Chris Bryant
Main Page: Chris Bryant (Labour - Rhondda)Department Debates - View all Chris Bryant's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Maria Miller
I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will know that it is not possible for us to give a timetable for the future of stage 2 of these inquiries at this time, with ongoing police investigations. I am sure he will therefore be aware that it is difficult for me to answer his question in full, although I understand that he wants to get some assurances. However, as soon as the criminal investigations are completed, we will do that.
In his statement the Prime Minister accepted in full the principles set out by Lord Justice Leveson that a new independent self-regulatory body has to be set up, and that it is truly independent in appointments and funding, giving real access to justice for the public and setting the highest standards for journalism through a code, with teeth to investigate and hold the industry to account. Rightly, Leveson set out that it is for the press industry itself to determine how this self-regulatory system is delivered.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Will the Minister explain how the new body that she envisages could possibly have any powers if it is not given any power by law?
Maria Miller
The hon. Gentleman will, I know, take a full part in the debate. I ask him to reflect a little. We are saying that we accept the principle of an independent and tough regulatory body, and that we will do what is necessary to make sure that it is tough and adheres to those Leveson principles. I am sure he will want to follow closely some of the cross-party talks that I am having with the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who speaks from the Front Bench for his party, on how we achieve just the sort of underpinning that he is talking about.
Ms Harman
It would be quite possible within Lord Leveson’s framework for the local press to set up their own board and for another board to look at complaints against the national press. The key point is that the regulation must be overseen to guarantee its continued independence.
Chris Bryant
Will my right hon. and learned Friend please rebut the myth that the report looked only at criminal activity? The families of the 96 who died at Hillsborough could not sue for libel—there was no defamation. Certainly, untruths were told and defamatory things were said, but the families could never have sued for libel—they had no recourse in law, and it took 23 years to get to the truth. That is why self-regulation failed.
Mr Whittingdale
I am not sure that I would say their case is irrelevant, because it plainly provided evidence of the way in which the press seemed to feel that they were above the law, and that is a matter for a body overseeing ethics and standards. My hon. Friend is right, however, to say that that matter should have been dealt with by the police, and we still need answers as to why it was not.
Chris Bryant
The point, surely, is that the Press Complaints Commission was part of the problem. It was self-regulating, and for far too long it admitted the “one rogue reporter” line that was being touted by News International because it saw itself as a spokesperson for the industry and for the newspapers, and not as an independent body.
Mr Whittingdale
It may surprise the hon. Gentleman to know that I agree with him. There is no question but that all of us in this Chamber are of one mind that the system of self-regulation administered by the Press Complaints Commission has failed. The commission produced a report saying that there was no evidence that anyone other than the one rogue reporter was involved, at the same time as my Select Committee produced a report saying that there was ample evidence and that we found it inconceivable that the rogue reporter defence was true. We are all agreed that we cannot continue with a system of self-regulation. The idea of the press marking its own homework, as Lord Leveson rightly put it, does not work and cannot continue—but that is not what is in prospect today.
Mr Lilley
Exactly; that is very much what I fear if the statutory body, following its own prejudices, determines the contents of the code and how it is enforced. Such a body would almost inevitably be made up of the sort of people who run and control the BBC. The BBC Trust has got into trouble for telling untruths about how it decided there should be unbalanced coverage of climate change and many other things, so we know the sort of prejudices such bodies have.
Lord Leveson specifies only one item of the code that the new body should contain. He says that it should “equip” the
“body with the power to intervene in cases of allegedly discriminatory reporting and in so doing reflect the spirit of equalities legislation.”
The body will be a politically correct one, enforcing politically correct standards on the media and press.
The body will also have the power to establish a
“ringfenced enforcement fund, into which receipts from fines could be paid, for the purpose of funding investigations.”
It will therefore have an incentive to levy fines, and in that way it will carry out investigations to increase and enhance its power and control over the so-called independent regulator.
Mr Lilley
No. I am not giving way to the hon. Gentleman.
The House should think seriously about setting up a body of statutory supervision that has detailed and substantial powers to influence how the so-called independent regulator behaves, and that has an incentive to enhance, increase and make more detailed that interference in regulation. The House will have no direct control over it, so it will therefore be an abnegation of the House’s duty.
The free press is vile, but it is better to have a free press with all its failings than to have a state-controlled and regulated press. I hope we do not go down that route.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I draw the attention of Members to my declaration of interests, which includes writing a column for The Independent every Saturday, and having received a settlement from the News of the World for the hacking of my phone.
It is perhaps an irony that most members of the public are quite sceptical about everything they read in a newspaper and equally sceptical about anything they hear Members of Parliament saying, so our talking about what has been written in newspapers will probably induce the height of scepticism among ordinary members of the public.
I want to follow on briefly from comments made by the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins). He made some good points, and I entirely agree with his remarks about Lord Justice Leveson’s comments on the police, in which I think he showed himself to be painfully naive. I believe that the paying of police officers for information is routine not only in the Metropolitan police but in many other parts of the country. One has only to look at the number of stories of where the press have turned up before anybody else to see that that can only be because of some tip-off from the police which, I am almost certain, is done not for the public interest but for financial gain.
I also think that Lord Justice Leveson has no power, because of the 1689 provisions, to decide whether anybody had lied to Parliament. I still believe that Mr Yates lied to Parliament in the evidence he gave to two Select Committees, and that when Lord Justice Leveson one day comes to the second part of his inquiry, he will have to address those issues.
I thought the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe was confused when he seemed to be saying that the Advertising Standards Authority, which has self-regulation that is backed up by statute, was a rather good model. He then seemed to say that he had doubts. It was almost as if he was trying to persuade himself to have doubts about something and, if I am honest, that was rather the feeling I got from the Secretary of State.
Chris Bryant
I will give way to the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe, but I will not be able to give way to the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless).
Damian Collins
My point is that I have concerns about how the ASA model works, because we can see how through self-regulation, underpinned by Ofcom, there is still an ability to influence and change the advertising code through external pressure, rather than through decisions made purely by the industry.
Chris Bryant
External pressure comes from the public; it is not that politicians are desperate to write elements of any code of conduct for the press. Anybody who wants to characterise any argument in this House as being in favour of politicians wanting to tell newspapers what they can or cannot write does a disservice to the argument. To be fair, the hon. Gentleman was not doing that, but like the Secretary of State he was trying desperately to find an argument for supporting the Prime Minister. I gently suggest to the hon. Gentleman that on this point it might be better to leave that alone.
In truth, we have been here before. We could replace all those in this Chamber with those who were here in 1947 for the royal commission, or in 1962—[Interruption.] I am sure my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) was not here in 1947, although I think she was here last time around. In 1973 there was Sir Kenneth Younger’s committee on privacy, and 1974 saw the royal commission set up under Professor Oliver McGregor, who went on to chair the organisation that was set up. There were two Calcutt reports.
Fascinatingly, in our last round of discussions on 21 June 1990, David Waddington rose from the Government Benches and said:
“It is now up to the press to take up the challenge…presented to it. I am confident that the response will be a positive one.”—[Official Report, 21 June 1990; Vol. 174, c. 1126.]
And here we are all over again. If anything, it is slightly worse, because changes in the digital economy have made it possible for the media to do things that they could not possibly have done back in 1990 although they would doubtless have loved to.
Victims of crime have once again had their lives turned into a commodity. That is the real immorality here. Abigail Witchalls was a victim of crime. In April 2005 she was attacked, rendered paralysed from the neck downwards, and month after month the press decided to invade her privacy. Sometimes, there was perhaps a contravention of the law, such as when 20 journalists were camped out in her garden and refused to leave. Perhaps it was an invasion of privacy to take aerial photographs of the building being built in her parents’ garden to accommodate her. Perhaps she could have gone to the law, but why should someone have to go to law, which is a very expensive process, simply to have degree of privacy after having been a victim of crime?
My personal interest in this issue started because of what happened at Soham. Someone with whom I was at theological college, Tim Alban Jones, was the vicar of Soham, and his experience during that time was that the press would not leave the victims of crime alone. It is not just that the families of the two girls who were murdered had their phones hacked; every person in the village had their door knocked. People were turned into a commodity, and that is the problem.
Whole communities have been traduced. I referred earlier to Hillsborough. The families of 96 people who had lies written about them in The Sun did not have the opportunity to go to the law to find redress. It is not that criminality was involved; the information had not been secured illegally and there was no opportunity to seek claims for libel because the class of people was too large to be specific. No individuals had been named. Those who argue that everything dealt with in Leveson has been criminal activity that should have been better policed are missing the point.
We must bear in mind that the part of the Leveson inquiry published so far is just the dodgy stuff, not the criminal stuff. Lord Justice Leveson has had to circumvent the criminal stuff to ensure that prosecutions can go ahead unprejudiced and unhindered, including those on phone hacking, the suborning of police officers, conspiracy, cover-up and all the rest. Some worrying developments are still going on.
Chris Bryant
I will not give way, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind.
The first worrying development is the lack of News International management standards committee co-operation with the Metropolitan police since May this year, which smacks of the Plimsoll strategy. As soon as the water starts lapping a little bit higher, senior News International and News Corporation management chuck somebody else overboard—a newspaper and an editor. The companies provided material on some of their journalists as long as they could ensure that the ship floated and the proprietor’s feet did not get wet. Given what Lord Leveson has said about management at News Corporation, I suspect that charges will be brought against senior directors, possibly including James and Rupert Murdoch as parts of the body corporate.
However, there is a mystery I do not understand. I understand—from two well placed people inside News International—that in 2005, The Sun and the New York Post, which are both News Corporation newspapers, paid a substantial sum to a serving member of the US armed forces in the US for a photograph of Saddam Hussein. A much larger amount was then paid via a specially set up account in the UK to that same member of the US armed forces. It is difficult to see how those who wrote the story in the UK and US, and the editors of the American newspaper and the British newspaper, could possibly pretend that they did not know how that material was obtained and that criminality was involved in the process of securing the photo. For that matter, they could not possibly pretend not to know that the laptop on which the information and the photograph were kept was destroyed; I believe it was destroyed so as to destroy the evidence of the criminality.
I therefore urge the management standards committee to provide all e-mails that relate to this matter—and particularly to the photograph of Saddam Hussein—from Rupert Murdoch to News International staff as a matter of urgency. Otherwise, people in this country will conclude that News International still does not get it, and that it is still refusing co-operate fully with the police.
Mr Watson
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register—I have written a book on corruption at News International.
Is my hon. Friend aware of allegations that the chief executive of News International has given assurances to journalists facing arrest that, if they go to jail, they will be given their jobs back? If that is the case, does he agree that the company has learned nothing about corporate social responsibility?
Chris Bryant
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Broadly, one point that Lord Justice Leveson hints at in his report is that corporate governance at News International is sadly lacking. It would only be logical for journalists who currently work at News International to believe that what my hon. Friend says will happen will happen because that is what happened before; people were given very large payouts on the understanding that they would plead guilty and have a tidy life when they came out of prison.
I want just a few things out of the inquiry. Of course, we have a press that will sometimes be raucous and wild, and do naughty things, but it should be one that informs, educates and entertains. We do not need snobbery about vulgarity, because we need many different kinds of press. However, I also want redress and reparation not just for defamation or invasion of privacy, but in respect of material that is fundamentally inaccurate. Lord Justice Leveson points to hundreds of cases in which the story was based on no fact whatever—it was quite simply untrue. Individuals should have the opportunity to seek redress.
Chris Bryant
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I have very little time remaining and I am not sure for how much of the debate he has been in the Chamber.
Glyn Davies
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; I have been in the Chamber for only an hour, but I am getting a feel for it.
All hon. Members agree with everything the hon. Gentleman says. I just cannot see why we need a statutory background to deliver what he wants. The organisation that Leveson has recommended seems to do that.
Chris Bryant
One problem is that the self-regulation we have had for years was part of the problem. The PCC ended up having to pay damages to a journalist because the chairman said they were selling lies about the nature of what happened at the News of the World. The problem with the PCC was that it had no power to investigate or to enforce redress. It could never ensure that a correction was made the same size and given the same prominence as the original publication. Those are precisely the powers that everybody accepts the new body needs. I do not see how it can enjoy those powers unless they are granted to it in statute.
Many myths have been perpetrated, including that no legislation has affected the press since 1695. Loads of legislation affects the press; legislation passed in the past 15 years includes reference to the press. The Secretary of State’s argument was that, if the industry does not act, there should be law. That suggested to me that this is not a matter of principle for her. She has accepted that she may have to enact in order to act, in which case the Government should get on with it. Otherwise, people will conclude that the only point of principle for the Secretary of State is that she wants political support from newspapers come the next general election.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
It is a privilege to speak in this debate on this important topic.
Why does the inquiry matter so much when, as Ofcom suggests, papers and magazines account for only 11% of news and current affairs consumption, and when the news cycle is such that the fact that Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant got out on Twitter much quicker than it could have got out in a newspaper? The point is that the news cycle of investigative journalism and in-depth analysis means that the press is at the forefront of holding politicians, Executives and the establishment to account, which is why such journalism deserves a special place in the media spectrum.
I agree with Lord Justice Leveson’s overriding principle that the freedom of the press should be maintained. I do not agree that we need to legislate for the Secretary of State to have such a duty, as the hon. Member for Falkirk (Eric Joyce) suggested. I agree with the self-regulation principle. I share the sympathies of hon. Members on both sides of the House who agree to some extent with the Prime Minister that we need to think very carefully about crossing that Rubicon, as he described it last week.
Sir Brian Leveson says in part K, chapter 5.47 that the threat to legislate must be credible. It has not been credible before. He suggests that that is the only reason why the proposals of Lord Black of Brentwood have progressed as far as they have. I would put it a different way. I would say that the threat of legislation has been made several times, which has led to the evolution of press self-regulation since it began in the late ’40s.
I referred earlier to a simple, three-clause Bill that refers to article 10 of the European convention on human rights but which leaves out the criteria of independence on the basis of not interfering in the operation of the media. However, Sir Brian Leveson says that Parliament must legislate for the criteria of independence. That Bill, which might have been simple at first, is already starting to grow.
Lord Justice Leveson also declines to give a definition of public interest, but the phrase is used extensively in the report. If Parliament is pressed down the statutory route, Parliament would have to consider that definition as part of the criteria for independence when setting up the body.
The report gets into the balance of ethics and privacy—it deals with balancing the public interest in the freedom of speech with the public interest in the rights of privacy. Sir Brian says that that is one of the key points, but that is an understatement. I am concerned that members of the public, including victims—including people affected by the Hillsborough disaster—believe that statutory underpinning is the answer to all previous problems. I do not think that statutory underpinning would necessarily solve the problems that people have experienced, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) said.
Sir Brian Leveson refers to extant changes in the code. One of his first recommendations for the regulatory body is that it should undertake a thorough review of the code. I tried to intervene on the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman)—she is unfortunately no longer in the Chamber. In evidence to the Leveson inquiry, she suggested that the code is fine and does not need changing. Are we adopting the entire principles and thoughts behind the Leveson inquiry, or are we, on a more careful reading—I have not got through all the report yet and have read only certain sections—beginning to see problems that we need to discuss in more detail, such as the report’s interpretation of how the press and legislation will work? Sir Brian Leveson says that the incentive to join the regime would be the existence of the tribunal route. I understand why that would be an incentive, but one wonders whether the Defamation Bill, which is currently before Parliament, could provide a route towards securing the same ends.
What if we cannot agree? What if not all the press sign up to a new body? Sir Brian refers to needing all national publishers to agree, and that if they do not, then Ofcom should become the regulator. Potentially, we have the same situation we had when Northern and Shell walked away from the Press Complaints Commission. If Northern and Shell or any other publisher walked away, the default recommendation in the Leveson report is for Ofcom to regulate the press. That would be a huge step backwards, and part of the slippery slope which many hon. Members are concerned about venturing on to.
There is an appropriate concern about access to justice. I do not agree with Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendations for excessive costs and penalty damages for publishers who do not subscribe to the code. In fact, he is trying to implement Sir Rupert Jackson’s comments on the qualified one-way costs shifting system. That is something we need to think about and more proposals need to come forward. If somebody went to the potential new body, which was not subscribed to by a particular publisher, one could imagine a situation where the regulator said, “Actually, you are absolutely right, that would have failed our tests and we will help you take on the publisher in court.” I can see something like that happening to ensure that people have access to justice.
I have other concerns. The issue relating to the Data Protection Act is a problem for people protecting their sources or for public interest use. Sir Brian Leveson suggests that the names of people should not be disclosed, or that we should not try to identify potential criminals. Frankly, if that was the case for TV, we would shut down the “Crimewatch” programme overnight. The press work with the police to flush out criminals and potential suspects, and to help get the public involved in the search on crime, and the report puts that at risk.
There have been two references to the potential extent of third-party complaints. I am concerned about one particular part of the report, which suggests that the code be amended to have a duty to ensure compliance with Government legislation on the wording of stories. Again, that strays from where we need to be.
A member of the House of Lords would apparently be able serve on the independent board, but an MP or a member of the Government would not.
Chris Bryant
Is it not therefore slightly odd that everybody is now saying that the PCC is independent, despite the fact that it is chaired by Lord Hunt, who takes the Conservative Whip in the House of Lords?
Dr Coffey
My next point is that Sir Brian insists that there will be no involvement of political parties. My concern is that that reinforces the prejudice that to have ever been involved in politics is somehow to be not interested in public service. I know I am taking a different view from a lot of other people. I am not suggesting that a serving MP or a serving Lord should be on any regulatory body, but I am concerned that politics is again being traduced in an unsatisfactory way. Thatis just an example of some of the minor things to which my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) referred—about trying to change the name of briefings and what they could be called. Frankly, that section of the report did not deserve the ink that was wasted on it.
On the problems the report will solve and the problems it will create, we have recently debated, and debated several times, the terrible incident of Hillsborough. There were two other incidents in the late ’80s that forced a change so that we moved away from the Press Council to the creation of the Press Complaints Commission. Not many people will recall that on 9 May 1989, a report from the ombudsman was printed on page 2 of The Sun. Of course, that was not enough. Today, the PCC rules would enable something of equal prominence to be printed, and the ombudsman adjudication at the time indicated that the headline should not have appeared. One concern is that we may start to give false hope to people who have been maligned by the press.
Chris Bryant
But it is also clear that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, in the charges presented against Mulcaire and Goodman, never relied on whether the messages had been intercepted before the intended recipient saw them, so I am not convinced—as Lord Justice Leveson is not convinced—of that argument.
Mark Reckless
As Lord Justice Leveson says, the July 2009 review by the DPP was not assisted by the failure to examine witness statements and exhibits from the prosecution. I asked the CPS for the witness statements from prosecution and it did not provide them, so I had to submit a freedom of information request, and it still has not provided them. However, I spoke earlier to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who was clear. He said that when he was one of the victims—in counts 16 to 20 of the indictment—a police key focus in interviewing and preparing his witness statement was on whether those messages had been listened to before he picked them up. He gave clear evidence to them, saying that he went into his voicemail and discovered that a number of those messages had already been listened to by someone else before he picked them up. That is partly why he felt he was picked: in order to give proof on the narrow basis of the legal advice that the CPS clearly—and, I believe, David Perry—was saying the police had to follow.
We also have the conference on 21 August 2006. The only proper, full note of that seems to have been taken by the police—Detective Chief Superintendent Williams, in charge of the investigation, is clear that the narrow interpretation was given. We also can say that, at most, the advice was nuanced. Carmen Dowd, who was from the CPS and who had throughout taken the narrow view, was actually in that meeting. David Perry was there, and although he was not contradicting the advice given by his instructing solicitor throughout, even on his own evidence he said it was tenable to take either the wide or the narrow view—despite the legislation being clear.
David Perry has another problem. He prepared a note on 14 July saying:
“We did enquire of the police at a conference whether there was any evidence that the editor of the News of the World was involved in the Goodman-Mulcaire offences. We were told that there was not (and we never saw any such evidence). We also enquired whether there was any evidence connecting Mulcaire to other News of the World journalists. Again, we were told that there was not (and we never saw any such evidence.”
The Director of Public Prosecutions said that David Perry had given him a personal assurance in a face-to-face meeting that that was the case, and that he clearly recalled saying those things. However, when Mr Perry gave evidence under oath to the Leveson inquiry, he said:
“I don’t think I would like to say that I necessarily expressed it in precisely those terms, but I was concerned to discover whether this went further than just the particular individuals with which we were concerned and I think I was conscious in my own mind that the question had to be whether it was journalists to the extent of the editor.”
That was much weaker than the assurance that had previously been given to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Leveson suggests that David Perry might have said that in July 2009 because he was advising in a rush overnight, but the fact is that the DPP showed—or it was shown on the DPP’s behalf—and that his draft letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee was put before David Perry on 30 July, and he again confirmed that the narrow interpretation had been made. That letter was then supplied to the CMS Committee and used again to inform the DPP’s commitment to the Home Affairs Committee in October 2010. So that was then a question of misleading Parliament. On 3 November, junior counsel repeated that same basis when looking at the DPP’s letter and going to reconfirm this to the Committee once more.
Given all these issues, Clarke in charge of this said that the uncertainty of the legal advice limited the investigation, and that we have to give credit.