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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“I suggest that Members make a list of the names of all who have been ruled against by the Committee, separate them into two columns consisting of Front Benchers and Back Benchers—I do not suggest that the two columns should consist of those who are within the gilded circle and those who are the mavericks—and compare the treatments of people who have committed the same crime. They will then find two classes of justice. We do not deliver justice in this House; we deliver an opinion of the establishment of the House, and that is why the public are not wrong to view our systems as intolerable. Let me give one example. I shall not give the examples of those who have been let off, because that might be mean in the circumstances, but I will give an example of someone who, in my view, was very badly treated.”
“He might stand on his own account like Dick Taverne, like the hon. Member for Clacton, or indeed like me, but he would not survive the normal political process. This is, as I have said, a mechanism for political expulsion. I might find that tolerable if our mechanisms in the House met any sort of judicial test, but, having been here for some 25 years, I suggest Members conduct an experiment. I say this with no ill reflection on the people who serve on and chair the Standards and Privileges Committee.”
“Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell), I shall vote for this Bill, although I must add that I do not view it as a recall Bill. If anything, it is a parliamentary expulsion Bill, because it makes it easy for the establishment of the House to expel someone from the House. Let us imagine the circumstances. A Member is found wanting by his peers in the Standards and Privileges Committee—no doubt amid a vast hue and cry from a number of tabloid and red-top newspapers—and his constituents are then told “If 10% of you vote in the referendum, this man will go.” No matter that 90% of them might want him to stay; in those torrid circumstances, only 10% need to vote, and he will be expelled. I do not think that anyone who was criticised and set up in that way would survive the process, or would be reselected by his party thereafter.”
“I think that 10 years ago I would have opposed the Bill, because I would have taken the conventional view that has been expressed by one or two Government Members today. The last decade, however, has led me to believe that the chasm that has grown between the political classes and the ordinary voters—the population of the country—has become too wide. Some of that has, of course, been due to the expenses crisis, but it is by no means either the only or the first reason. As my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) pointed out, the current trend has been ongoing for a long time, but I believe that it is now approaching a crisis point. I have therefore concluded that a recall Bill is necessary, and, like the hon.”
“That is why we are better off trusting the public than trusting the hierarchy in this House.”
“This point has been made a number of times, particularly by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)but also by others. My hon. Friend is presuming that his constituents would vote on the basis of a simple political judgment, according to whether they wanted a Labour Government, a Tory Government, a Liberal Government or even a UKIP Government, but I do not believe that our constituents behave like that. I believe that they behave in a moral way and make judgments about us. I have discussed this matter with my constituents. Many of those who have never voted for me in my 20-odd years in the constituency would not vote to remove me on that basis. They would not make such a judgment on a political basis. They would recognise that this was a quasi-judicial judgment.”
“This is an incredibly important Bill, but the Government have got it quite materially wrong. This is one of those rare occasions on which it is for the House of Commons to make a judgment that will decide our own future.”
“There was much argument in Committee about the figure of 20%. Some people talked about 25%; others talked about less. The simple truth is that 20% is pretty much the norm internationally. Most, if not all, other countries exercising this mechanism do not experience many vexatious actions. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones)made legitimate points about the role of big money in this exercise, but only a Californian governor has been replaced throughout the century in which this mechanism has been in place in America, despite the fact that many people would have been vehemently opposed by big corporate interests. In any event, we can deal with that through the regulations and laws that will surround this Bill when we make it an Act of Parliament.”
“The hon. Gentleman misses the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park made. This would involve not an electronic collection but a physical collection of votes. People would have to get out and go down to their town hall or their polling station. I think we have nominated four locations for any given constituency. We thought about this very point; indeed, it is one of the things we crowd-tested with 40,000 people. They recognised, as did members of 38 Degrees, that an electronic vote would be the wrong way to carry out this process. It has to be a process in which people exercise a moral judgment and overcome a physical hurdle by going down to one of those locations and doing something about it. Again, this shows that we are better off trusting our own constituents.”
“Does the provision also deal with the issue of limited companies being created to provide public services? The most egregious example was the Association of Chief Police Officers, which, as a limited company, could refuse to answer FOI requests, even though it did serious and sensitive public work.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing a debate about one of the great threats to modern civilization: the prospective failure of antibiotics. Since he is not going to focus on agriculture, might I ask whether he agrees that, because some 50% of antibiotics are used in agriculture in this country, and 80% in the United States, if we are to take an international lead, as the Prime Minister would wish us to, we have to clean up our own act at home, in the way that the Dutch have in agriculture?”
“Q3. As the Conservative party and only the Conservative party will deliver a referendum and a renegotiation on Europe, will the Prime Minister tell us his intentions of bringing to this House the red line issues that will feature in his renegotiations, and can he give us a preview of some of those issues today?”
“I want to take up my right hon. Friend’s exact point. Does the lack of strategic objective not manifest itself in one particular way? We have heard that this could go on for some time, but we have not heard a criterion for stopping, let alone a criterion for what we are going to achieve.”
“Forgive me, but I speak as an English, rather than as a Scottish, Member of Parliament. The issue is not—for many of us, I think—whether or not the legislation is generally a good idea; it is the confusion over why the Scottish Parliament cannot carry this out itself. What is stopping the Scottish Parliament; what is the confusion?”
“There is another way in which the Bill is a gift to the Scottish nationalist argument. No one has argued that this problem is unique to Scotland. Indeed, it occurs across the whole country. If the Bill were passed, it ought to be called simply the Responsible Parking Bill, rather than the Responsible Parking (Scotland) Bill. Why should Scotland be different in this respect?”
“The two requests to the European Court of Justice came not from bogus organisations, but from the Irish High Court and the Constitutional Court of Austria. Those were therefore serious revisions and it was entirely probable that we would find ourselves in the situation that we are in today. Why has it taken three months? Why was the legislation not pre-prepared? Why was the deal with the Labour party not struck in advance? My understanding is that there was an argument inside the Government between the two halves of the coalition. That argument has gone on for three months. What the coalition could not decide in three months, this House has to decide in one day. That seems to me entirely improper.”
“To follow on from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), I think that we are looking at a third category: a piece of legislation that is being renewed, but that has fallen into disrepute over the years in which it has been used. That is why this Bill is more important than a simple renewal. There is an emergency—a legal emergency—but it started on 8 April. It was eminently predictable because, as far back as 2010, the European data protection supervisor said that the data retention directive was “without doubt the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the EU”. Data retention has been struck down in Germany and Romania, and there have been difficulties in other countries.”
“No, I am going to be very fast and finish on this point. Parliament has three roles: to scrutinise legislation, to prevent unintended consequences and to defend the freedom and liberty of our constituents. The motion undermines all three and we should oppose it.”
“This is more a philosophical than a practical point for the Home Secretary, but what is the implication of our demanding extraterritorial powers for the likes of Google and others for, say, China, Russia and other unpleasant powers claiming the same power?”
“The right hon. Lady is making an interesting point. Is not the implication of her last six sentences that the Labour party should support the sunset clause being brought forward to Christmas of this year, which would force the debate that she is asking for?”
“The result of that—the point that I think the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) was referring to—is that too many people have too much access, too easily, to too much data. That is the core point. Therefore, we use this power in that respect more often than many of our international colleagues. There were 514,000 authorisations and notices reported in the RIPA 2013 report. It is difficult to compare countries, but to give a partial comparison—”
“The Court, as a number of speakers have mentioned, branded the untargeted mass collection of our data—European rather than just ours—as a “wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with” our “fundamental rights.” It is arguably the case that, in some ways, Britain is the most extreme example of that across western Europe. Because the Bill does nothing to correct that particular aspect, it is likely to face legal challenge, and may well fail as a result. It will not be beneficial to security in this country if that happens. Much of this failure hinges on the fact that access to communication data in this country is not subject to judicial approval. It is one of the differences between ourselves and America and some other European countries. It is approved by officers of the same organisation that request it.”
“But the harsh truth is that Parliament has been a weak defender of our freedoms this past 20 years, and the process we face today, crashing the Bill through the Commons in a single day—even more poignantly on reshuffle day; I see the empty Benches around me—is an awful demonstration of that. One consequence of that slack attitude is that we have bumped more and more frequently into treaty obligations and international court judgments against us, where Britain should be the shining example, not the villain of the piece. The Bill does nothing to correct that.”
“Certainly many Liberals thought that, and a number of Conservatives too, and some Members of other parties. That may be one reason why the Government are uncomfortable about giving this Bill a full procedure over several weeks, with a proper Committee and Report stage, and so on; because they may find that they get a tighter definition of RIPA than they previously had. The House knows that I am not a great fan of the British Government being told what to do by the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights. I much prefer that British liberties—our freedom, our privacy—are protected by Parliament.”
“It is a particular pleasure to follow my old sparring partner from east Yorkshire on this as much as on any other issue. As I have only a short time, I shall focus on one issue alone out of the four that affect the Bill. When this Government brought a different but related Bill before the House, the so-called snooper’s charter, it was, frankly, an embarrassment. It was pilloried by the Joint Committee on the draft Communications Data Bill and heavily criticised by both MPs and Lords. One clear fact that arose from that review was that many thought that RIPA, the Bill upon which this legislation is based, was simply not fit for purpose, that it was too loose, and that if the snooper’s charter came before the House at some later stage, many would use it to rewrite RIPA.”
“They were badly designed in 2000—I am sorry to say to the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw)—and they have got worse with the passage of time and technology. The Government have not listened, and accordingly have left themselves open to legal challenge. While the Bill may be law by the end of the week, it may be junk by the end of the year.”
“At one time this firm distinction stood up and was credible, but now, because of technology, rather than going the other way and making things more difficult for the agencies, the scale of the internet and mobile phone technology has provided an intimate picture of people’s personal lives. In the ECJ’s words: “This data, taken as a whole, may provide very precise information on the private lives of the persons whose data are retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, activities carried out, social relationships and the social environments frequented.” In other words, it is an incredibly intrusive piece of information. As I said, I do not like taking lessons from the ECJ, but on this they are absolutely correct. These measures are just not proportionate.”
“The intention was that data be used only for the purposes of prevention, detection or criminal prosecution of offences that may be considered sufficiently serious to justify such an interference. There are 100,000 prosecutions for indictable offences that face custodial sentences in the UK each year. About 80,000 end up in prison. We are talking about 500,000-odd approvals to deal with fewer than 100,000 prosecutions. The Government seek to diminish the importance and sensitivity of communications data by distinguishing it from the content of the communications.”
“That is not correct, I am afraid. The authorisation process does not go to the commissioners. It comes back afterwards to the commissioners. The point about this is the numbers. The Americans, with whom we can partially compare, use only 39,000 to 57,000 references in a given year. In Europe, the country that least admires the privacy of its nationals is France. Its total metadata approvals is 35,958—36,000. If we add in all the other approval processes, it still comes to less than half of ours. So access to our data has insufficient safeguards. There is no prior review to access by a court or independent body, and after-the-event oversight—the commission oversight—is incredibly under-resourced.”
“My hon. Friend says, quite properly, that there is time for those of us who are concerned to make our points, but there is no time for us to research those points. There are significant legal and practical issues involved, and some of the issues are difficult to research because most of them are secret. One weekend is a ridiculous time scale in which to consider something that goes to the heart of the fundamental relationship between the state and the citizen.”
“The Minister is conflating two issues that amendment 2 seeks to deal with. First, this House has not had the time to research, consult and debate this issue. Secondly, the technology underlying the problems we face is changing. It is not mutually exclusive to address the first issue—lack of debate, consultation, research and knowledge—through, in proper, slow time, a consultative process in September and a proper Bill procedure in the autumn, and later, if he thinks it fit, to come back to the House with another review. That would at least allow the House to make its decision on a proper basis. If he allowed that, I would be happy to vote for Third Reading today. If he does not allow it, I am afraid that this is an undemocratic process that none of us can support.”
“The Home Secretary has justified rushing this Bill through the House on the basis of an emergency. However, the case was put to the ECJ some time ago, and it took some time to reach its conclusion on 8 April, so if there is an emergency, it was a predicable one on 8 April. There has since been plenty of time to look at the 12 clauses that relate to data retention, so why is there an emergency now and not then?”
“Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), how many homes in my constituency were at risk of flooding, and he replied that from 2008 to 2012 the number of properties at risk had increased by 1,000. That illustrates the fact that with sea levels rising, if defences are not improved, that figure is certain to grow.”
“People in those remote villages were either evacuated while there was time or forced to abandon the ground floor of their own houses. They gathered what they could upstairs, but they were powerless to prevent the torrent of floodwater and debris from entering. For much of the time they were in complete darkness, because the power went as well. Some of them are pensioners, who moved to the area for a quiet and happy retirement only to see everything that they have worked for destroyed. One respondent to a survey conducted by the local council had been informed that “Blacktoft never floods”, because of the defences, but in this case the defences simply were not good enough. Of course, defences that were perfectly adequate 25 years ago are not necessarily adequate today. In 2012, I asked the then Minister responsible, my hon.”
“Warnings were not given in time, and in some cases alarms sounded only after the floodwater had inundated people’s homes. Across the Humber, most warnings were received only an hour before the waters rose. Those who were affected had no time to prepare and were forced to abandon their homes and their dearest possessions to the elements. They subsequently faced a living hell of temporary accommodation, not knowing when they would be able to move back into their own homes. In the East Riding alone, 200 homes and nearly 50 business properties were flooded, and 15 miles of roads were submerged, which led to communities in my constituency being completely cut off. Blacktoft, Yokefleet, Saltmarsh and Faxfleet became virtual islands, and residents unsurprisingly felt abandoned and isolated.”
“The floodwater overtopped more than 40 km of flood defences, and the Hull tidal barrier was inches away from being defeated. Had that happened, a significant part of the city would have been flooded, and thousands upon thousands of homes would have been rendered uninhabitable, causing misery for tens of thousands of people. In the event, although that did not happen, more than 1,100 properties in the area were flooded, which was still a miserable consequence for the families and businesses involved. The event was devastating, with the highest water levels ever recorded in the Humber, and we were fortunate that no one was seriously hurt or killed. When there was a similar but lesser tidal surge in 1953, more than 300 people in the east of England died. For the people most closely affected, the flood has been a living nightmare.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. Although I have been fortunate enough to secure the debate, the interests of other Members in the Chamber are at least as great as mine, so I will be as brief as I can. I will try to limit my contribution on this important matter to 15 minutes. On 5 December last year, news around the world was dominated by the death of Nelson Mandela. The death of the greatest statesman in modern history rightly dominated all news coverage, as his achievements and legacy were celebrated. An unfortunate side effect of that was that it almost totally eclipsed one of the most serious tidal flooding events to hit the United Kingdom for more than half a century. The tidal surge that hit the east coast of England that night was devastating.”
“I will not be shocked if the Minister has not turned up with £900 million for us in his back pocket—I will be disappointed, but not shocked. Nevertheless, we must recognise that we are faced with a conjunction of several things: a major risk that we know is going to get worse; a historic demonstration of the harm of that risk if it is ever realised; and a clear strategic asset that is at risk in terms of industry, economy, links to the outside world and, most importantly, the hundreds of thousands of people of the area. Because it will take so long to carry out the necessary improvements and enhancements to the defences, it is vital that the Government take a strategic view in both direction and money.”
“If we do not act by implementing the Humber flood risk strategy, there is a serious risk of such a catastrophe being repeated. Governments of all colours—Tory, Labour, coalition or whatever—find it difficult to take more than a five-year view, for obvious reasons; when it comes to flood defences, it is necessary to take at least a 50-year view, if not a multi-century one. We must start work on a programme that will take at least 10 years to complete. Yes, the numbers are enormous and run into billions of pounds, but the cost of doing nothing would be far greater in the long run. On 5 December 2013 we were given a timely warning—one might say God-given—of the consequences of inaction. We would do well to pay attention to it.”
“Much of that consensus has already been achieved: the agencies, local government, the local enterprise partnership and Members of Parliament have all acted completely without attention to narrow self-interest and with serious concern about the overall interest. In the next 50 years it is highly likely that we will see a tidal surge event similar in magnitude to the one we experienced last winter, but worse in consequence. Factoring in the possibility of even less favourable conditions and rising sea levels, it is clear that the next major flood event could be devastating. There could be a serious threat to life and more than £32 billion of economic impact. It is not a doomsday event with an outside chance of happening; it is likely to happen at some point in the next half century. We were lucky to escape that outcome last year.”
“To that end, the Environment Agency prepared the Humber flood risk management strategy in 2008 with the aim of improving the defences in the Humber, most of which dated back to the 1950s following the previous flood surge. The surge of last winter showed that the defences were inadequate and gave the agency new information that it is using to inform a comprehensive update to the strategy, with the aim of bringing defences up to such a standard that they could survive not a one-in-1,000-year event, like London, but a one-in-200-year event—that is the colloquialism, but it really means an event the probability of which occurring is 0.5% per annum. The scheme is ambitious and will require co-operation across local and national Government, across party lines and across the north and south banks of the Humber.”
“On both banks of the river, the floodplain is very flat, and some of it is even reclaimed land—using for the first time in Britain what were then innovative Dutch techniques, Vermuyden drained Hatfield Chase, which is now in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy). Because the land is so flat and low-lying, it is impossible to separate any part of the defences from another. We cannot ring-fence the major population centres of Hull, Grimsby or Scunthorpe; we must deal with the problem as a single entity. As Vermuyden’s involvement demonstrates, our area is in many ways as close to Holland as it gets in England. The Dutch do not do flood defences by halves, and neither should we. Perhaps we should reapply the lessons we learned from Vermuyden some centuries ago.”
“For the Humber, we are talking about £888 million, but that would still be significantly less than a third—perhaps less than a quarter—of the spend on the Thames barrier, which I do not think anyone disputes was an absolute necessity and an act of serious foresight by the Government of the day. With those figures in mind, the people of the East Riding, north Lincolnshire and Hull will rightly ask questions if the Government do not take action to improve the region’s defences. Once it is understood that the Humber represents a national strategic asset, it becomes clear that any system of flood defences must address all risk across the entire estuary.”
“Given the region’s vulnerability and the number of people under threat, it is past time for action to be taken to deal with the flood risk. By comparison, London, where the Thames floodplain has the highest flood risk in the country, is protected from events on a one-in-1,000-year basis. To achieve that, the Thames flood barrier was built between 1974 and 1982 at a cost of about £534 million, with an additional £100 million of investment around it to make it work. It is hard to assess accurately, but in today’s money that would be equivalent to more than £3 billion. What we are discussing today would cost a lot of money.”
“More than 30% of the UK’s coal and an increasing amount of biomass fuel lands at Humber ports and is transferred to power stations such as Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge on road and rail routes that are also at risk from flooding. The chemicals industry in the region is enormous, amounting to more than £6 billion. Altogether, more than 20,000 businesses in the Humber are at risk from flooding, and the area contributes some £15 billion to the nation’s economy. That all makes the Humber a national strategic asset, and rising sea levels mean that the next flood risk to that asset is not merely some distant probability. It is not something that just might happen. In the next 50 years, if we do not enhance our defences, there will be a costly and probably fatal catastrophe.”
“The Humber is vital to the UK power industry, and the pressure put on the UK power network by a major flood event of the type that is predicted to occur in the next 50 years would be colossal. In addition, 28% of the UK’s oil refining capacity is situated in the Humber floodplain, and the loss of such capacity could not be made up by shifting demand to other plants. That is an important point, because it underpins one of the criteria that the Treasury uses to assess such things. It is often assumed that if an industry is at risk, it can go somewhere else, but that is not the case in the Humber. Oil and gas terminals in the region process 30% of the country’s gas demands.”
“The Humber represents the second highest flood risk in the country, behind only the Thames estuary. The national risk register considers tidal flood, which is what we face, to be second in severity only to an influenza pandemic. That is the scale of the threat facing the region. The economic case for action is clear, given the strategic importance of the region to the rest of the country. Local authorities have worked incredibly well together on the matter, completely ignoring party, regional or geographic differences. Using the Treasury guidelines for such calculations, they have identified £32 billion of potential damage, which includes straightforward damage, lost productivity, increased insurance costs and deterred investment. The economic value that is at risk includes several industries of significant strategic importance.”
“If that had happened, we would have seen a similar picture to that in the Somerset levels, where the land was flooded for weeks, if not months afterwards. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that had we not been fortunate with the other events besides the tidal surge, we would have faced a much bigger catastrophe, and the events of 5 December could have included fatal incidents. The situation would have been at least as bad as it was in the Somerset levels, but with the difference that there would have been three international ports and a city of 256,000 people in the middle of it all. The danger is real. As all hon. Members present know, we have had serious flooding in the region twice in less than a decade—in 2007 and 2013—with other serious localised flooding in 2011.”
“I think my hon. Friend has read the next page of my speech, as happens so often. He is absolutely right, and there were a number of coincidences that could be described as fortunate, although it may seem odd to describe the events of December last year as such. Had the tidal surge coincided with the astronomical tide—he is right to say that the difference was two hours—the event would have been much bigger. Had there been the levels of rainfall that we saw in 2007, the Aire, Calder, Ouse, Derwent and Trent rivers, which all feed the Humber, would have been fuller. The Humber would have started from a higher level, and I suspect that the Hull tidal defences would have been overtopped and defeated.”
“May I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to something that has not been mentioned so far? Even though residential accommodation is given the highest score in the ranking, that is based on property value. One thing that works against the north of England is that properties there tend to be of lower value, which leads to a cyclical effect: the house is cheaper, so it gets less defence and therefore gets cheaper. It feeds on its own poverty. Does my hon. Friend agree that that has a distorting impact on flood defence funding?”