Speeches by Gardiner.

“Mr Gilruth, I entirely accept that the wildfires and the burning are causing emissions. My point to you would simply be this. If we have, as you said, a shared objective in that your members want to see the rewetting, then let us focus on that.”

“We have, on many occasions.”

“Mr Gilruth, you did make some generalisations. You have just done so as well in saying that there is nowhere in the world. You said that there was no reason to do the rewetting because no mapping had been done, but surely that is no reason to decide that you should just have burning of the peat.”

“That is a counsel of despair, isn’t it? You say, “If you cannot rewet it, watch out, because you will get those wildfires”, but I like to stick with the positives. You have said that your members want to rewet the land.”

“You urged the Committee to look at the science and to look at the world as it is, not at the world that we might like it to be. We agreed that the Government had, in the past, incentivised the draining of peatlands. I think you would accept that your members did lobby heavily for them to do that, but the key thing now …”

“On-site inspections are very difficult to cover the areas. It is remote land. Since May last year, we do have the England peat map. You said there had not been mapping done, but, of course, that was done in May of last year.”

“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…”