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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“Some of my constituents who are very qualified people monitored that site and estimated that between £50 million and £60 million in landfill tax was being evaded while those lorries were flooding the area. That is at one site alone. This activity involves the destruction of my constituents’ quality of life and the destruction of the local environment, all in pursuit of illegal profits, yet so little action is being taken. The right hon. Member for North Durham quoted the Public Accounts Committee saying about the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in October last year that “the approach to large parts of waste crime is closer to decriminalisation.” I make the point, as a past Chairman of the PAC, that the PAC is careful about what it says about Government operations.”
“Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) that this is not primarily about changing the regulations or the law, but about changing the mode of operation of the agencies involved. Precisely because they cheat and evade payment of landfill tax, criminal companies can undercut other businesses, picking up waste and charging a pittance for it, knowing they will make up for it in illegal returns. In the case of Gilberdyke, locals reported that lorries were flooding the area from Wembley, south Wales, south-west Scotland and Manchester. It is expensive to transport this stuff. Why would it be transported that far unless there were some enormous unfair—not to mention illegal—advantage for the operators? That is what is going on there.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is right, and I will come back to the incentives—both criminal and legal—that are built in against legal operators. The right hon. Gentleman also spoke about the powerlessness of communities. Again, I can exemplify that point. We thought we had scored a victory by taking the Niramax associate Transwaste to court over the Gilberdyke site and winning our case that it had breached a whole load of conditions. We won the case, but did my constituents see any improvements? No. Were the problems addressed in court fixed or enforced by the agencies? No. Did the behaviour of the operators improve? No. The courts proved powerless and so the community certainly felt powerless, again because there was no proper enforcement. That goes back to the point that the right hon. Gentleman made in response to the hon.”
“If it is not working, it is a failure of its own remit.”
“That is absolutely correct. I am sure Gresham did not have in mind blackmail and threats as well, which also come into it when the operation becomes criminal rather than legal. The joint failure of HMRC and the Environment Agency led to theft from the public purse—it is as simple as that—the devastation of public spaces, and the undermining of public confidence in this whole policy area. Ostensibly, the issue is that HMRC is focused on the collection of tax, while the Environment Agency is following a remit to manage waste. That is the excuse given, if you like. Frankly, it is extraordinary that the Environment Agency would not collect data on a tax designed to incentivise good waste operation. That is its purpose, so why on earth is the Environment Agency not monitoring that carefully?”
“The cheap operator who is not paying taxes gets all the business, and therefore nothing is pushed to a better waste outcome. I take her point, but in many ways management is more important.”
“I agree with the aims the hon. Lady describes, but I am not sure whether this is a resource issue for the Environment Agency—I think there is a resource issue in other areas. If the Environment Agency does its job right first time, that is it dealt with. To bring it down to the microcosm of a single waste tip, if it does not enforce the first, second or third complaint, it will have hundreds and thousands of complaints, and its time will be sucked into dealing with them. To some extent there may be a resource issue, but a bigger issue is, straightforwardly, to do with management and the determination to make the industry obey the rules and to spot such things as tax evasion. If tax evasion takes place, the whole structure she describes disappears.”
“It is shameful, frankly. This is where I agree with the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) that this is a resource issue. We absolutely need to ensure that, unlike at HMRC before, there is the right legal advice at every stage, the right data at every stage and the right investigative capability at every stage, so that, rather than saving £10,000 here and £10,000 there only to lose £3.5 million on a failed case or £1 billion a year on the system as it is, we actually deal with the issue. The current strategy is penny wise and pound foolish, and in that respect she and I agree.”
“Thanks to the NAO, we know that every single year, waste crime in general costs £900 million—the PAC said £1 billion—which is a very, very large number. We should not lose track of the fact that that is an annual cost. And that is without, as it turns out, the costs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We do not have the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) in his place to raise a point about Northern Ireland, but there are costs there, too. In the current climate, I can only imagine the uproar if that occurred in any other situation. The right hon. Member for North Durham touched on the importance of HMRC’s joint unit for waste crime. The Government would like to claim it has been a success—indeed, after the first year they said it was a success—but I have to tell Members that I cannot see a single sign of success.”
“I agree. Exporting from Scotland to England will not help at all, so the right hon. Gentleman is exactly right. We have a ridiculous co-ordination problem in the midst of all this. The NAO told me that Operation Nosedive failed for a variety of reasons, but ultimately it was felt that defence lawyers for the criminals would be able to exploit all the weaknesses of co-ordination and data in the system. Frankly, it is galling that criminal charges could have been held back by the bureaucracy and box-ticking approach of Government Departments effectively, which were stepping on each other’s toes rather than working together. Waste crime and landfill tax fraud are cheating the taxpayer out of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and it is time we got serious about that.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right. There is almost a generic problem with local authorities. They very often face problems that look intimidatingly large to them, and the temptation always is to penny-pinch—to spend just a little money to see if they can stop it. They fail, and the problem invariably grows. We see that time and again, particularly in this area. This is a separate issue really, but concerns about fly-tipping among the public are as great as they are about waste crime in general. The hon. Gentleman is dead right. My advice to local authorities is always to try and nip it in the bud, because if they are seen as a weak responder, the crime will come to them. That is what will happen.”
“Why not save the taxpayer money and, most importantly of all, save our constituents from the disasters these people visit on us?”
“We need to ensure that they all get proper legal advice. One of the reasons Nosedive failed was that, if I remember correctly, three different lawyers were given to them by the Crown Prosecution Service over time. Eventually, when they hired a private lawyer, they got proper advice and decided they could not pursue it. That is saving tens of thousands to lose £3.5 million and to lose billions—it is penny wise and pound foolish. If the Government think this costs too much, they should just think of the consequences of failure. I appreciate that the Minister will not be able to give instant answers today, but I ask him to go back to his Department and simply ask, why not? The right hon. Member for North Durham and I have proposed a variety of measures that will pay for themselves 1,000 times over, so why not take the action necessary?”
“In summary, what we need is for the warrants, or the reserves required on the balance sheets of new waste operators, to be big enough to cover the cost of a clean- up in the event that they go bankrupt. Whether that is an insurance system, a reserve system or a warranty system, I do not know, but it has to be something like 10 times as big as what we currently have. The new joint waste crime unit needs dedicated funding from central Government of sufficient size. We have a perfect environment. We have had the failure of Nosedive. We can see all the points of failure: unusually for HMRC, they are identified in the public domain, so we can design what is required for the joint unit. We need the Environment Agency to get out on the ground and collect the data it needs to help HMRC prosecute these gangsters.”
“For too long, waste crime has gone unnoticed by Environment Agency officers. That begs the question, what is going on? Are they indolent? Are they incompetent? Are they involved? Are they being bribed? No. The simple truth is that they do not have the tools they need to do the job. We have created a system where our agencies are prevented from acting for fear of that action making the problem worse. If they want to take action on a company, they are terrified that they will bankrupt it and suddenly the taxpayer will be left funding the clean-up. There will either not be a clean-up or they will have to find millions upon millions of pounds. None of that needs to happen.”
“The NAO said: “the waste crime data they currently collect do not give an accurate picture of actual incidence of waste crime because of under-reporting”. That comes back to the finger-in-the-air guess of £1 billion. It is obviously bigger than that because the issues are being undermeasured. I cannot see how our agencies can get a grip of the problem if they do not even measure the size of it. When I told one of my constituents about this debate, he told me how little faith he has in the Environment Agency. Frankly, I share his concerns. Before I came into the Chamber, I was sitting outside talking to colleagues. Four colleagues in a row said, “Yes, we have the same problem.” They are not here now, as they are off back to their constituencies, but they all have the same systemic problem that comes back time and again.”
“The hon. Gentleman is reaching beyond my level of expertise, frankly. My view is that this clearly is a systemic problem. There is either a funding shortage or a power or capability shortage. One or the other needs to be corrected, because the current system is not working. Anyone who lives in a rural area will see that we are dealing with a permanent nightmare—a running sore. I agree with the hon. Gentleman about its being systemic. To come back to the waste crime issue, there is not just lack of funding or joined-up Government, but a lack of understanding of the problem. The NAO found that DEFRA and the Environment Agency are simply not collecting the data. They need to fully realise the extent of waste crime across the board.”
“My hon. Friend has talked of perverse incentives. As far as I am aware—and, as I have said, I served as Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee for five years—this is the clearest example of a strong incentive for good policy turning into a strong perverse incentive against that good policy, off the back of enforcement. When the Treasury assesses how much it puts into enforcement, ought it not to take that full spectrum of effect into account?”
“No, it is an environmental catastrophe waiting to be discovered, because much of it lies underground in our constituencies. This is an area where a huge amount of resource is at play, and a huge amount of effort should be put into dealing with it.”
“In a way, the Minister’s comments on Walleys Quarry reinforce the point. He says it is a difficult area to enforce in tax terms. I do not actually agree. I think a great deal more could have been done on the ground with Operation Nosedive in terms of physical investigation. Such things would not normally be undertaken, but that should have happened for something as big as this. I reiterate the point I made earlier to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell). The costs of the failure to enforce are financially enormous and socially disastrous, and serve to completely invert the purpose of the policy. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) quoted the industry association and talked about an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.”
“I strongly welcome the seriousness with which the Prime Minister addresses this issue, particularly his focus on stopping the Albanian gangs. With respect to the dispersal centres, when the Home Office attempted to introduce a dispersal centre in my constituency, it ignored the local authority’s concerns about healthcare, public services and children’s services. It then also ignored the existing level of Albanian organised crime in Hull and did not even consult the local police chief before it moved on the matter. Needless to say, it did not consult any of the local MPs either. If we continue in this mode, the Home Office will face judicial review after judicial review and the policy will not work. Can we please see a radical improvement in decision making in the Home Office in this process?”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that impartiality is right at the front of the BBC’s ethos, but that in practice many of us in this Chamber—certainly, I do—find that BBC local radio, in my case Radio Humberside, is far more impartial than any national programme?”
“My intervention is on the same point as that raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), but from the opposite direction, in effect. What if it turns out that, as many security specialists and British leaders in security believe—not just the companies, but professors of security at Cambridge and that sort of thing—it is not possible to implement such measures without weakening encryption? What will the Minister’s Bill do then?”
“May I intervene on a point of fact? The hon. Lady says that fines are a drop in the ocean. The turnover of Google is $69 billion; 10% of that is just shy of $7 billion. That is not a drop in the ocean, even to Elon Musk.”
“My hon. Friend is giving a fascinating disquisition on this industry, but is not the implication that, in effect, these companies are modern buccaneer states and we need to do much more to legislate? I am normally a deregulator, but we need more than one Bill to do what we seek to do today.”
“The right hon. Lady and I have co-operated to deal with international corporate villains, so I am interested in her proposal. However, a great number of these actions are taken by algorithms—I speak as someone who was taken down by a Google algorithm—so what happens then? I see no reason why we should not penalise directors, but how do we establish culpability?”
“I listened with interest to the comments of the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) about who should be held responsible. I am trying to think through how that would work in practice. Frankly, the adjudication mechanism, under Ofcom or whoever it might be, would probably take a rather different view in the case of a company: bluntly, it would go for “on the balance of probabilities”, whereas with an individual it might go for “beyond reasonable doubt”. I am struggling —really struggling—with the question of which would work best. Does my hon. Friend have a view?”
“The clause sounds innocuous and legalistic, especially given that the notices will be issued to remove terrorist or child sexual exploitation content, which we all agree has no place online.”
“Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), knows he is a favourite of mine. He did a fantastic job in his previous role. I think this Bill is a huge improvement, but he has a lot more to do, as he recognises with the Bill returning to Committee. One area on which I disagree with many of my hon. and right hon. Friends is the question of encryption. The Bill allows Ofcom to issue notices directing companies to use “accredited technology,” but it might as well say “magic,” because we do not know what is meant by “accredited technology.” Clause 104 will create a pressure to undermine the end-to-end encryption that is not only desirable but crucial to our telecommunications.”
“The simple fact is that the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) and I differ not in our aim—my new clause 16 is specifically designed to protect children—but on the method of achieving it. Once upon a time, there was a tradition that this Chamber would consider a Companies Bill every year, because things change over time. We ought to have a digital Bill every year, specifically to address not legal but harmful but, “Is it harmful enough to be made illegal?” Obviously, self-harm material is harmful enough to be made illegal. The hon. Lady and I have similar aims, but we have different perspectives on how to attack this. My perspective is as someone who has seen many pieces of legislation go badly wrong despite the best of intentions. The Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon.”
“I do not agree with every detail of what the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said, but I share her aims. She has exactly the right surname for what she does in standing up for children. To avoid the risk of giving my Whip a seizure, I congratulate the Government and the Minister on all they have done so far, both in delaying the Bill and in modifying their stance. My hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight), who is no longer in the Chamber, said that this is five Bills in one and should have had massively more time. At the risk of sounding like a very old man, there was a time when this Bill would have had five days on Report. That is what should have happened with such a big Bill. Opposition Members will not agree, but I am grateful that the Government decided to remove the legal but harmful clause.”
“I could go on and on about the areas in which encryption matters.”
“I will come back to that in some detail. The first time I used encryption it was one-time pads and Morse, so it was a long time ago. The last time was much more recent. The issue here is that clause 104 causes pressure by requiring real-time decryption. The only way to do that is by either having it unencrypted on the server, having it weakly encrypted or creating a back door. I am talking not about metadata, which I will come back to in a second, but about content. In that context, if the content needs to be rapidly accessible, it is bound to lead to weakened encryption. This is perhaps a debate for a specialist forum, but it is very dangerous in a whole series of areas. What do we use encryption for? We use it for banking, for legal and privileged conversations, and for conversations with our constituents and families.”
“That is correct. The companies cannot easily focus the measure on malicious content alone, and that is the problem. With everything we do in dealing with enforcing the law, we have to balance the extent to which we make the job of the law enforcement agency possible—ideally, easy—against the rights we take away from innocent citizens. That is the key balance. Many bad things happen in households but we do not require people to live in houses with glass walls. That shows the intrinsic problem we have.”
“I am looking at my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), the ex-Chairman of the Select Committee, on this issue. If we are going to be the innovators—and we are the digital world innovators— we have to get this right.”
“As I said to the right hon. Member for Barking, I am worried about how we place the responsibility, and how it would lead the courts to behave, and so on. We will debate that in the next few days and when the Bill comes back again. There is one other issue that nothing in this Bill covers, and I am not entirely sure why. Much of the behaviour pattern is algorithmic and it is algorithmic with an explicit design. As a number of people have said, it is designed as clickbait; it is designed to bring people back. We may get to a point, particularly if we come back to this year after year, of saying, “There are going to be rules about your algorithms, so you have to write it into the algorithm. You will not use certain sorts of content, pornographic content and so on, as clickbait.” We need to think about that in a sophisticated and subtle way.”
“I very much agree with my hon. Friend on that. He and I have been allies in the past—and sometimes opponents—and he has often been far ahead of other people. I am afraid that I do not remember the example from the 1970s, as that was before even my time here, but I remember the intervention he made in the 1990s and the fuss it caused. From that point of view, I absolutely agree with him. My new clause is clearly worded and I hope the House will give it proper consideration. It is important that we put something in the Bill on this issue, even if the Government, quite properly, amend it later. I wish to raise one last point, which has come up as we have talked through these issues. I refer to the question of individual responsibility. One or two hon. Ladies on the Opposition Benches have cited algorithmic outcomes.”
“My hon. Friend is exactly right about that. I used the example of clickbait as shorthand. The simple truth is that “AI-generated” is also a misnomer, because these things are not normally AI; they are normally algorithms written specifically to recommend and to maximise returns and revenue. We are not surprised at that. Why should we be? After all, these are commercial companies we are talking about and that is what they are going to do. Every commercial company in the world operates within a regulatory framework that prevents them from making profits out of antisocial behaviour.”
“Perhaps we should run my speech against— [Laughter.] I am teasing. I am coming to the end of my comments, Madam Deputy Speaker. The simple truth is that these mechanisms—call them what you like—are controllable if we put our mind to it. It requires subtlety, testing the thing out in practice and enormous expert input, but we can get this right.”
“I rise in support of the right hon. Gentleman. The production order structure, as it stands, is already being abused: I know of a case in place today. The measure should be stronger and clearer—the Bill contains almost nothing on this—on the protection of journalists, whistleblowers and all people for public interest reasons.”
“All of us in this House have a duty to uphold its rules and institutions, but by knowingly breaching the confidentiality of the Speaker’s correspondence, the hon. Member has done the opposite. This is a clear breach of our rules. The proper response after Mr Speaker’s censure of him for his behaviour last week was for the hon. Member to accept the seriousness of his actions, apologise properly to the House, and delete the offending tweets. If he had done so, I imagine that would have been the end of the matter; indeed, I would not have made my point of order on the day. However, he failed to apologise, and instead compounded his misdemeanour. Taking to Twitter once again, he claimed that he “offered no apology as there was no misrepresentation.””
“He broke all the conventions on the privacy of Speakers’ correspondence on privilege, and disclosed a partial and partisan account of Mr Speaker’s letter. He said on Twitter: “He’s considered my letter, but he’s decided to take no further action.” In doing so, he implied that it was Mr Speaker’s unfettered decision not to refer the matter to the Privileges Committee. Nowhere in his filmed statement did he tell his followers that Mr Speaker was following normal procedure by accepting the will of the DCMS Committee—I imagine that is why Mr Speaker described his action last week as giving a “partial and biased account” of the correspondence—and nowhere in his statement did he tell his followers that it was he himself who sat on that Committee and signed off the conclusions.”
“Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) sits on that Committee. He did not ask for a Division before the report was published; he did not vote against it; he did not publish a dissenting opinion on that report. Instead, he wrote to Mr Speaker asking him to give precedence to matters reported on by the Committee, even though the Committee itself was not seeking such precedence. As would be expected, Mr Speaker did the usual thing, and—in his own words—decided to “respect the Committee’s assessment of the situation.” —[ Official Report , 23 November 2022; Vol. 723, c. 291.] After Mr Speaker had replied to the hon. Member privately, as is the convention with privilege issues, the hon. Member took to Twitter. He brandished a copy of Mr Speaker’s letter in his video.”
“Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries) before the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport while she was Secretary of State, the Committee opened an investigation into several claims that she made, but ultimately it decided against any action. The Committee as a whole published a special report— [ Interruption. ] [Hon. Members: “He’s turned up.”] Oh, right. The Committee as a whole published a special report, which said: “we may have sought a referral to the Privileges Committee but, as her claims have not inhibited the work of the Committee and she no longer has a position of power over the future of Channel 4, we are, instead, publishing this Report to enable the House, and its Members, to draw their own conclusions.” It is crucial in this matter to remember that the hon.”
“As for upholding the rights of Back Benchers and Opposition Members, we need only look at Mr Speaker’s fierce criticism of the Government during the statement yesterday, when he upheld our rights. It is therefore vital for Members to protect the integrity, impartiality and apolitical nature of the Speaker’s office. That point is clearly recognised in “Erskine May”—hardly a polemical document—at paragraph 15.14, which states that “reflections on the character of the Speaker or accusations of partiality in the discharge of their duties” are a punishable offence. “Erskine May” also recognises that a Member’s behaviour and conduct outside this House count towards that. I turn to the substantive motion. Following an appearance by my right hon.”
“Ever since Speaker Lenthall told King Charles I that “I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me,” the Speaker has been the spokesman, champion and protector of the Members and institutions of this place, as well as being the impartial arbiter of our proceedings. If hon. Members think that that is just a piece of ancient history, they ought to consider more recent times. Mr Speaker’s more recent predecessors have been criticised on issues of impartiality or for failing to protect Members: for example, Mr Speaker Martin’s failure to protect my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) was highly controversial at the time and very important.”
“I beg to move, That the matter of the actions and subsequent conduct of the hon Member for Ochil and South Perthshire in relation to correspondence from the Speaker on a matter of privilege be referred to the Committee of Privileges. I have been advised by the Clerks that this is a very narrow motion, so I will stick strictly and exclusively to the matter at hand. Before I come to the substantive motion, however, I want to say something to those members of the public who may think that this is an arcane or even abstruse issue.”
“He claimed that he “didn’t ‘release’ the Speaker’s letter. I summarised it entirely fairly.” That is untrue. He misled the country by deliberately withholding the way in which this decision had been arrived at and his part in it. He also retweeted an account that was directly critical of Mr Speaker, saying that Mr Speaker’s statement had been merely “Ermine pursuing theatrics” and that Mr Speaker was placing his “integrity above that of parliament”.”
“The hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire had again compounded his misdemeanour by deliberately attempting to undermine the impartiality and integrity of the Speaker’s office. It is the role of the Speaker of this House to protect Members and stand up for its Back Benchers, and it is the Members’ duty, on our part, to uphold the dignity of the Speaker’s office.”
“I do not believe any of this conduct to be appropriate for a Member of this House. However, that is not for me to judge, as a single, ordinary Member, which is why this is not a motion to condemn, but a motion to pass the matter to the Privileges Committee of the House of Commons.”