Lawfare and UK Court System

Debate between Damian Collins and Aaron Bell

Thursday 20th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), and to contribute to this excellent debate secured by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). I am very grateful to him for securing it, and I am also very grateful for the briefing that he arranged for Members earlier this week to explore some of the issues behind this.

I want to touch on the really big issues that we have already discussed, but I also want briefly to mention a local low-level lawfare issue in my constituency. Walleys Quarry landfill, which I have referred to many times in this House, is a landfill run by Walleys Quarry Ltd. It is owned by Red Industries, which is controlled by Mr Adam Share, a convicted criminal. He went to jail for bugging the Environment Agency in the 2000s over another landfill, which had remarkable similarities to Walleys Quarry, with the odour overcoming many residents in the local area. Residents were bugged, as were the Environment Agency and the local councils.

Walleys Quarry Ltd is a very litigious company: it has tried to sue me; it has sent legal letters to my council leader, Simon Tagg, and to county Councillor Derrick Huckfield; it tried to secure an injunction against protestors at the last minute the other day, only to be defeated by a woman on Zoom at the High Court on her own—Audrey Young, with no legal representation, defeated that injunction, and I pay tribute to my constituent for that today. This is a slightly lower-level case and I will not go into any further detail for the House today, but I hope that the journalists who want to publish what they know about what has been going on at Walleys Quarry are able to convince their lawyers to stand up to the lawyers employed by Walleys Quarry Ltd.

We have heard today about how our libel laws are being used to silence journalists; how the Data Protection Act and the general data protection regulation are being used to harass investigators; and the abuse of subject access requests to try to obtain special personal data. As the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), who is no longer in his place, said in his intervention, when that fails there is the hack and leak approach, where people hack in, publish someone’s data and then sue them for having that data in the first place. Surely that is absolutely ludicrous. We also hear about how judicial review is used to threaten our Government, our Government agencies and our regulators, such as the Serious Fraud Office. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism described how City law firms acting on behalf of those under investigation are “completely outgunning” the SFO in ligation tactics and resources, and raised concerns that an “imbalance of arms” is allowing some oligarchs and powerful corporations to “buy impunity”. That is what is happening to our regulators right now, in our courts, and it is ludicrous that that is permitted.

What do we need? My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) described the independence of the judiciary as one of our essential bulwarks of freedom of speech and liberty, but another is parliamentary privilege. Therefore, first, we need a parliamentary inquiry into all of this. I hope that he will read the Hansard record of my saying this, because such an inquiry would be very valuable. It could look into legal intimidation and into SLAPPs, and it would have the added advantage of giving key figures such as Ms Leslie—I did not serve with her, but I know that most of the Members in this Chamber did—the opportunity to come to this House and say things that are true but that she is worried about saying in any other place because she is frightened of losing her home and of all the other things that were described in the excellent opening speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes an important point on whistleblowers. They get privilege if they give evidence to a parliamentary Committee, but the act of coming to give evidence is not necessarily privileged and they could face legal action for choosing to reveal information. We should look seriously at the idea of extending privilege so that any whistleblower invited to come to a parliamentary Committee will be protected in the act of giving evidence.

[Aaron Bell]

I thank my hon. Friend, who speaks with experience as a former Chair of a Select Committee. The Procedure Committee, on which I serve, has been looking at what is covered by parliamentary privilege, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) will hear what he has said today and make sure he examines whether that is something we could look at.

--- Later in debate ---

[Aaron Bell]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I will ensure that all three of those interventions are brought to the attention of the Procedure Committee, because there is a lot to consider here and it is worrying that those tools could be used against Members of Parliament. We should have full protections in all aspects of our job, not just in what we say in this Chamber.

[Damian Collins]

As a former Chair of the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, I know from experience that Committee Clerks and staff of the House are often sent repeated requests for information about data they hold. Some information is exempt, with respect to the main business of the Committee, but some is not. A huge amount of Clerks’ time and Committee time is taken up with processing those requests.

[Aaron Bell]

Yes, I quite understand the position that Clerks are in; our staffers can be in the same position. We need protections for everything that goes on in and around this place in the proper exercise of our duties.

What else do we need, as well as the things we can do in Parliament? Fundamentally, we need a change of the legal rulebook. Many of the tactics deployed by unscrupulous claimants are becoming increasingly commonplace, so much so that they constitute a rulebook of tactics and strategies to thwart corruption investigations. They need to be countered by an opposing rulebook, in the ways that have been described: anti-SLAPP laws and a reorientation of the legal profession, private investigation and PR firms to abide by fair standards of litigation and stop pre-trial manoeuvres designed simply to drain resources and intimidate counterparties. Such a reorientation would involve an overhaul of all regulations applicable to the legal profession on the conduct of litigation. As many hon. Members have said, the legal professional bodies need to look hard at what they are permitting to take place under their auspices.

Let us look at anti-SLAPP laws and at what happens elsewhere. In the USA, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) mentioned, there is the public figure defence. Protection of Public Participation Acts were passed in Ontario in 2015 and in the Australian capital territory in 2008. There are off-the-shelf models in other countries that we can adapt to work in the United Kingdom.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden began by praising our courts. Of course he was right to do so, but the best infrastructure in the world, and all our best infrastructure, can always be abused—people can drive at 110 mph on our motorways and flush whatever they like into our sewers. We must not let dirty money flush through our courts. We must find a way to prevent the perversion of justice by people who mean us harm.