Leveson Inquiry

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham]

My Lords, when I gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry, I tried to explain to Lord Justice Leveson that his report would be valuable even if the Government did not agree to the need for statutory control of the press. He replied by summarising what I was saying as tails he wins and heads he also wins. I believed that his report would be valuable in either event, and so it has proved. I am a big supporter of his recommendation that the system of self-regulation should be tougher and above all independent. However, I am not a great admirer of many of the things in his report. Let me briefly touch on some of them.

It is not surprising that the report does little to deal with the problem that caused the inquiry to be set up in the first place—namely, the illegal acts of phone hacking and bribery. They were criminal acts before Leveson was set up and they still are—and that is how they should be dealt with. I also share the horror that many noble Lords spoke of about some of the awful things that have happened in recent years, but Leveson did not give credit to the industry for the improvements it has in fact made over recent years—for example, in the treatment of children, particularly but not only the princes when they were small, coverage of hospitals and the sick, coverage of the dying and the treatment of the bereaved.

Leveson is also critical of Section 12 of the Human Rights Act, which was devised after I made a speech in this House on 5 February 1998—sitting exactly where the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is now. I pointed out that the way the Government were incorporating the Human Rights Act into our domestic law was to create a privacy law, which the Government said they did not want. Jack Straw rang me up and I had several meetings with him. We negotiated Section 12 to try and maintain a press not shackled by statutory control. I am not absolutely sure that our efforts were entirely successful but that is the basis upon which Section 12 came to be part of our law.

Lord Justice Leveson’s suggestion about amending the Data Protection Act is again to reverse the changes that I negotiated with the late Gareth, Lord Williams of Mostyn, a former Leader of this House and a very experienced QC with massive media experience. We did that, as Lord Williams said, to protect investigative journalism, which we both thought was in the public interest. I am also doubtful that the statutory underpinning could be effectively enacted if it did not require Parliament to settle in the legislation most of the big issues that Lord Justice Leveson wanted kept out of the hands of politicians and the industry. I will refer to those in a moment. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Alli, that that is the fundamental question that is still unresolved.

Having said that, as far as I know them, I am a big supporter of the proposals that the industry is putting forward that can be implemented in a matter of months, whereas statute will take several years and will be hard fought and divisive. If the new system of self-regulation is satisfactory and fully independent, and the chairman and a majority of the board are persons of standing, no statutory underpinning should be necessary. I cannot conceive of a chairman and board not standing their ground in those circumstances.

As some noble Lords might remember, I retired from chairmanship of the Press Complaints Commission over 10 years ago. The Press Complaints Commission of my day was not a regulator nor was it equipped to be. However, at no time did the industry not co-operate or not accept my jurisdiction. I made it quite clear to those in the industry that I would not stay for a single minute if they tried. The code I worked to was not strong enough and although I got the industry to tighten things up several times it was not a patch on the code that will now be implemented. A new self-regulatory system will be very different from the one I sought to administer. In my opinion, it should be on the following lines: the members of the Board should be totally unconnected with the industry; the industry should be bound to support the regulator financially by long-term civil contracts and to continue to pay its dues even if it was dissatisfied with some of the judgments it received; the code should be drawn up by editors but scrutinised by a body with a lay majority; and there should be a system of fines for serious transgressions. A new regulatory body on those lines, with a chairman and members of standing, would be perfectly able to do an excellent job. The industry would co-operate, for it would have no doubt of its fate if it did not.

Let me conclude by indicating why a system that requires statutory underpinning would be so difficult. First, what code would that be underpinning? The communications industry is moving so fast that the writ would probably be out of date before the Bill got Royal Assent. Secondly, there would be substantial questions over the human rights position, particularly of editors who elected to stay out of the new regime.

I shall try to put some of the other complications as simply as I can. If the new independent regulatory body is to receive approval, it will be necessary to set out the legal requirements it must meet before it can be recognised. The overseeing body will also have to be set up by statute and will have to have a legal constitution before it can grant recognition to the regulatory body—and, by common consent, that overseeing body cannot be Ofcom. If that is not already enough, Parliament will have to set out who will appoint the members of the overseeing body, who will have to be independent of politicians and the industry. As well as that, the law will have to define the legal arrangements that must be put in place with publishers that do not join the regulatory regime. I wonder whether a Bill to set all that out would end up, through Parliament, as an Act in quite the way that was intended when it began.

The Leveson report simply does not say how this will be done, which news organisations should be included and what should be left out. There are some vague references to online news services. Would we treat UK services differently from, say, United States services, where the freedom of the press is protected by their constitution? My fear is that if we go down the statutory road, the danger will be that we shall end up by requiring a licensing of the press and an end of a free press after hundreds of years.