Speeches by Gardiner.

“Mr Gilruth, I am keen that we end up here as friends and that we get some consensus.”

“Is it 8% or 12% now? It used to be that 6% had been inspected in the past five years. SSSIs are, in effect, not worth the name that—”

“They did not pay for it, but it was done. I do not want you to pursue this too much, because—”

“We have, on many occasions.”

“Mr Gilruth, can I just check something with you about what you were saying? You are absolutely right that successive Governments did absolutely incentivise land managers to drain the upland moors. Many of us thought it was a disastrous policy at the time, but that was what the Governments did. I totally understand wher…”

“I am trying to be as specific as possible.”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“rose—”

“More!”

“The speech by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) was one of the finest on the environment that I have heard in this House for a long time. One day, the Government will see sense and he will become Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I will cut most of what I…”

“We should all welcome the end of the Iranian regime—if it is the end of the regime. Those of us who were in this House for the decision on Iraq needed no convincing that Saddam’s was an evil regime. What we needed convincing on was that the attack was permissible in international law and that there was clarity about th…”

“May I begin by thanking my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for his remarks about Kingsbury school, which for 27 years was in my constituency before it passed over to that of the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman)? I want to raise with the Leader of the House schedule 17 to the Environment Act 2021, wh…”

“Absolutely. The sooner we can get people to realise the extent of the problem, the better. There is also the opportunity for savings and an economic benefit. If you want to grow the economy, the CBI is saying that there would be a £1.6 billion benefit to the economy from meeting those guidelines.”

“Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the Committee for considering the application. Last year, 205 people died in this country because of knife crime. It is a national outrage, and politicians fulminated against it so much that the Government have said they are going to halve knife crime by 2035. Last year, 1,579 people …”

“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…”

“This year the EU is doing that, isn’t it, on a class-based approach, but we are not?”

“I think it raises a fundamental problem for me, which is that you are looking at where the problem exists rather than looking at how to stop the problem starting.”

“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…”