Lawfare and UK Court System — House of Commons, 2022-01-20
Topic: Environment
Aaron Stuart Bell (Conservative, Centre-right): 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.