Points of Order

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Next week, the BBC’s economics correspondent will publish a book and release whistleblower testimony, telephone recordings, emails and documentary data on a number of serious miscarriages of justice in the LIBOR scandal that emerged in 2012. It will show that British and US authorities covered up state involvement in LIBOR rigging, and the scapegoating of 37 low and middle-ranking bankers, some of whom spent years in jail.

In this evidence, there is a prima facie case to believe that state agencies coerced individuals into perjury that led to false evictions. I will write to the Metropolitan police asking them to investigate any potential perjury, but, more importantly in this context, I am also greatly concerned that the Treasury Committee may have been misled by state agencies about the knowledge and involvement of the state in setting false rates.

This is a big and complex issue with hundreds of pages of evidence. I have written to the Chair of the Treasury Committee suggesting that the Committee might want to look into the issue. Can you confirm that that is the appropriate mechanism to deal with this serious matter, Mr Deputy Speaker?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order and advance notice of it. It is a very serious issue that he has raised. He has put his point on the record and shown that he is experienced enough to take appropriate steps even without any advice from the Chair.

Water Quality: Sewage Discharge

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. A little while ago, when Peter Tatchell came to visit me, he had a badge confiscated from him—a campaigning badge against homophobia. I subsequently received a letter of apology from the Serjeant at Arms saying that he would look at that practice. Yesterday, some other people came to visit me. They had a series of leaflets about the Chinese Government’s treatment of Jimmy Lai, and those were confiscated too. There may well be a well-intentioned purpose behind this, but will the House authorities look at the operation of these rules, because it seems very odd that it is illegal to bring political material into the House of Commons.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the right hon. Member for his point of order. I will raise this issue with the Serjeant at Arms tomorrow, and I will get back in touch with him.

Public Order Bill

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I can now announce the result of today’s deferred Division on the draft Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Home Detention Curfew) Order 2023. The Ayes were 290 and the Noes were 14, so the Ayes have it.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I will be brief because much of what I have to say agrees with the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones).

I remind the House that the biggest curtailment of stop and search in modern times was in 2010, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) was Home Secretary. The reason she did it, in large part, was the feeling that nearly all the stop and searches were in the Met—there were only about 50 in Scotland one year, but thousands down here—and ethnic minorities felt that they were targeted at them. The way they were pursued made race relations in the capital worse.

Lawfare and Investigative Journalism

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Monday 17th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Before I call the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), I thank him for informing the Table Office in advance of the case he intends to raise in his debate, which, I understand, is not sub judice. However, I remind all Members to be mindful of the sub judice resolution and to be careful to avoid raising any issues that could prejudice any future legal proceedings or those currently before the courts.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On 20 January, a number of us MPs initiated a debate on the use of lawfare by oligarchs and undemocratic states that seek to suppress free speech and scrutiny of their activity. The Ministry of Justice took up the question and has promised new legislation, and I am glad to see the new Minister about to lose his departmental virginity in this debate—it will not hurt; I will be gentle.

Today, I will speak about another outrageous case of lawfare that centres around the former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. He was the autocratic ruler of Kazakhstan for three decades. His time in office was characterised by repression, torture and other human rights abuses. He was ousted from power in 2019, but remains a significant influence in the country. He was more or less able to anoint his successor as president, and met Vladimir Putin even after leaving office.

During his 29-year rule, Nazarbayev won elections with claimed results of more than 90% of votes cast, and the capital city was even renamed after him in 2019. The term “rigged dictatorship” comes to mind. As long ago as 1999, the western press aired concerns about assets held by Nazarbayev and his associates. In that year, The New Yorker reported that Swiss officials had found a bank account worth $85 million that was intended for the Kazakh Treasury, but was in fact held by Nazarbayev—$85 million, which turns out to be small change. Three years later, Nazarbayev’s critics in Kazakhstan accused him of hiding $1 billion in oil revenue in offshore accounts.

Now, the Nazarbayev Fund Private Fund, an ostensibly charitable organisation, and a related firm, Jusan Technologies Ltd, have between them started a lawfare campaign against four news bodies, including three based in Britain, which are the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Daily Telegraph and openDemocracy. The supposed provocation for that action was the news bodies’ reports on Nazarbayev and his associates, which revealed several ambiguities and a lack of transparency around his charitable foundations.

First, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a non-profit investigative news platform, published an investigation into charitable foundations set up during Nazarbayev’s rule. It revealed that companies connected to those charitable foundations and to his relatives had received bail-out and loan funding from his Government.

One such case involves the St Regis Astana, which is a hotel in the Kazakh capital that opened in 2017. The company that owns the hotel, the Turion Investment Group, has included among its shareholders Nazarbayev’s daughter and son in law. The hotel project was built with the help of a loan of $85 million from a state-owned development bank, which even the current President Tokayev conceded has become

“the personal bank of a select group of people representing financial, industrial, and construction groups.”

Let us remember that that is supposed to be a state bank.

In the early 2000s, Nazarbayev’s Presidential Affairs Department joined two Kazakh firms in developing a resort on the Turkish coast where Nazarbayev reportedly spends his own holidays. One of the private firms involved was owned by three businessmen who had previously handed cash to Nazarbayev’s university fund. In another instance, two of Nazarbayev’s foundations owned a landscaping business that received $6.5 million in Government contracts between 2012 and 2018.

After those revelations, openDemocracy covered the story and asked the simple question of whether an autocrat’s riches were being allowed into this country without due scrutiny. It was talking about Jusan Technologies, a firm that is incorporated in the United Kingdom and has nearly $8 billion in gross assets, yet had only one member of staff in the UK in 2020.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Daily Telegraph then collaborated to investigate Jusan Technologies. It appears that its registered office at the time was a brass-plate address shared with hundreds of other firms. Its assets have been held in several sectors, including banking, telecoms and retail, and in several countries, from Luxembourg and the UK to Kazakhstan itself. Until recently, it was controlled by three organisations, including the Nazarbayev fund via an intermediary organisation.

The Nazarbayev fund is allegedly run for the benefit of educational institutions in Kazakhstan and stipulates in its charter that Nazarbayev cannot benefit personally from the fund. Yet he remains the chairman of its executive body and has the power to change its rules. It is not clear why a fund ostensibly for education and the benefit of the Kazakh population needs assets in banking or retail.

The fund is also connected to senior Kazakh politicians. Nazarbayev’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Yerbol Orynbayev, was a director of Jusan Tech and owned 4.6% of the company. Moreover, the investigation shows that the First Heartland Jusan Bank, the largest asset owned by Jusan Technologies, has received more than $2 billion in bail-outs from the Kazakh Government. This is a company that has paid out $430 million in shareholder dividends in recent years. An oligarch married to one of Nazarbayev’s relatives owns 20% of the bank. It appears to be steeped in Nazarbayev’s influence.

While Jusan Technologies itself has now changed its ownership structure—it did so shortly before the reports were first published—the new structure is, if anything, even more opaque. The new owner is a non-profit organisation based in Nevada, a jurisdiction the secrecy laws of which have been criticised in the past, including in respect of the Pandora papers. That non-profit is owned by another non-profit, whose president is the chief executive of the Nazarbayev fund as well as Nazarbayev’s former Education Minister.

Frankly, Mr Deputy Speaker, if you are confused by this extraordinary cat’s cradle of different and interlocking organisations, you would not be alone. It is designed to be confusing and designed to be difficult to understand and opaque. Creating organisations of this level of opacity and complexity is not easy, but it is always done for a reason. In this case, the most likely reason is to conceal the extent of Nazarbayev’s control of this web of assets and wealth.

To come back to the point about lawfare, all the news outlets did was ask legitimate questions and try to shine a light on some apparent irregularities and the opaque nature of Nazarbayev’s foundations. They did not even make any allegations of impropriety or money laundering in the articles for which they are being attacked, yet they are now facing potential legal censure. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Daily Telegraph alone have received three threatening legal letters in four months telling them to retract their claims and apologise, and a case has now been filed in the High Court.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I was extraordinarily generous.

[Mr Davis]

I thank the right hon. Lady for drawing the attention of the House to that case. I do not know the substance of it, but the fact is that these cases are best resolved transparently and in public, with fearless reporting, not with repression of free speech. Oligarchs will often bring these claims as they know their opponents will, as in this case, have to back down either through the threat of bankruptcy or because they become bankrupt as a result of the operation, and it is a good example of this problem.

That is why the Government earlier this year found that some journalists

“no longer publish information on certain individuals or topics—such as exposing serious wrong-doing or corruption—because of potential legal costs.”

That also applies to some newspapers and some organisations whose job it is to expose this sort of information.

With every letter and every stage of legal action, organisations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism must divert resources and attention away from public interest reporting and towards defending themselves against bogus or trivial claims. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a small team, with just a few dozen staff. To defend itself, it has been forced to divert much of its reporting team and senior management, as well as significant financial resources, to dealing with these legal threats.

This kind of lawfare is a potentially existential threat to investigative journalism, and that is precisely what the claimants in these cases intend. These proceedings are not initiated to prove the organisations wrong—the oligarchs know that the organisations are right—but rather to financially and psychologically exhaust them into retraction. What Nazarbayev wants is to import into the UK the contempt for free speech shown in Kazakhstan during his three-decade rule. As the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) pointed out in his intervention, Nazarbayev is bringing to Britain what he imposed on Kazakhstan and we cannot allow that. This should offend the sensibilities of anyone who values a fair and equal justice system, as well as those who rightly appreciate the value of public interest reporting.

It is of some reassurance that the Government intend to reform the law around SLAPPs, but we must move more quickly. I say that directly to the Minister, who is an old friend of mine over the years; I am very pleased he is in his place and in the Department as he will do a fantastic job, but I say to him that we must move more quickly. There is no time to waste when even now we have oligarchs using SLAPPs to curb free speech and evade justice in our country. One of our ex-colleagues, Charlotte Leslie, is facing such a case at the moment. We as Members of Parliament have parliamentary privilege and so can speak without the threat of libel action, but that privilege brings with it a duty to speak up for those who cannot speak for fear of punishment by the likes of Nazarbayev.

In the wake of the war in Ukraine, the Government swiftly introduced sanctions on those with links to the Russian regime, making it harder for them to use our country as a money-laundering venue. It is high time that we applied that same urgency and purpose to addressing the damage that oligarchs are doing to our justice system and our free-speech values. For too long, we have facilitated oligarchs’ dirty money and corruption in the UK.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Davis]

The hon. Member is exactly right. There are a variety of other mechanisms that we could use. We could give judges the right to strike down egregious cases early. We could even look at the prospect of providing legal aid for journalists pursuing bona fide public interest issues. There are a variety of issues, and we should address all of them. This country is the global home of justice. Our justice system is admired around the world, but, if we are not careful, it will be corrupted, undermined, manipulated and abused by SLAPPS and people using SLAPPs.

I ask the Department and the Minister to take action, or to tell us that they will take action. Brits are rightly proud of how our legal system is a model for the world. If we are to ensure that that remains the case, we must act, and act soon.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I welcome the Minister to his new position.

Use of Patient Data

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Thursday 24th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point and will elaborate on it as I make progress. As presented, the plan is to collect the data first and think about the problems second, but the information is too important and the Department’s record of failed IT is too great for it to be trusted with carte blanche over our privacy.



There is also the so-called honeypot problem. Data gathered centrally inevitably attracts actors with more nefarious intentions. The bigger the database, the greater the incentive to hack it. If the Pentagon, US Department of Defence and even Microsoft have been hacked by successful cyber-attacks, what chance does our NHS have?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. As we are coming towards 5 o’clock, I will just go through the following technical process.

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 27th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I inform the House that the knife falls at 4.32 pm and we have nine speakers, plus the Minister to respond. That gives hardly any time, so can I implore those contributing either remotely or physically please to use self-discipline? With nobody specifically in mind, I call David Davis.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con) [V]]

Thank you for the hint, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will confine myself to issues around Lords amendment 1R in order to limit what I have to say.

Last week’s concessions from the Government on the matters relating to amendment 1R were long overdue. With their tabling of the amendments removing genocide, torture and crimes against humanity, some of the most egregious errors in the Bill were corrected, which is why I voted in favour of the Government amendment last week. However, as I warned on Wednesday, that amendment left one serious matter unresolved—war crimes are still subject to a presumption against prosecution. Thankfully, further representations from Lord Robertson and others have led the Government now to rectify this oversight with the amendment we are considering today. I welcome that further concession. In government, as I said last week, it is always difficult to change your mind once you set out on a specific course of action, but the Government are to be commended for doing just that in the case of this Bill. In particular, I again commend the new Minister for his extremely rational approach to this and using the time that ping-pong has given him to good effect.

The original drafting of the Bill created a situation whereby the UK’s standing on the international stage would have been threatened. Our reputation as an upholder of the rule of law would have been tarnished and we would have run the risk of potentially having our troops hauled before the International Criminal Court. That would have been a truly shameful outcome. The ICC is usually in the business of prosecuting tyrants and torturers, not the soldiers of law-abiding democracies, let alone one with the United Kingdom’s reputation. The concessions last week would still have left our soldiers open to charges of war crimes. To be clear, these are not theoretical concerns of myself or other Members either here or in the other place. When I asked the chief prosecutor of the ICC for her consideration of the Government’s concessions on this point, she said in her response to me last Friday that

“any gap between the scope of coverage in the excludable offences under the proposed legislation and conduct which might otherwise constitute a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court would risk…rendering relevant cases concerning such conduct admissible before the ICC.”

In other words, the Bill in its state last week would have still left our soldiers open to prosecution.

Today’s amendment means that torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide will all now, quite rightly, be excluded from the presumption against prosecution contained in the Bill. That is to be welcomed. On that basis, I am entirely supportive of the Government and they will get my vote today. However, I will just make a comment en passant relating to what the right hon. Members for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) and for North Durham (Mr Jones) said. The Ministry of Defence now needs to take the advice of people like former Judge Advocate General Blackett, and others, and improve its own investigation system to stop soldiers from going through the same problems again in future. The problem has always rested, in part, within the walls of the Ministry of Defence, so improvements to the investigation process must be made. Our troops need to be reassured that if they ever face allegations of wrongdoing they will be investigated fairly, rapidly, and without the threat of constant reinvestigation. Only then will our service personnel be properly protected from vexatious and damaging litigation, and only then will this Bill and its associated policy have properly achieved its aim.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Budgets and Finance Bills were the first reason for having a Parliament —to approve the expenditures of the Executive. For more than a century, the first resolution for a Finance Bill has been what is known as the general amendment of the law resolution. The resolution allows Members to table amendments that deal with tax administration and relief provisions not otherwise provided for by the specific Ways and Means resolution.

However, since Philip Hammond’s Finance Bill 2017, the Government have not included such a resolution. The effect is that any amendments tabled by Members to the Finance Bill must be tied to one of the specific resolutions already agreed by the House. In effect, by not including the amendment of the law resolution, the Government have shut down the rights that the House has enjoyed for more than 100 years. The result is that Members’ hands are tied when it comes to effectively amending the Finance Bill. Mr Deputy Speaker, can you give guidance as to how the House can recover those fundamental rights, which have been arrogated by the Government?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of the point of order. There is no matter of order for the Chair arising from the absence of an amendment of the law motion. There was no such motion after the last three Budgets and I think I remember, during the last Budget, a very similar if not identical point of order from the right hon. Gentleman. There is a lot of tradition around Budgets, and it may well be that the David Davis point of order becomes part of that tradition. Anyway, it has no effect on the scope of debate—the reasons for and implications of the absence of an amendment of the law resolution are themselves a proper matter for debate. The right hon. Gentleman has put his point on the record.

Before I call the Minister, I point out that up until and including No. 6, Darren Jones, on the call list, Back-Bench contributions will have a five-minute time limit. Thereafter—No. 7 onwards—the limit will be reduced to three minutes. For those who are contributing remotely, please look at the timer on the bottom right-hand corner of the device that you are using. If, for whatever reason, you do not have sight of that, please use an alternative way of ensuring that you keep within the time limit that has been set. Please do not be tempted to try to extend it, because we have 101 contributions to this debate. For those who are taking part in the Chamber, the timer will be displayed as usual on the monitors in the Chamber.

Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I will tell my right hon. Friend in a moment exactly why I am not reassured by that, but he is quite right that the issue is the repeated investigation of people who are innocent, in most cases. That is a harassing and destructive thing. The best known case is that of Major Campbell, who underwent eight investigations. I am afraid that the real blame lay with the Ministry of Defence for at least four of them. That is what we should address.

As I say, the prosecution system is not slanted against soldiers. I will give the rather gruesome, well known example of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi man who, in 2003, was dragged from his desk while working as a hotel receptionist by British soldiers, handcuffed and taken to a detention facility in Basra. Thirty-six hours later, he had been beaten to death, having suffered 93 separate injuries while in the custody of British forces. The number of solders convicted of murder as a result: zero. The number convicted of manslaughter: zero. There was a single conviction of one soldier, who confessed to inhumane treatment and got one year in prison.

It is difficult for prosecuting and other authorities to make out a clear-cut case of torture, inhumane treatment or even manslaughter, so I do not believe that the system operates against the interests of the armed forces. Indeed, on the several occasions on which the Government have been asked to produce a case of vexatious prosecution—not investigation, but prosecution—they have never been able to name one. That is not surprising. The Service Prosecuting Authority—the body that brings prosecutions—already dismisses claims that it believes are vexatious. In evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Nicholas Mercer, the former Command Legal Adviser in Iraq, said:

“Before I left the army, I gave legal advice on a number of prominent cases…I found a case that was without merit and I closed it. It was as simple as that. I do not need legislation to do that. It happens already.” That is a good reflection on our system, and we should not be ashamed of it.

The area of contention, which has been mentioned by the hon. and gallant Member for Barnsley Central, is the triple lock against prosecutions. The Government’s own stated aim is to raise the bar for prosecutions after five years. In its scrutiny of the Bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights concluded:

“a limitation period that would prevent prosecutions is unlawful under international law if it prevents investigations and prosecutions in relation to torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”

The Government state that the measure is not a statute of limitations. The Law Society, which some may dismiss, agrees with the JCHR, and concludes that the presumption against prosecution creates a “quasi-statute of limitation” that is “unprecedented” in criminal law, and represents

“a significant barrier to justice.”

Rather more importantly, the Judge Advocate General, whom I described earlier, has said:

“In my view, what this Bill does is exactly the opposite of what it is trying to do. What it is trying to do is to stop ambulance-chasing solicitors and vexatious and unmeritorious claims. The Minister quite rightly said we want rigour and integrity. What it actually does is increase the risk of service personnel appearing before the International Criminal Court. That is why I said it was ill conceived.”––[Official Report, Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Public Bill Committee, 8 October 2020; c.117-18, Q234.]

That is the Judge Advocate General, the most expert person in the country on this subject. He also described, incidentally, the Bill as bringing

“the UK armed forces into disrepute”.

If the Government really think that schedule 1 does not make justice more difficult, they would not have excluded sexual offences from the remit of the Bill. If it is not difficult to get a prosecution, why exclude any category? It was right to exclude sexual offences, and the Government should exclude torture on exactly the same grounds. That is the point of the amendment in my name and in that of many others.

I have a couple of minutes, so I will deal briefly with the issue of civil claims. There have been 1,000 civil claims, according to the Ministry of Defence, all of them against the Ministry, not against individual soldiers—as far as I can tell. Surprise, surprise, someone trying to get money goes to the Ministry, not to a poverty-stricken soldier. However, that does not help veterans; it actually hinders veterans.

The point has been made by other Members, so I will press it no further, except to quote the British Legion director-general:

“it protects the Ministry of Defence from civil action—from someone bringing a case. That longstop does not protect the armed forces personnel.”––[Official Report, Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Public Bill Committee, 8 October 2020; c. 86, Q161.]

Of course, what the Bill could stop are the sorts of cases that exposed Snatch Land Rover, the lack of provision of body armour and a number of other scandals, which quite properly improved the operation the MOD.

The Bill does the same for torture cases. All the stories about torture and rendition came in the first instance from civil cases—all of them. That is what brought them into the public domain; there was not a single criminal prosecution in the first instance. It is difficult to bring a torture case. In most, only two people know about the torture: the victim and the oppressor—the torturer, or torturers. Typically, no other evidence is available in the public domain. A case is difficult. Even in the case of Belhaj, the most famous torture case—we delivered Mr Belhaj and his pregnant wife to the Libyans, for heaven’s sake—it took 10 years, essentially, to get to court, and of course he got an apology from the Prime Minister. That is why the issue of torture is almost impossible to bring to court.

Time is running out, so I will finish by quoting the questions that the Judge Advocate General put to the Minister in Committee. He said that

“six Royal Military Police were killed…in 2003”,

and asked:

“would we accept that there would be a presumption against… prosecution”

of their murderers? Would we expect special arrangements—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I will let the right hon. Member read the quote before finishing.

[Mr Davis]

I will read the quote:

“Would we be content that a member of the Iraqi Government’s consent would be needed to prosecute? Would we accept a decision by that person not to prosecute? In my view, there would be outrage in this country if”––[Official Report, Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Public Bill Committee, 8 October 2020; c. 128, Q278]—

the Iraqis behaved in that way. The Judge Advocate General said that we should always remember that the law should be “even-handed” to all people.

Points of Order

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Monday 2nd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for notice of his point of order. I heard the question that he posed to the Prime Minister and the response that he was given. The creation of a new Committee would require the House to pass a resolution determining the membership, terms of reference and so forth. Motions that would have a direct consequence of additional expenditure under the House of Commons administration estimate of £50,000 or more would require the Clerk of the House to produce a memorandum setting out the expected financial consequence. I hope that is helpful. If the right hon. Gentleman wishes further guidance on that, he should seek it directly from the Clerk of the House, Dr John Benger.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Thank you very much for that explanation. I am entirely with my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) in his request to the House. These are unique circumstances and this is a time when the House is finding it difficult to do its job properly. I would like to give notice that we wish to press the matter further.

Point of Order

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. There is no provision on today’s Order Paper for debating the programme motion, which is listed to be moved forthwith at 10 pm. That motion proposes that the further stages of the Bill—Committee, Report and Third Reading—be taken in single session on Thursday week. The Bill we are debating today is described in the House of Commons briefing document as raising

“one of the most profound issues which can face a democratic society governed by the rule of law”,

quoting not some left-wing non-governmental organisation but the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The last time the Government rushed a security Bill through in this way, I and others had a challenge in the court of law; the Government lost and had to rewrite the Bill. We do not want to do that again, so what can we do to ensure that these profound issues are properly debated, before we allow the Government to break our laws whenever they choose?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of the point of order. As he knows, it is not a point of order for the Chair, but Standing Orders do not, as he rightly says, provide for separate debate on a programme motion after Second Reading. It is, however, in order for him to raise his concerns during the Second Reading debate and to vote against the programme motion itself, should he wish to do so. The scheduling of the subsequent stages of the Bill is entirely a matter for the Government.

We are now going to suspend for three minutes to enable the sanitisation of the Dispatch Boxes. Will those leaving the Chamber please do so with social distancing in mind?

Finance Bill

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 1st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Forgive me; I might have missed the reason why are we are not going to be able to divide on new clause 31, but I would be grateful if you could explain it to me. I have today become the longest serving Member for Reigate since the Great Reform Act, so I might have missed one or two things that are going on, but I would be obliged if you could tell me why we are not going to have the opportunity to divide on new clause 31.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the hon. Member for his point of order, but I think we have to wait until the end of the debate before these decisions are made.

[Mr Davis]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I shall move on to the other issue that I want to discuss today.

Amendment 20 would delay the imposition of the IR35 rules from 2021 until April 2023. It is very unlikely that the economic crisis we are facing will be over by April 2021, and attempting to implement IR35 will cost jobs and do serious economic damage. A few months ago, the powerful Cross-Bench House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee wrote a report on IR35, and much of what I am going to say involves quotations from that report. I will start with this:

“It is right that everyone should pay their fair share of tax. But the evidence that we heard over the course of our inquiry suggests that the IR35 rules—the government’s framework to tackle tax avoidance by those in ‘disguised employment’—have never worked satisfactorily, throughout the whole of their 20-year history. We therefore conclude that this framework is flawed.”

It is right not to impose unnecessary burdens on business at a time like this. I agree with a great deal of what the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East had to say about the importance of preserving—and, indeed, not destroying—employment in the current circumstances. This goes right to the issue of IR 35. The report states that

“the government made this decision after considering the issue too narrowly, in terms of its tax take. It has severely underestimated the costs to business of implementing the changes…And it did not analyse sufficiently the unintended behavioural consequences of the proposed reforms or their wider potential impact on the labour market, and on the gig economy in particular.”

Many contractors in the coming years will be left in an “undesirable halfway house”. They do not enjoy the rights that come with employment, yet they are considered employees for tax purposes. In short, IR35 will create “zero-rights employees”. I am saying this directly to Labour Members, because the idea that a Government action can create a class of employee with zero rights is an issue close to their hearts. Such employees have no rights under employment law but under tax law they are employees.

The Lords Committee called on the Government to commission an independent review to devise a better implementation of the scheme. I think that is exactly right, which is why I want to see another two years before we implement whatever the decision is. We need that time to understand precisely what the effect of our new policy will be.

It would be a disaster if, in the context of the economic crisis and the growing gig economy, the Government accidentally created that class of zero-rights employees with no holidays, no sick pay, no pension, no redundancy —no employment rights whatsoever. We must stop that happening either accidentally or deliberately, and on that basis I ask the House to support amendment 20.

Covid-19

Debate between David Davis and Nigel Evans

Monday 11th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con) [V]]

It is always a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). May I commend in the strongest possible terms the speech that has just been made by the Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who has given the best analysis I have heard today of the mistakes we have made? While I am at it, I also commend the Chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), who made a similarly incisive speech earlier.

We should be honest: most of the western nations have handled this crisis badly. They have made mistakes, mostly in being late to control the virus—not all of them; some are different. For example, Greece, perhaps surprisingly, has controlled it much better than many of the others. It has about 15 deaths per million of the population versus us at about 477 at the moment. Those mistakes have cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of lives. A primary mistake, as pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells, was the failure to test, track, trace and contain from the very beginning.

I would like to speak, in the brief time I have, about what we did once the disease took hold, because I think there are also potential mistakes there. The Government adopted a slogan—“protect the NHS, save lives”—which we all, including myself, took to enthusiastically and enthusiastically signed up to. My question for the Minister when she winds up is: did the strategy we pursued in good faith to protect the national health service exacerbate, in some respects, the death rate?

In addition to the lockdown, we did four things to protect the NHS and to protect it from being overwhelmed by the pressure on it. First off, we asked people with the illness to self-isolate at home and come to hospital only when the symptoms got really bad. When they did exactly this—exactly the same thing—in New York City, some of the doctors noticed that the patients were arriving in emergency too late, frankly, to be rescued. Their disease had advanced too fast, although they could have been cured earlier. My first question is: did that strategy cost lives?

The second question is: we applied triage on the basis of the so-called frailty index so that people who got a poor score on the frailty index were simply put on palliative care, again partly to protect intensive care unit capacity, so did that strategy cost lives? Two Members—my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith)—have already raised the question of care homes. We discharged patients from hospital early, when some of them still had this disease, into care homes, with the consequences that we have heard in graphic terms already. Did that strategy cost lives?

The final thing we did to protect capacity was that we cancelled operations for other illnesses—cancer and other illnesses—and that almost undoubtedly cost lives. We can see it in the excess mortality rates. Indeed, Britain holds the highest place in Europe, equal with Spain I am afraid, for the highest excess mortality over this period, so the combined effect of these strategies has to be looked at very carefully indeed. Bear in mind that throughout this time our intensive care unit capacity was used only to 81%. That is normal for this time of year. The Nightingale hospitals stood almost empty, and now only 30% of ICU capacity is being taken up by covid-19 patients. Did we get this balance wrong? Did we, at the cost of lives, just give ourselves empty beds, rather than doing the best thing for the patients the NHS is there to look after? That is not the fault of the staff of the NHS; it is a question of whether the strategy was the wrong one to pursue once we were where we were.

I finish by coming back to the point made by the Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee. The best way to protect both the NHS and the lives of our citizens is the approach taken by other countries, and that is to use testing, tracking and tracing to isolate the illness as well as to bring it down. The Prime Minister talked about the R number; that is just an average. The R number in my constituency, a rural area, is lower than that for a care home. We must put all the resources—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. We have to leave it there, I am sorry. I remind everybody that the wind-ups are not tonight but at the conclusion of the debate tomorrow.