the last couple of decades we have allowed our free press to become gagged and crippled.”
“In each individual case that might be the right decision, but the collective effect of that is to suck criminally based information into our system and therefore engender and help the industry. All that is why new clause 1 and 2 are vital. That all had the effect of creating a vast, possibly unintentional institutional cover-up for criminal activity: money laundering, fraud and concealment of evil actions abroad. Let us bear in mind that some of the oligarchs we are talking about are murderers. The system murders people. It is evil activity. That is why new clauses 1 and 2 are incredibly important. What the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill is proposing in new clauses 1 and 2 is a second best option. We already heard the best option in earlier interventions: a freestanding Bill immediately, because this is happening now.”
“We have a legal system that is probably the most brilliant in the world in delivering fair outcomes and good justice, but it is also phenomenally expensive, which means it is one-sided in its operation between an oligarch and an ordinary citizen, journalist or whoever they may be. In conjunction with that are the things that flow from it, such as the behaviour of solicitors, to some of whom my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), who is not in his place, gave a fair old pasting yesterday, but one that was deserved. The private investigators industry, unregulated, undertakes crimes to gather information for use as weapons against other people. Our courts—not uniquely, but outstandingly—allow that information to be used.”
“There is no doubt that the more recent you are, the more salient the case. Frankly, I can remember being ashamed of a British Prime Minister hosting Putin at the Olympics only a few years after Litvinenko was murdered in our country in the most cruel and overt act of state terrorism. Neither Government dealt with that. Cameron’s action was grotesque in the extreme, but neither Government dealt with it. Similarly, both Governments kowtowed to China after Tibet and all the rest of it. That has been done too many times. It is the entire system, not just one Government or another. London is a fabulously attractive place for the Russians or the Chinese. If you want to be somewhere else than Russia, this is the place to be. We have facilitated that at every turn. Here comes the issue to which SLAPPs relate.”
“It is important in this House that we have access to printed copies of Government documents, so can the House do anything to ensure that that happens in future?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I hope you will forgive me for a boring, but important, administrative point of order—nothing new, do I hear you say? Yesterday, we asked the Vote Office and the House of Commons Library for a copy of a Government report by Ben Goldacre for a meeting today. It is a very important report. We were told that it was too long for the Vote Office to print, so it was sent off-site to Waterloo. We were also told that the House of Commons Library does not keep copies of Government reports, which rather astonished me. When we received the report from the off-site printers, it arrived in random order—page 1, page 7, page 3, page 15 and so on—so it was a little difficult to use. When we called them, they said that that was because the Government had provided the document in the wrong format.”
“What is more, we are being asked to sign a blank cheque—one might almost say a pig in a poke—because we do not even know how many pieces of legislation are going through on the back of this Bill, let alone what they are. That, of course, is not democratic. We have heard the anoraks talking about this SI Committee, that sifting Committee and so on. That is not the Floor of this House. These issues are sufficiently important—some of them, not all of them—to be debated in the Chamber. Just glancing down the list, I see: aviation safety; compensation rules; insider trading; protecting a pensioner’s payout when a company goes bust—I cannot think of anything more significant to our constituents than that; and preventing the trafficking of illegal weapons. These are substantive issues that need to come to us.”
“I remind the House, given the substance of this Bill, that I resigned from Cabinet to preserve the right to diverge from the EU. So I agree with the aims of the Bill, but I also agree with the SNP spokesman, the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), about its effectiveness in delivering those aims. I voted and campaigned to improve democracy; I wanted to take back control in order to give it to Westminster, not to Whitehall. However, that is what we have here. When the Minister was speaking earlier, she talked about the consultations, but they were not with us—they were with the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Departments of State and not with us. But we are the people who are responsible for this legislation.”
“I will be brief. My arguments will be simple and they will go straight to amendment 36. When the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) spoke, I had a flash of déjà vu, back to the days when I co-operated with his father, thwarting the Blairite attempts to bypass Parliament some years ago. It came back to me that his father and I also shared a view on the European Union, with both of us knowing that it was undemocratic. We knew that both from ministerial experience and because we had read out history; Monnet and Schuman had designed it to be undemocratic, which was why we wanted to leave. I say to the Minister, given what was said before from the Front Bench, that I come at this as a convinced and campaigning Brexiteer.”
“If the hon. Lady had given me 30 seconds, I would have made exactly that point. I agree with her. This morning, or last night, we had No. 10 rushing to brief the papers and to write to us saying that the Bill will not remove existing rights and protections, which is plainly not true, and that it will not impinge on environmental rights and so on. That demonstrates what a great hole there is in the middle of this legislation. If those matters were covered in the law, we would not need to have that assurance. All of the non-governmental organisations that are concerned—I do not agree with all of them—would not have had to have their say either.”
“The right approach is the one that we have actually taken in some areas. For example, we are rewriting the General Data Protection Regulation under a digital Bill. We are rewriting Solvency II and other financial measures under primary legislation, and the same is true for some procurement work. We should be doing similar things with some other software elements and biomedical rules. That is the way to do it: pick off the 10% or the 5% that really matter—that make 100% of the difference—and do that properly, on the Floor of the House, and not by remote control on a ministerial diktat in an SI Committee upstairs.”
“That is sensible. Once we have dealt with that, things will broadly work and will not justify a rush at this exercise. Let me explain very briefly what I think the consequences of that will be. I said that it is not democratic, but it will also be inefficient and possibly incompetent. I give the House, as a demonstration of this, what we did on 3 March 2020. You may remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, that that was the day that we gave the Government all sorts of powers under the emergency Coronavirus Act 2020. If we look, we can see how many errors were made in governing the country over the next six months, until we corrected that Act. If we do not bring a Minister to that Dispatch Box to justify what they are doing, the quality of the decision goes down, and that is dangerous when we are talking about measures as important as these.”
“I am sorry, but two wrongs do not make a right. The reason why I did not like the European Union was precisely what my right hon. Friend has just described. We had things almost de facto imposed on us. We went down an SI-type route to do things that I thought were important enough to justify discussion on the Floor of the House. The depletion of debate on the Floor of the House, mostly in the years before he came into the House, was one reason I was a Brexiteer. We have approached this issue in a different way in other respects. Let us imagine that we are talking about 4,000 pieces of law, regulations or whatever. In truth, probably 90% of that may be clunky and may not work very well, but there is one thing in the Bill that I approve of, which is dealing with the superiority of European law—taking those priorities out of it.”
“I must be clear that not all operators in the waste industry are criminal enterprises—that is anything but the case—but the clear inaction of our agencies has emboldened the dangerous individuals that do run such criminal enterprises.”
“Since it was such a big and recurrent issue, I said, “Yes, okay, come to see me.” He came to my home and, in essence, told me that the north-east of England was rife with waste crime and was known for it. That was what he argued to me. He did not know whether it was an accident of history or whether it was because the Environment Agency was somehow corrupt or involved, or for whatever reason not doing its job. That was five years or more ago. To be frank, the story was so extraordinary that I thought it was an exaggeration. I am sorry to say that I was wrong. That person was describing pretty accurately what we have discovered in our joint endeavours over time. For too long, the Environment Agency has not been meeting its legal and community obligations, and HMRC has not been enforcing its.”
“We need to bear in mind more generally when we discuss waste crime that these are not just small-time wheelers and dealers. They are not the Harold Steptoes of today; they are very big wheels, in criminal terms, and very nasty people indeed. Waste crime has blighted many of our constituencies—it has certainly blighted Haltemprice and Howden—for many years. That is where the concern first came from in my case, as I think it did in most others. Some time ago, in the middle of battles over the Gilberdyke site in my constituency, one of the sites that Niramax has an interest in, someone from south-west England involved in legitimate waste disposal asked to see me.”
“He referred to the type of criminals we are talking about—the Niramax directors and associate directors, one of whom, as he said, was jailed for 15 years for manslaughter. Frankly, I was quite surprised that the charge was not murder, because it was a man behaving in a random way over a personal argument and deciding to kill the other person who was involved. That is the sort of character we are talking about. An associate director went to prison first for a machete attack and then later on for drugs. That reinforces the point that the right hon. Gentleman made about drugs, prostitution and all the nasty underbelly of society—all the nasty criminal activity—being funded and supported by the problem we are talking about.”
“Last weekend’s Sunday Express said that £200 million in landfill tax had gone uncollected in 2019-20 alone—that is, again, an under-estimate, even in HMRC’s own figures. The right hon. Gentleman said pretty plainly—and I agree—that HMRC does not want to big up this issue and make a big thing out of it, but it admits that at least £850 million has not been collected in five years. It has gone straight into the pockets of some of our most dangerous criminals. If £1 billion was not collected from, let us say, the bankers, legal people or some other such group, there would be uproar. But here, it is not being collected from criminals, and the matter just goes by. The right hon. Gentleman made the point about the money being funnelled into criminal enterprises, and he was quite measured in his language.”
“As we have come to expect, the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) made a wise, insightful and pretty comprehensive speech. He is right to say that we have both struggled, over more than a decade, to get the Government and their agencies to take this issue seriously. He has covered ground thoroughly, but let me see if I can reinforce his points without too much repetition. The right hon. Gentleman spoke of the Public Accounts Committee’s estimate of the near billion-pound cost to the Exchequer each year—he quite rightly referred to it as a finger-in-the-ear exercise. I have been a PAC Chairman, and I know how that sometimes happens. That is an under-estimate. We have signals all over the place of how big this really is.”
“Given how landfill tax is structured, if evasion is not stopped, then every time landfill tax goes up to improve the environment, the criminal is actually incentivised more by a bigger comparative advantage against the legitimate operators.”
“Gentleman said, there have been no prosecutions whatever for landfill tax fraud. With Operation Nosedive—like the right hon. Gentleman, I wondered about the name, where it came from, and whether it was making a prediction about its own success—I have to say that its failure was written in from the beginning. It was a failure from the start. HMRC, the Environment Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service were simply not working together properly to investigate and prosecute the gangsters. They simply were not doing the job as a coherent group of people. The NAO told me that HMRC and the CPS admitted as much, and that is why no prosecutions were taken forward. The problem is that this failure and the ongoing increases in the rate of landfill tax mean that illegal profits are only increasing.”
“It is careful that it is factually based, and it bases everything on the National Audit Office reports and so on. For the PAC to accuse an agency or Department of effectively decriminalising something as serious as this is in itself an enormously powerful and worrying statement. That quote will strike a chord with those of us who have had to observe the appalling weak record of enforcement of the Environment Agency, even with legal operators, frankly. We are not talking about legal operators today, but even with legal operators, the Environment Agency is weak, let alone those who need to be cracked down on. That fact, again, is reinforced by the data. The number of prosecutions for waste crime generally—not tax evasion, but waste crime generally—have fallen by more than 90% since 2007-08. As the right hon.”