Press Matters

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord for repeating the Statement by the Secretary of State in another place and welcome him to the Dispatch Box. I hope it will not be a single guest appearance on this occasion.

We can judge from its opaque title and surprising appearance that the Statement, “Press Matters”, has very little to do with the substance of either the commencement of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 or announcing a date for Leveson 2 to commence. Its purpose seems to be to muddy the waters around the remaining stages of the Investigatory Powers Bill, which is about to be debated in the other place.

Surely the right thing to do is to honour the Government’s commitment to the victims of press intrusion and harassment. Let us remind ourselves what the test is for this process. The former Prime Minister summed it up on 14 June 2012 when he said, having met the Dowler family in Downing Street:

“It’s not: do the politicians or the press feel happy with what we get? It’s: are we really protecting people who have been caught up and absolutely thrown to the wolves by this process? … that’s the real test”.

Labour supports a free press as essential to democracy. We do not support any state control of the press. It is 1,324 days since all parties agreed to implement the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry in full. The Leveson inquiry looked into press behaviour following the public outcry over illegal phone hacking and after it emerged that there had been many victims of press intrusion.

A key recommendation of the report was the creation of a,

“genuinely independent and effective system of self-regulation”.

The new system was debated in Parliament and received unanimous cross-party agreement. It involved creating the Press Recognition Panel by royal charter in October 2013 as an independent body to oversee press regulators. Has the Minister read the recent annual report of the PRP? If so, he will be aware of what it says about the need for Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 to be implemented. Does he agree with the chair of the PRP, David Wolfe QC, who says:

“There has been a significant delay in doing this, despite the Act being enacted nearly four years ago. Commencing section 40 will strengthen the public’s access to justice. Everyone agrees that politicians should not interfere with the running of the press, but paradoxically, the failure to commence section 40 has kept a political presence in place. The new system intended by Parliament is not in place, and the public interest has not been safeguarded in the way that was expected”?

On Leveson 2, is the Minister aware that one of the original terms of reference given to Lord Justice Leveson was:

“To inquire into the extent of the corporate governance and management failures at News International and other newspaper organisations and the role, if any, of politicians, public servants and others in relation to any failure to investigate wrongdoing at News International”?

This part of Leveson was delayed—as the Minister knows because he has been answering my questions on this matter—until all outstanding court cases are dealt with. Can he confirm that that is imminent?

As my right honourable friend the shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport said in the other place, Leveson 2 is the investigation into how the cover-up of phone hacking was conducted, but what the Government are in effect announcing today is a consultation on whether the original cover-up should be covered up. This is shameful. We need the immediate implementation of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 and we want an early date for the second part of the Leveson inquiry. We do not need a faux consultation on these matters. If the Government are to proceed on this route, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain in some detail what elements of the recent police investigations referred to in the Statement—the Hillsborough inquiry and its findings on misleading police statements to government officials and subsequently newspapers; the case of Mazher Mahmood, who perverted the course of justice to secure his scoops and left scores of previous convictions unsafe; senior police resignations; the new revelations on the Daniel Morgan case; and what we have just heard about Orgreave—persuade him that further consultations are not now required.

We must not miss this historic opportunity. We must ensure that what the press did to the Dowlers, the McCanns, the family of Abigail Witchalls and others who suffered so terribly, can never happen again.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble and learned Lord for repeating the Statement. I must declare an interest, in addition to being a victim of phone hacking by the press. In 2002, I was the subject of a kiss-and-tell story on the front page and eight inside pages of a Sunday tabloid newspaper. Many of the allegations were untrue and the rest were a massive intrusion into my private life by a former partner whom I had lived with for four years. He was paid £100,000 for the story. In the absence of an effective and independent press complaints system, my only course of action was to sue the newspaper and although I was able to secure a conditional fee agreement, many ordinary people are not. Lawyers acting for the newspaper tried every trick in the book to get me to concede, in which case I would have been liable for both my own and the newspaper’s costs and I would have been made bankrupt. If the paper had not admitted libel and agreed a settlement a week before the case was due to go to trial, and had I lost the action, I would have lost my home.

If newspapers do not sign up to an independent, royal charter-compliant, press complaints system that the public can have real confidence in, the press must be prepared to cover the costs if their refusal to sign up results in complainants having to take action through the courts. This was a cross-party agreement, reached at considerable effort and cost, resulting in a royal charter that the Government are preparing to consign to the dustbin. Not only that, they are preparing to ditch detailed scrutiny not only of the matters detailed by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, but of the relationship between the police and the press—issues that were to be covered in Leveson 2—despite such recent cases as that involving South Yorkshire Police, the BBC and Sir Cliff Richard.

If the Statement is designed to head off amendments to the Investigatory Powers Bill currently being considered, does the Minister not agree that it adds fuel to the fire, rather than dampening things down?