Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Geoffrey Cox Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Whittingdale]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. There was undoubtedly a failure of corporate governance, and that may well exercise the minds of the shareholders of News Corp, and perhaps even the American authorities.

Reference has been made to The New York Times article, which I remember well. Part of the problem was that the quotation that I think the Leader of the Opposition read out was from an unnamed former editor. Sean Hoare was named. He was the only individual who was. Sadly, the late Sean Hoare was an individual whose testimony some people felt might not be wholly reliable.

[Mr Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con)]

Is it not also true that Mr. Hoare was unwilling to back up the allegations that he had made to The New York Times?

[Mr Whittingdale]

I know that it was widely believed that Sean Hoare’s testimony would not stand up in court.

I want to raise one other matter that relates to the actions that could have been taken by the previous Government. The one recommendation from the Information Commissioner, right back at the time of the “What price privacy?” report, was that the maximum penalty for breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 should be a custodial sentence. Press freedom is protected because there is a public interest defence in that Act. My understanding is that the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), who was the Home Secretary at the time, accepted that recommendation and it was Government policy to impose a custodial sentence as a maximum sentence, but he was then overruled by the then Prime Minister following pressure from the media.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale). I congratulate him and his Committee on the excellent work that they have done in their inquiry. I thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing the House to sit for this extra day, and the Prime Minister for coming to the House and making such a very long statement and answering so many questions.

Yesterday was a good day for Parliament. Along the corridor of the Grimond Room and the Wilson Room, the Select Committees for Culture, Media and Sport and for Home Affairs were simultaneously holding hearings. We in our Committee did not have the drama of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee hearing, and I know that you, Mr Speaker, have instituted a security investigation. Perhaps there were no police officers around because most of them were giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee. We took evidence from both the former commissioner and the former assistant commissioner, and there were a lot of police officers there.

I pay tribute to the work of my Committee Clerks, and to the Committee. We basically locked the doors in the Grimond Room to ensure that we agreed the report that is before the House today. I will speak only briefly about these issues. The report has 122 paragraphs and it was published at 5 o’clock this morning. But there is an opportunity for those participating in this debate to look at the report’s conclusions, which we began as early as last October. I thank members of the Committee, three of whom—the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) and for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe)— are in the House today, for the work that they have done. Others, I am sure, will come into the debate.

The report’s conclusions centre on three areas—first, the police, secondly, the mobile phone companies, and thirdly, we touched on News International, only in respect of its co-operation or lack of co-operation with the police. We found a catalogue of failures by the Metropolitan police. We looked at the first investigation and we took evidence from Mr Clarke, a senior officer, very distinguished in relation to counter-terrorism. But Mr Clarke felt that he could not proceed with his inquiry, the first inquiry—we provided a useful timeline for hon. Members just after the first chapter, which sets out when these inquiries took place—because he felt that he was deliberately thwarted by News International. We took evidence from Mr Hayman, and the report speaks for itself in respect of his cavalier attitude to the Committee, and indeed to his relationship with News International. We questioned the relationship between the police and New International whereby there appeared to be a revolving door. Former senior police officers ended up writing articles in News International titles, and former employees of News International ended up working for the Metropolitan police and advising the commissioner for £1,000 a day.

The second inquiry, we felt, was also very poor. To give him his credit, John Yates was very clear. He used more colourful language when speaking to Sunday newspapers, but we thought that it was a serious misjudgment that on 9 July he spent only eight hours looking at the evidence. He denied that that was a review and said that it was the establishment of facts, but we were clear when we took evidence from Sir Paul Stephenson that no time limit was placed on John Yates. He could have taken longer. Indeed, when we saw the DPP, Keir Starmer, afterwards, he was very clear that John Yates had contacted him after 9 July, because Keir Starmer, in preparing his evidence for the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, had asked John Yates to come and talk to him, with leading counsel, to decide whether there was a case to reopen the matter on 9 July. Sadly, the lack of co-operation from News International continues. As the hon. Member for Maldon has just said, it is refusing to waive client confidentiality, and refusing to allow Harbottle & Lewis to release the exchange of correspondence.

[Mr Cox]

May I take the right hon. Gentleman back to 2006? Did he find as part of his investigation that the Attorney-General had been informed in 2006—on 30 May, to be precise—that a vast array of numbers had been tapped by investigators employed by News International? The then Attorney-General’s approval was sought for a much narrower focused investigation, which plainly, by implication, was given. Is it not clear that Ministers knew in 2006 that there was a great array of tapped phone numbers that could have given rise to a wider investigation, but they never allowed the police, or instructed the police to carry it out?

[Keith Vaz]

No witness who came before the Committee has said that to us, but I am happy to write to the previous Attorney-General to ask whether in fact he or she—I have forgotten who it was at the time—was informed. Clearly the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed, and the Attorney-General has superintendence over the DPP.

[Mr Cox]

rose—

[Keith Vaz]

I will not give way a second time, but I am happy to talk to the hon. and learned Gentleman later, or if he catches Mr Speaker’s eye he could make his points then. I shall be happy to write to the previous Attorney-General if that helps.

We come to the end of the second police investigation and the failure of the police to inspect the evidence in their possession adequately and thoroughly. The risk was that waiting for a certain length of time with, as Mr Yates described it, bin bags full of evidence, there is the possibility that the Metropolitan police would have disposed of that evidence. Just in time, Operation Weeting was established. We all agreed that Sue Akers gave excellent evidence to the Committee. We want to ensure that she has all the resources she can possibly need. That is one of our recommendations. Although when I last pressed the Prime Minister on the issue, at the Dispatch Box a week ago, he said that he was leaving it up to the Metropolitan police to decide on resources, Sue Akers really does need more resources. There are 12,800 names; she has cleared 170 and is clearing them at the rate of 30 a month. We made a calculation, which is not in the report, that that process could go on for several decades. It will take at least a decade unless we give her the resources that she needs. We have confidence in Sue Akers. We believe that she will complete her investigation properly.

There are many issues in the report, but I want to highlight two relevant points. The first concerns the arguments that went on throughout the whole process between the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police. The hon. Member for Rochester and Strood pursued that issue vigorously with all our witnesses, and I am sure if he catches your eye Mr Speaker, he will be able to enlighten the House on what he and the Committee saw as the problem. Suffice to say that it is not helpful when such things happen. We should like to see the Crown Prosecution Service and the police working closely together.

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[Mr Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con)]

I want to raise three points. Although I congratulate the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) on his Committee’s report, one or two loose ends seem not to have been followed up. On 30 May 2006, a Crown Prosecution file note recorded that the police had written a briefing paper informing the Attorney-General and the then Director of Public Prosecutions that

“a vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. These may be the subject of wider investigation.”

In a memorandum dated 8 August 2006, a senior Crown Prosecution Service lawyer wrote:

“It was recognised early in this case that the investigation was likely to reveal a vast array of offending behaviour.”

However, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police concluded that aspects of the investigation could be focused on a discrete area of offending relating to two officials at the palace and the suspects Goodman and Mulcaire.

From those documents, it is absolutely manifest that the Attorney-General in the previous Government, who sits when appropriate in the Cabinet, was informed that there was “a vast array” of offending behaviour in which hundreds of celebrities, Members of the House and of the other place and others had had their phones accessed without authority. Why was nothing done?

The Leader of the Opposition has left the Chamber. Can he or former members of the Cabinet tell us whether the Attorney-General in 2006 brought to the attention of his colleagues the fact that a vast array of offending behaviour had been committed by News International but it was not intended that it be investigated by the police? The Attorney-General has a solemn duty to draw to the attention of the Cabinet such matters if they affect the public interest. The Attorney-General has a right of oversight of the CPS—the ultimate resort—and could at least instruct that advice be given to the police on such matters. Why was nothing done?

I invite the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee to call for that evidence and to examine it closely, because it seems to me a matter of the most pressing public interest.

[Mr Straw]

The hon. and learned Gentleman invites members of the then Cabinet at large to say whether the information was ever shared with them by the then Attorney-General. I can only speak for myself. I served in that Cabinet and subsequent ones and on no occasion do I recall that Attorney-General, or any Attorney-General, ever informing members of the Cabinet either at a formal meeting or informally, of an ongoing investigation. Even when I was Home Secretary, the Attorney-General of the day would never have informed me about an investigation and decisions he or she had made, nor would I have sought that information.

[Mr Cox]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that information, but the fact remains that the Attorney-General under the previous Government appears to have countenanced a prosecution strategy when he and the then Director of Public Prosecutions knew that the voicemails of hundreds of individuals had been accessed.

[Keith Vaz]

I will write to the previous Attorney-General today to ask for that information.

[Oliver Heald]

rose—

[Mr Cox]

I will give way to my hon. Friend.

[Oliver Heald]

When the former Home Secretary spoke a moment ago, he used the words, “or informally”. Does my hon. Friend think that one aspect that may need examining is whether the matter was another subject that fell into the “sofa Government” category, and that the Attorney-General may have spoken to the Prime Minister or one or two others, but it was not brought before the full Cabinet?

[Mr Cox]

The matter needs to be closely examined, and the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee has taken it on board. With the greatest respect to the Attorney-General at the time, if he was informed of the matter, he should have interested himself in exactly how the investigation would be conducted. On the face of it, an enormous amount of wrongdoing was simply ignored. The police appear to have proposed a strategy, which would, as the briefing paper put it to the Attorney-General, “ring-fence” Mulcaire and Goodman and exclude a whole raft of serious criminal wrongdoing from investigation. That may well have affected Members.

I do not know to whom the Committee refers when it says that neither Ministers nor the police escalated the matter. As the Committee put it, if Ministers at the time had taken those issues sufficiently seriously, the matter would have been investigated. The truth would have been discovered then and we could have avoided a whole series of events that we now know unfolded.

My second point is about the review suggested by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner Yates. The Home Affairs Committee has rightly judged, in tone and substance, its criticisms of Mr Yates and Mr Hayman. There are serious questions to be asked about why an investigation or a review—I appreciate that it was not a formal review—that was carried out in eight hours apparently failed to read material that, as the former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions was able to determine in a few minutes, gave rise to the gravest illegalities. On the face of it, that is either wilful blindness or rank incompetence. Whatever the reason, Mr Yates’s resignation was right and done for proper reasons. It is inconceivable that, if the exercise had been carried out properly, the material would not have come to light in 2009. Questions arise about the closeness of officers of the Metropolitan police to News International and whether that deflected and deterred them from a rigorous analysis of the evidence that had been in their possession since 2006. It was not only in their possession, but, as the memorandum of 30 May 2006 to the Attorney-General shows, they had discovered that it included

“a vast array of offending behaviour.”

[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

I do not know many of the details that my hon. and learned Friend has given to the House, but the Select Committee heard that a great deal of the evidence was never examined, either in the original investigation or in the course of the review, so it could not be known what possible criminal behaviour had occurred, in addition to the hundreds and thousands of names involved. The e-mails that my hon. and learned Friend mentioned are slightly different. News International supplied them internally and they had not been held by the police. They were supplied to the solicitors who gave them in May to the former DPP, who quickly saw wrongdoing in them.

[Mr Cox]

My hon. Friend is right that new material was supplied by Harbottle & Lewis, but I am referring to material that was in the possession of the police in 2006—mobile phone records, about which they told the then Attorney-General, “Look we’ve got a vast array of offending behaviour here. What are we going to do?” The instruction—or at least the approval—that came from on high appears to have been, “Confine it. Keep out the penumbra of offending behaviour you could examine and confine it to Mulcaire and Goodman.” That was wrong. With hindsight, we now see that that judgment was fundamentally flawed. The matter should have been investigated. Why was it not?

One cannot resist the conclusion that, until it became apparent that ordinary members of the public—Milly Dowler, soldiers who fought for this country—had also been subject to hacking, the Labour Government’s approach was that politicians and celebrities were fair game, so it was not a serious matter. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee reported that Mr Clarke gave as his justification the fact that he did not have many resources and that he was also dealing with terrorism at the time. Frankly, the clear impression is given that the matter was not very serious. One suspects that that is why no action was taken.

It has been suggested that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was wrong to decline an invitation to be briefed in 2010. The surprise is that the offer was ever made, not that it was declined. The chief of staff did exactly the right thing. In 2010, when The New York Times published the report, the Prime Minister was right: he needed evidence. He could not act on anything else.

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[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

I served on the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into this matter. I came to the inquiry straightforwardly; I had no previous involvement or personal interest in it. I heard the evidence given to the Committee and shared the conclusions that it came to and which I felt were justified by the evidence. I say with sadness that I am not satisfied with all the evidence that we heard from the police. I say that with sadness as somebody who has the greatest respect for the police. I do not believe that any taint has been put on the integrity of Sir Paul Stephenson or on the thousands of Metropolitan police officers who serve on the force, many of whom live in my constituency. However, questions remain unanswered about the conduct of the investigation, including the original investigation, which, as we now know, seems to have had catastrophic effects on the reputation of the police and, as we now know, on many individuals.

I heard the contribution from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) and agreed with many of the questions that came to his mind. As he said—and this was the evidence that the Committee heard—a considerable amount of material was seized from Mulcaire and Goodman, but the police did not properly pursue investigations with the material that they had. Indeed, some of the large quantities of material was not investigated or read at all, it would appear. Nor did the police look for further potentially relevant material in the normal way by searching premises, seizing documents and interviewing people. We now know that such material might have been at hand because we heard the evidence from the former Director of Public Prosecutions—as it happens, he now works for News International as its counsel—who, when asked to advise on this matter, saw some of the material that had been in the hands of News International and after brief consideration advised that it contained criminal matters that had to be referred to the police. I think that that was in May 2011—that is what the chronology suggests—not in 2005-06 when the matter first came to light.

[Mr Cox]

I am grateful for what my hon. Friend has said. I can show him the evidence if he wants. On 30 May 2006, the Attorney-General and the DPP were informed that there was a vast array of offending behaviour and that a vast number of telephone numbers in the possession of the police had been accessed without authority. However, there was a conscious decision to confine the investigation, even though they knew that hundreds of people, including Members of the House, had had their phones tapped.

[Mr Clappison]

I have to say, having heard the evidence, that the answer to my hon. and learned Friend’s point remains hanging in the wind. I am not satisfied with the explanations that we have heard, which will appear in the evidence that will be published by the Home Affairs Committee. One explanation that was given by a senior investigating officer in the case was that the police had other priorities, and this matter was not regarded as sufficiently important when set beside them. We have to accept that police resources are limited and the police have to determine their priorities, but their credibility on the matter is not assisted by what the senior investigating officer of the case wrote about it—incidentally, in a News International newspaper of which he had subsequently become an employee. I am referring to Mr Hayman, who said:

“In the original inquiry, my heart sank when I was told the accusations came from the Palace. This was not the time for a half-hearted investigation—we put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned as officials breathed down our neck.”

I believe that was inconsistent with the evidence that we heard from the police about the priorities that they set themselves at the time. That is the honest conclusion that I have come to on the basis of that evidence.

The Committee has gone as far as it can. I believe we have gone to the limits of what a Select Committee can achieve in carrying out an investigation. These questions now remain to be resolved by others in the course of the Leveson inquiry, which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has rightly set up, and further criminal investigations must go forward under the direction of Sue Akers in Operation Weeting. In view of the evidence that we have now heard from the former DPP and others, I will not be surprised if evidence is uncovered of further phone tapping, further payments to officers and, I am afraid, possibly other offences involving the corruption of police officers. I hope that that is not the case, but the important thing for the reputation of the police, the good reputation of many honest officers and the public interest is that these matters are now fully investigated impartially and independently, and that those investigations are carried through to their conclusion.

We have heard a great deal about the press. One catastrophic effect of the original failed investigation, along with the failed review carried out by Mr Yates in 2006, was that senior police officers went to see representatives of The Guardian, which had been carrying out an investigation, effectively to try to put them off further investigations by persuading them that their investigation, which was based upon matters that were seeping out through the civil courts, was exaggerated and unjustified. It is to the credit of The Guardian, and particularly its journalist Nick Davies, that it persisted with the investigation. I say that as somebody who is no great sympathiser with The Guardian—I do not expect to receive an invitation to lunch there any time soon, and I do not know the people concerned. However, that was to their credit, and it was an illustration of the value of a free press.

That brings me to my next point. It is very important to keep the criminal side of this separate from the issues that arise in respect of the regulation and ownership of a diverse, free and robust press. The matters that we have been talking about are criminal matters, not just matters of comment or of insufficient comeback from the Press Complaints Commission. They are serious criminal matters involving a wide range of people—politicians, celebrities and, as we have heard, many ordinary members of the public often in tragic circumstances. Each case has to be properly investigated, and anybody who has committed offences has to be brought to justice.