Speeches by Gardiner.

“Sorry, I appreciate you are trying to explain this in context, but when you say find out what is out there, my understanding is that there are not just a few hundred but tens of thousands of individual ones. If you adopt a specific approach one by one you will never do it. That would also ignore that there is a cumulat…”

“Is that part of the problem then, that what we are dealing with is people looking at this from their own perspective—you as one regulator and DEFRA as another regulator? You can all be saying, “My patch is all right,” but nobody is joining this up to get something done to protect the public.”

“Yes, but you said you broadly agreed with the plan earlier in responding to the Chair. You said you had been involved in every part of the implementation of the plan and you agreed with it. What are the elements of the plan, then, that you disagree with?”

“I have been going through all the action points in the plan and the question that arises in my mind is: why are you prioritising measuring harm over preventing harm? Virtually every action point is about, if I go to the very start, having to “continue to monitor and report annually”, “Make the Environment Agency’s…mult…”

“So where did the £80 million come from?”

“Yes, but that was not my question. I understand that what you are telling me is that the expectation that we all have is that ultimately this will fall back on the taxpayer in one way or another. My question to you was: how do you justify the £80 million figure that you and the Minister quoted and what estimates have y…”

“I want to tease out this £80 million remediation cost figure that you spoke about. I am sure, Mr Casale, you will know that the European Commission has published a report in which it says that Europe is on track to pay at least €440 billion to deal with the pollution impacts from PFAS. It said that the cost could actua…”

“Why does the action plan say nothing about this? It is supposed to be an action plan.”

“The art of litotes is not yet dead.”

“Ms Parkes, you talked about the plan there, and you talked about costs. The Environment Agency has estimated the cost to clean up the PFAS problem sites and said that just to clean up those problem sites alone could cost between £31 billion and £121 billion. Yet the plan makes no mention at all of cost. Presumably, the…”

“The costs have been published.”

“That is what you said it is. You said it was a signal. It is there in the report.”

“What element of that do you disagree with, Minister? The costs?”

“On page 9 of your plan it says, “We expect to see progress through a combination of improved public understanding, industry-led and industry-owned initiatives (such as the Chemical Industry Association’s PFAS Information Exchange Forum), and transparent self-regulation.” So on the one hand you are putting the responsib…”

“Minister, a comprehensive restriction does not mean an immediate ban. As the Chair has pointed out, the EU model explicitly allows a time-limited derogation. On what you said about what industry wants, industry are quite happy at the moment, are they not, because they are getting away with not having to pay for the cle…”

“Does the Minister share with me a sense of irony that the former Home Secretary and the former Immigration Minister who were responsible for giving out those 616,000 have now joined Reform?”

“One of the four pillars that the Minister has set out in the consultation document in relation to integration is volunteering. A number of hon. Members have already mentioned that there is an arbitrariness—a subjective nature—to that. Who will certify the volunteer work that is done? One can imagine a plethora of organ…”

“Will the Minister confirm whether the changes that are firm were also consulted on in the consultation document? If so, why were they consulted on?”

“Does the hon. Gentleman recall that between 2022 and 2024, even though the number of spaces in the care sector was deemed to be between 6,000 and 40,000, his Government made available 616,000 visas for that?”

“I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on securing the debate. Legislation should be clear, and the people to whom it applies should know where they stand. Retrospectivity and arbitrary or subjective criteria make for bad law, precisely because they destroy clarity …”