Queen’s Speech

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

My Lords, I would like to address the impact on Britain’s media businesses of the legislation in the gracious Speech. I declare my interest as director of the Telegraph Media Group and draw attention to my other media interests in the register.

As noble Lords will be aware, these are not easy days for Britain’s newspaper and magazine industry, which is part of a publishing sector that employs 250,000 people. The inexorable, quickening pace of profound structural change in the industry, arising from the growth of digital media and the fracturing of audiences and advertising, combined with a very deep recession, has placed media businesses under serious commercial pressure. Then there is the long shadow cast by the Leveson inquiry and the menacing calls from some of the witnesses who have appeared before it for ever tighter restrictions on the media at a time when, commercially, they need much less regulation, not much more, if they are to survive. For some businesses, we should be in no doubt that survival really is a challenge.

Against that background, a number of measures outlined in the gracious Speech, with one exception I shall come on to, provide a rare glint of sunlight to pierce the May gloom. If not quite three cheers for the Government, there will certainly be two from the hard-pressed business of journalism. The loudest cheer will be for the excellent news that we are finally going to have a Defamation Bill to reform our oppressive and antiquated libel laws, which for far too long have had a serious chilling impact on reporting and investigation across the media. Like the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, I hope that it will succeed in ending the scandal of libel tourism. We need to ensure that this Bill really will create the new, robust and workable defences needed to protect investigative journalism in the digital age of the 21st century. I am sure that the chances of that will have been greatly increased as a result of the careful scrutiny given to it by the Joint Committee so expertly chaired by my noble friend Lord Mawhinney, to which the Minister has already referred.

Key to the legislation will be a trio of tasks: first, to ensure that court action is restricted only to cases where the most serious and substantial harm to an individual’s reputation truly is at issue; secondly, to reduce the complexity and hence the cost of proceedings; and, thirdly, to give the Reynolds defence real bite by ensuring that there are strong practical defences to provide protection for legitimate investigative reporting. In order to deliver real change, it will be vital that the Government maintain a constructive dialogue with all the different parts of the media during the Bill’s passage. My noble friend Lord McNally has already shown himself to be a willing and constructive listener. There will be improvements to explore as well as potential pitfalls to avoid, in particular any extension of courts’ powers to dictate what goes on a newspaper’s front page. I know that newspaper publishers and editors at national and regional level stand ready to assist.

Another cheer is for the Crime and Courts Bill, which will introduce cameras into some courts. It is now nearly a quarter of a century ago that regional and national newspaper publishers took part in the very first working group to look at court broadcasting. This shows that perseverance pays. All those with a commitment to open justice and the public’s right to know will now hope for a swift rollout from Court of Appeal cases to the sentencing remarks of judges in the local Crown Court. This would help enrich online court coverage, particularly for Britain’s regional press for which this issue is very important, and rapidly increase public understanding of the work of the courts. I am sure that this legislation will be a great success and I hope that Britain’s media companies, along with the Society of Editors which has also worked very hard to bring this about, can on the back of it persuade the Government and the judiciary that responsible coverage of whole trials, with suitable safeguards, should not now be indefinitely delayed.

So hearty cheers for those two Bills, but there is not one, I am afraid, for parts of the justice and security Bill which point in the opposite direction to the openness of the Crime and Courts Bill. Proposals for the extension of closed material proceedings barring press and public from access to hearings and evidence in some civil cases brought against the Government open up the prospect of secret justice rather than open justice. I will not go too much further just in case my noble friend accuses me of being swept away in the tsunami of overhyped hysteria, but there are some serious issues here, as my noble friend Lady Berridge mentioned. Indeed, the Joint Committee on Human Rights has already expressed deep concern about the paucity of evidence in the Green Paper which foreshadowed this Bill to justify the proposals and its failure to consider the impact of such a radical departure from long established principles of open justice on the media’s ability to report matters of public interest. I am sure that we will have important debates in this House on this vital issue, as we will on the draft communications data Bill, which has a potentially serious impact on the confidentiality of journalistic sources.

I do not want to trespass onto tomorrow’s economic business but I also commend the commitment to introduce the enterprise and regulatory reform Bill. Many local newspaper businesses in particular, like many of the creative industries, which are often small-scale start-ups, continue to suffer from the burdens of bureaucracy and red tape. I agree with my noble friend Lord Grade: let the bonfire of regulations begin. I believe that this Bill may do something to get the flames going. I hope that ways might also be found to speed, simplify and cut the costs of the frankly Byzantine processes that local newspapers have to go through to change ownership. At the moment, too many local newspapers are still closing because of the fear of the burdens and cost of a Competition Commission referral. This Bill would be a good place to start wholesale reform of the system in a way that would be of real value to local communities up and down the country. It would be a real policy for growth.

There is a great deal to be welcomed in the gracious Speech for those of us who have an interest in freedom of expression and in the protection of investigative journalism. I hope that the Defamation Bill, in particular, can now make speedy progress through Parliament as the changes within it cannot come a moment too soon.