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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“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This is similar to the point of order made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner). It is about qualified privilege, public record and the protection of the reputation of ordinary citizens, not necessary political people. On 20 April, in response to a parliamentary question, the Prime Minister referred to Mr Suliman Gani and said, “this man supports IS”—Islamic State. That is an incredibly serious allegation, with massive reputational implications. It might restrict somebody’s right to travel, perhaps to the US, and it could even put his safety and that of his family at risk. It transpires that the allegation was not true.”
“As my hon. Friend knows, I am in favour of electronic voting, but the route that he is taking is the correct one. The one real fear out there, which can be put paid to right now, is that this approach is designed simply to delay the onset of online voting. Will he tell the House that, when the Minister receives the report, it will be dealt with with appropriate dispatch?”
“The hon. Gentleman comes right to the point. He does not have to rely on the good will of this Minister, who I am sure will be in the Cabinet in six months. The reason I asked the Minister to outline at the Dispatch Box the Government’s intent on receipt of the report was that, if another Minister were ever tempted not to follow the explicit policy line we have now, the hon. Gentleman and I could hold that Minister to account in this Chamber.”
“I fully intend to support and vote for this important motion. When I was in Syria two weeks ago, I interviewed about 23 or 24 people from various groups who had suffered, including Christians and Alawites. My key point in the debate is that not just Daesh was responsible, but Daesh and its allies. We should remember that when we come to bring these cases before the international court.”
“I would go further and say that it probably has cost lives because bad decisions were made. Indeed, many of the revelations in the report will come too late to be useful in relation to decisions that have already been taken. This is the irrecoverable harm that has been caused by the delays—the unconscionable delays—in this inquiry.”
“Had the House not blocked military intervention, we could have ended up as military supporters of our now sworn enemies, IS. In Iraq, the UK is of course involved in the ongoing civil war that has raged since the invasion in 2003. There are lessons to learn from the Iraq war about our foreign policy, our political decisions to go to war and our military operations. The longer we leave it, the less useful these lessons will be, and the more likely it is that we will make the same mistakes. When decisions such as those that were made in Libya, Syria and Iraq are made without knowledge of the facts, mistakes are made and sometimes people die as a result. Therefore, it is not hyperbole to say that the delay to the Iraq inquiry could cost lives because bad decisions may be made.”
“We demand that the Government publish the report as soon as security clearance is complete, and certainly no more than two weeks after its receipt. While this inquiry has lumbered on, there have been at least three significant foreign policy decisions that could have been dramatically different had we had the benefit of the Iraq inquiry’s findings. The decision to intervene in Libya was intended to prevent a massacre, but since then, partly because we changed the aim to regime change, the country has descended into civil war and miserable, fractured chaos. On the question of regime change, when the Prime Minister first asked this House to support military action against the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, the House turned him down.”
“I cannot believe that clearance will take any longer than that, given, as we already know, that every single piece of this report has already been negotiated with Whitehall, presumably on the basis of security considerations. Given that, and the Prime Minister’s declaration that he is as exasperated as anyone by the delays to publication, the public ought to expect the report to be published in the first week of May. That should be the reasonable conclusion, but that is not the case. There are now reports that the publication of the report will be postponed until after the EU referendum at the end of June. This is frankly outrageous. It is for this reason that I, together with right hon. and hon. Members from all parties in this House, have called for this debate.”
“It is not intended to allow protected negotiation between the commission and teams of expensive lawyers—incidentally, those expensive lawyers are paid for by the taxpayer—who negotiate ad nauseam, at any cost, to protect their client’s reputation, even over and above the national interest. That is what is happening. We know that finally, after all that, the Iraq inquiry is now due to submit its report to the Government next week. The next stage will be security clearance before publication. The Prime Minister stated last October that he fully expected security clearance to take less than two weeks, the time taken by the equally enormous Saville inquiry. Let us remember that the Saville inquiry took decades to come to its conclusion, but it was cleared in two weeks.”
“The process was clearly frustrating for Sir John. He queried why it was that “individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot”. He was of course referring to Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell’s respective diaries, which quoted such information, again without Whitehall veto. Then came the excruciatingly long process of Maxwellisation. This is meant to be a process of notifying any people criticised in the report so they can correct factual errors and be ready to respond to those criticisms when they become public.”
“There have been long negotiations between the inquiry and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, and his predecessors over the disclosure of some material, most notably correspondence between ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush. There is no point whatsoever in the inquiry if it cannot publish the documents that show how the decision to go to war was arrived at. That is, after all, the point of half the inquiry. Chilcot wrote in a letter to the Cabinet Secretary: “The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK’s involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK’s continuing involvement, is central to its considerations”. The negotiations between Chilcot and Jeremy Heywood concluded only in May 2014, when it was announced that an agreement had been reached.”
“It also covered issues of incredible sensitivity in terms of national security, international relations, intelligence agency involvement, judicial propriety and ministerial decision making—the whole gamut. Sir Richard Scott was allowed to decide himself what he would release into the public domain, unfettered by Whitehall, so that whole tranche of time—that couple of years—would have been unnecessary. By contrast, Sir John Chilcot, a former permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office who chaired an incredibly sensitive inquiry into intercept—some Members of the House may remember that—and who is considered a responsible keeper of the Government’s secrets, is tied up in protocols subject to the whim of Whitehall.”
“Nevertheless, at that time—more than five years ago—Sir John Chilcot said: “It is going to take some months to deliver the report itself.” It has been 62 months and counting. Then the inquiry started the classification process. Under the inquiry protocols, there are nine different categories of reason for turning down the classification—for preventing Sir John not from seeing the information, but from publishing it. What the inquiry can publish is determined by a series of protocols that have criteria so broad that a veto on application can be applied virtually at Whitehall’s discretion. Compare that with the Scott inquiry into the Iraqi super-gun affair.”
“It has been more than a year since this House, in a similar debate, called for the Government to publish the Iraq inquiry report as soon as possible, and yet that report has still not been published. It is no surprise that one of the most pre-eminent politicians of our era, the highly respected and very civilised ex-Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, branded the delays a scandal. He is right. They are a disgrace. In 2009, the then Leader of the Opposition, who is now Prime Minister, was scornful about the suggestion that the report would not be published before the 2010 election. In 2009, Sir John Chilcot told families that he would complete the inquiry in a year if he could, but that it would definitely not take more than two years. In fact, the evidence taking did not conclude until 2 February 2011.”
“It has done untold damage to the reputation of the west throughout the middle east and, indeed, among Muslim populations at home and abroad. Initiated to protect the west from terrorism, it has, in fact, destroyed the integrity of the Iraqi state and triggered a persistent civil war that has created the conditions for perhaps the worst terrorist threat yet to the west: ISIL or ISIS. The war has done huge harm to the self-confidence and unity of the west, in effect neutering our foreign policy. The war was, with hindsight, the greatest foreign policy failure of this generation, and I say that as someone who was misled into voting for it. It has been more than six and a half years since Gordon Brown launched the Iraq inquiry and more than five years since it heard its last evidence.”
“Instead, it exacerbated and massively increased a threat of terrorism that does exist. It was supposedly fought in defence of our values, but it has led to the erosion of civil liberties at home and the use of torture abroad. Because we were misled on the matter, Parliament voted for the war by 412 to 149. So there were very good reasons for setting up the inquiry in the first place. The war led to the deaths of 4,800 allied soldiers, 179 of them British. The lowest estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties was 134,000, but plausible estimates put the number up to four times higher. The war immediately created 3.4 million refugees, and half of them fled the country. It cost the British taxpayer £9.6 billion, and it cost the American taxpayer $1,100 billion.”
“I beg to move, That this House calls on the Government to conclude the National Security checking of the Iraq Inquiry report as soon as possible in order to allow publication of that report as soon as possible after 18 April 2016, and no later than two weeks after that date, in line with the undertaking on time taken for such checking by the Prime Minister in his letter to Sir John Chilcot of 29 October 2015. As an aside, Mr Speaker, I never cease to be impressed by your short-term memory. The second Iraq war was started to liberate the Iraqi people. Instead, it shattered their country. It was intended to stabilise the middle east. Instead, it destabilised the middle east. It was intended to remove a threat of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.”
“It is correcting, enhancing and improving that knowledge that the inquiry report is all about. I am no pacifist, but I find myself horrified at the thoughtless, aggressive and unnecessary interventions by the west in areas that it does not understand. I did not like the Gaddafi regime; I did not like the Saddam Hussein regime; I do not particularly like the Bashar Assad regime, but ripping them out has led to something even worse. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) is therefore absolutely right in his analysis, which demonstrates why this report and its speed of preparation are so important.”
“I do not think it is a question of “may be”; I think there will be the continued disruption of international affairs and the continued threat of terrorism. Europol’s assessment that there are 5,000 jihadists in Europe implies an arrival rate of 1,000 a year, and the rate is going up, not down. It is clear that the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That brings us to a significant point. When the individual Prime Ministers involved in each of the decisions I mentioned made their decision, I am sure that in their own mind they were doing the right thing—they were trying to save lives, to save a civilisation or to intervene to prevent further terrorism. The trouble is that every single one of them made simplistic decisions, without detailed understanding. The complexity of the issues they were reaching into was beyond their knowledge.”
“My right hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not follow him down his comparison between Dr Strangelove and past Prime Ministers, but he is right in one respect: the most important element of this is what we learn from our mistakes. However, there are also issues of accountability and closure, which I will return to in a moment.”
“I will come back to this issue in the latter part of my speech. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and I have a very dear common friend who thinks that Mr Blair should be at The Hague, so there is a range of opinion on this, but to come to that conclusion today would be to pre-empt the report. I do not intend to do that, but I do intend to turn to the issue of accountability in a minute.”
“Someone said to me this morning that I might have summarised the rather long motion rather more crisply by saying, “This House instructs Sir John Chilcot simply to press ‘send’.””
“It cannot be right that those who are to be criticised can delay publication for their own interests, so I hope that strict time controls will arise as a result. There is no reason for further delay. It has been suggested that the delay between the report being security cleared and its publication is because it needs to be proof-read and typeset. That would be unacceptable if true. The report is already in electronic format. It has already been repeatedly checked for accuracy, and will be checked again by the security services. It will have been read by more people than some newspapers. The fact is that the report has been pored over by many people for five years. We are in the 21st century, not the era of hot lead typesetting.”
“That is why I would not be drawn by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield, who is a very great friend of mine. The report has to answer those questions; what the tabloid and other press do with the report the day after publication is not for me. I will press on, briefly, with the lessons to learn not just about the war but about how we should conduct these inquiries. The Government now intend to review the Maxwellisation process, in which those who have been criticised in a report are given the chance to respond. That is to be welcomed, as Maxwellisation has been responsible for half the delays here. It is clear that strict time controls are needed for future inquiries.”
“The hon. Gentleman has made his point well, but one of the issues that the report will face up to, one hopes, is the veracity of what was told to the House that day. That will be one of the key issues, which is why the argument between Sir John Chilcot and Whitehall is very important. Reading between the lines of his letters, that argument was very much about what decisions were taken before the House made its decision and after—what was told to the House, whether it was accurate, whether it was based on impartial briefings and whether, indeed, the politics of the issue coloured the views of important components of the state. I am not going to attempt to answer those questions today, but I would be incredibly disappointed if the commission’s report did not actually answer them in plain English.”
“That is to be expected and must be right. However, this is principally about learning from mistakes that we made as a nation, and ensuring that we do not make the same mistakes again. It is also about remembering those who have suffered great loss, and giving them some measure of solace in the truth and some degree of closure. This is about doing the honourable thing by those who have made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their nation, and to delay any further for no good reason would be an insult to those brave soldiers who died in the Iraq war, and a cruel insult to their families who have waited more than six years for a proper answer.”
“To give the House a simple comparison, the Israeli Government appointed the Winograd commission in 2006 to investigate the war with Lebanon. It produced its interim report not in seven years but in seven months, and it was highly critical of the existing Government that had set it up. The final report was produced after 17 months. Any argument for delay on grounds of political sensitivity or national security would be far more pressing in Israel, where that is a matter of daily life and death to all its citizens. Because of that, it is also a matter of very high and extremely important politics. If Israel can produce a report in seven and 17 months, we should be able to do it in a lot less than seven years. Some people will, of course, be held to account in this report; otherwise it will properly be dismissed as a whitewash.”
“The Conservatives and Labour both supported the war. As the hon. Member for Nottingham North said, half the Labour party stood back or voted against it, and there is no advantage either way. The inquiry was started by Labour and supported by the Prime Minister. It is therefore inconceivable that the Government should seek to wait until after the June referendum to publish the report, and I hope that when the Minister replies to the debate, he will make it clear that that will not happen—I am sure he will address that point directly. Let us put this issue in context. If the report waits until June, it will be seven years since the inquiry started, and some parents of the dead soldiers will have been waiting 10 or 12 years for an answer.”
“That is what two years of the argument was about. If there is a single redaction, I and others will be looking at it very closely and asking why it was not redacted years ago instead of now. The hon. Lady is absolutely right about the rights of the families in this affair. There is no doubt that the whole country is fed up with waiting for the final report, but none more so than the families of those 179 British soldiers who died fighting for their country in Iraq. The families have suffered for years as this inquiry has dragged on and on, and it would be disgraceful to make them wait for months longer, just because the Government are worried about what effect—if any—the report will have on the referendum. I cannot imagine what impact that might be, given that there is no party political advantage in this to either side.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right, but, to be honest with her, I will be astonished if there are any redactions in the report. I remember that once, when I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, a report was given to me about the overrun of MI5 and MI6 on their buildings. It had four chapters: the introduction, the chapter on MI6, the chapter on MI5 and the conclusion. The chapters on MI5 and MI6 were virtually identical, except that all the redactions were different. We rang up MI5 and said, “MI6 has agreed to all these,” then we rang up MI6 and said, “MI5 has agreed to all these,” and then we removed nearly all the redactions. They were political—they were redactions to preserve the interests of the bureaucracy involved, not the national interest. The simple truth is that the facts in the report have already been cleared.”
“My hon. Friend has been a Defence Minister and shadow Defence Minister. What is his opinion of the argument put at the time that, whenever our forces are in the field, we cannot have an inquiry, which seems madness to me? We had a successful inquiry into Norway, for example.”
“The House needs to address this idea that we cannot debate or investigate anything when troops are in the field. When I have spoken to our troops in the field, they have said that they want our democracy to work properly. They want to feel that they are fighting for an honourable cause. In future, we should dismiss this idea that we are undermining our troops; we are standing up for something that will ensure that their lives are not wasted in the future.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that the criticisms he is rightly laying at the door of several different establishments should properly be laid at the top of those establishments? Just before the Iraq war, a regimental colleague of ours serving in the planning section of the Ministry of Defence said to me, “David, I have never known a war in which the British officer class has been less happy”—so somebody was asking questions and not getting any answers.”
“and hon.—and sometimes gallant—Members, and this is a matter of honour: let us give those families closure. Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House calls on the Government to conclude the National Security checking of the Iraq Inquiry report as soon as possible in order to allow publication of that report as soon as possible after 18 April 2016, and no later than two weeks after that date, in line with the undertaking on time taken for such checking by the Prime Minister in his letter to Sir John Chilcot of 29 October 2015.”
“This has been a very good debate. Every speech has been impressive, well-informed and passionate. There are three reasons why Chilcot matters: one is learning lessons; one is holding people to account; and one is giving closure to those who have suffered the loss of their nearest and dearest. From the point of view of the last of those reasons, I want to say through the Minister to Sir John Chilcot that publication in June or July is incomprehensible and unacceptable. In the Gallery is Peter Brierley, whose son Shaun died 13 years ago in the service of his country. In my mind, he represents the 179 families who have lost sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, loved ones, wives and, in some cases, mothers and fathers. We owe them a debt. We call ourselves right hon.”
“Between lunch and tea, now. In your statement, Mr Speaker, you said that two days had been agreed by all parties, but that was actually agreed by those on the Front Benches. Many of us believe that this enormous constitutional Bill balancing privacy and security requires four days on the Floor of the House, as there are at least a dozen major topics that need to be dealt with and we will not be able to do so in Committee. Can you advise us as Back Benchers, not Front Benchers, how on earth we get this Bill debated properly?”
“As the Home Secretary says, this is an extremely important power but also a very sensitive one. As I understand it, she exercises it about 2,500 times a year, or about 10 times in each working day. Given that they are so sensitive, how long does she take, typically, over one of those decisions?”
“On the Wilson doctrine, the wording of the Bill, as I understand it, relates to communications between Members of Parliament and constituents. That does not cover the whole Wilson doctrine, which covers communications between Members of Parliament and whistleblowers, between Members of Parliament and each other, and between Members of Parliament and campaigning organisations. They should all be protected. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree?”
“Other countries, in particular the most unpleasant ones, are always happy to use Britain as an example for something that they should not be doing. That is why I opposed 90-day detention and many other illiberal things that too many Governments have done.”
“The staff of the Senate judiciary committee then went through the claims one by one and found only one case, and it was not a terrorist attack but an $8,000 money laundering case. That is how useful the powers were and that is why they have been curbed. This Bill, or something like it, is absolutely necessary. It replaces 66-plus other statutory mechanisms, so, in the interests of transparency, we need something to put in their place, but it grants sweeping powers with insufficient safeguards and not enough consideration of privacy. I ask all parts of the House to press for more time on Report to allow for reasonable amendments to the legislation that will put in place a world-standard law. I will finish on this point.”
“Most damningly, the American President’s privacy and civil liberties oversight board said that it was “aware of no instance in which the” NSA’s bulk records programme “directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.” There are genuine concerns that the collect-it-all approach actually makes things worse, which goes back to the point about Bill Binney referred to by the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick). I say this to the House and to the ISC: the Senate intelligence committee, the ISC’s more powerful equivalent in the US, was initially persuaded that bulk data collection had prevented over 50 terrorist attacks.”
“The powers allow for the interception of vast quantities of foreign and domestic communications and the acquisition of the entire nation’s phone and internet records, and permit industrial-scale exploitation of phones and computers. The fundamental question is whether those powers are effective. In the US, the bulk collection of citizens’ data has been heavily curbed as it was considered to be “not essential to preventing terrorist attacks”.”
“There are many other significant flaws in the Bill that must be put right, such as the lack of sufficient privacy protections, the collection of ill-defined bulk personal datasets, wide and too-easy access to retained communications data, the prime ministerial appointment of judicial commissioners—it goes on and on. I have about a dozen items here, but I do not intend to go through them all. In my final couple of minutes, I want to touch on the bulk capabilities. The House should be under no misapprehension as to how broad and potent the powers are, even though the Chairman of ISC, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), is quite right to say that the agencies do try to be as economical as they can in using them.”
“We saw it in the Intelligence Services Act 1994, which I mentioned, and in the Telecommunications Act of, ironically, 1984, which followed the decision to privatise British Telecom. That is why this Bill must be drafted incredibly precisely and carefully. As it stands, the language in the Bill is designed to confuse. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe, a previous Home Secretary, and I were talking about this and both of us had trouble understanding its 250 pages. That must be put right and that is why I am concerned about the Report stage.”
“This is extremely dangerous to the operation of justice. It could destroy equality of arms, which in turn could undermine perfectly proper cases against terrorists, leading to their being freed on the basis of an improper prosecution. That single example of the actions of the agencies and the Home Office is important in its own right, but I cite it here as a demonstration of what has been happening over the past 20 years. Owing to the difficulty of the counter-terrorism task and the opportunities afforded by technology, the agencies in particular, but also the police and other organisations, have quite understandably sought to extend their powers, using, in this case, the silence of RIPA to erode legal privilege. We have seen that again and again.”
“However, the Government of the day chose to interpret that silence as acquiescence that RIPA did allow for the surveillance of privileged communications. So we went from a situation in which recording equipment was switched off in those circumstances to one in which privileged conversations were recorded and kept in a separate, red-flagged database. That was how it worked. This matter eventually came out in 2009, when two Law Lords, Lord Phillips and Lord Neuberger, expressed their incredulity that the Government had in effect been “sanctioning illegal surveillance”. At least in those initial stages, however, the illegally collected information was red-flagged and kept from being allowed to pervert the judicial process. Then, either during or before 2014, the rules were changed to allow the Government lawyers to see the intercepts.”
“It was never envisaged, for example, that that legislation would provide for the acquisition of bulk personal datasets. I could give the House many further examples, but time is short so I shall give a single example of how, with the best of intentions, the creep of surveillance has happened. It relates to the erosion of legal privilege. Until the late 1990s, when an intercept or bug was recording a criminal suspect, the bug was turned off the moment the suspect started talking to his lawyer. That is what used to happen; the position was absolutely clear. Then in 2000, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was introduced. RIPA was silent on legal privilege. It was simply not mentioned in the Act at all.”
“However, the presentation of this Bill has required the Home Office publicly to avow a vast range of surveillance powers that to date have existed in secret. These powers seem to be rather greater than those used by our allies—certainly greater than those used by America or Germany. Some of them would have been struck down as unconstitutional in both those countries. What seems to have happened is that these powers have been developed over the past 20 years using a vast thicket of existing legislation, largely without the knowledge of Parliament. Many of the agencies’ current capabilities were never considered when the legislation that underpins them was created. I can say with absolute certainty that that is true of the Intelligence Services Act 1994, which as a Minister I took through Parliament.”
“When I was listening to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) talking earlier about steaming open letters, I was reminded of the fact that, in 1929, the then American Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, shut down the State Department’s code breaking department with the words: “Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” That was quaint even then, and the action was quickly reversed. Today, everybody recognises the vital importance of targeted surveillance of dangerous criminals of all sorts. I think everyone in this House wants to see our intelligence agencies and police forces equipped with effective measures that will help them to do their job. I do not think that there is any difference between us on that issue.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. For five or six years, the number of national insurance numbers issued to EU migrants has been hundreds of thousands higher than the official immigration figures. That implies that the official immigration figures may be a dramatic underestimate. We can know the truth of the matter only if Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs releases its data on active EU national insurance numbers, but HMRC has refused to do so. Will the Prime Minister instruct HMRC to release those statistics immediately so that we can understand the truth about European Union immigration?”