Paul Farrelly
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Defamation Bill
Paul Farrelly Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
May I both welcome the new ministerial team and put on record my sadness that the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) will not pilot the Bill through? He did a lot of work on the Bill. He said he would reconsider certain details in respect of websites, and the Government have brought forward amendments, which I welcome.
New clause 1 seeks to address a perverse and, no doubt, unintended anomaly, whereby so long as a website operator complies with all the requirements and delivers up the identity of the poster, they can continue to publish content on the site. I pointed out that anomaly in Committee, using the example of a political website that, having complied, continued to run defamatory material about rivals for the sheer mischief of it. This is a live issue.
I have one principal question. The new clause seems to be very narrowly drawn. It appears to say that the claimant must first succeed in an action for defamation for the court to be able to order a website operator to take down material. The amendments I tabled in Committee, but then withdrew, were broader. They covered, for instance, circumstances where an individual could ask for an injunction ordering that material be taken down in advance of an action for libel, which might, of course, take some time to be heard. Is it the Government’s intention that courts should be able to issue injunctions or other orders only after a successful libel action? It would also be helpful if the Minister could clarify the meaning of subsection (2) of the new clause.
Jeremy Wright
I thank Members for their kind words of welcome to me and my fellow Justice Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant). I also echo the tribute the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) has just paid to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), whom I thought the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) was very harsh on, as he certainly was involved in the concessions—
Jeremy Wright
My hon. Friend raises some fair questions. I know that he will forgive me if I do not litigate a case that may or may not have happened 22 years ago. As he knows, there is various case law on these issues as they affect public authorities and defamation—if he will forgive me, I will not go down that road. However, I will urge the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland not to press amendment 7—
Jeremy Wright
Before doing so, I will give way, one last time, to the hon. Gentleman.
Paul Farrelly
The Minister has been clear that he wishes courts to make orders only after successful defamation cases. What he has not answered is my question about the meaning of subsection (2) of the new clause, which refers to subsection (1) not affecting
“the power of the court”.
The courts, of course, have the power to issue injunctions.
Jeremy Wright
Of course they do. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that I omitted to mention that and of course that is exactly the point. The court’s right to make injunctions remains, and although interim injunctions are rare, they are still available. The purpose of the subsection is to ensure that they remain so. With that, I ask that hon. Members support new clause 1 and amendments 5 and 6, and I urge them to resist amendment 7.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 1 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Clause 2
Disapplication of Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012
‘Sections 44 and 46 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 shall not apply in relation to civil actions for defamation, malicious falsehood, breach of confidence, privacy or publication proceedings.’.—(Robert Flello.)
Brought up, and read the First time.
Mr Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in the debate because it gives me the opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright) and for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) on their promotion to the Government. I cannot think of two finer people to receive such an honour. I served on several Public Bill Committees with my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam when we were in opposition, and I could not think why he was not made a Minister as soon as we came into government. At least he got there in the end, however, and I sincerely trust that he will stay in his post for a good long time, not least because the Bill is of considerable public importance and interest.
I must disclose a form of interest in the Bill because there was a time when I knew quite a lot about the law of defamation, although I then spent two years as a Law Officer during which I forgot all the law I ever knew. While I was listening to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello), I was reminded of our debates during the passage of the Bill that became the Access to Justice Act 1999. At that time, it was apparent that the then Labour Government were not terribly interested in providing access to justice, and I said that that Bill would more properly be called the Denial of Access to Justice Bill. However, that was a long time ago.
I come to our debate on the new clause untrammelled by any knowledge of sections 44 and 46 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, but I did listen to the hon. Gentleman’s speech. I do not think that my hon. Friend the Minister will have to look very hard to find the references that the hon. Gentleman was after, but if the situation is as it has been described, that would be a pity, to say the least.
If the words of my noble Friend Lord McNally that were cited are to mean anything, I trust that the Government will do something about the problem, because a failure to provide access to justice for people without deep pockets should not be encouraged. Conditional fee arrangements—I have benefited from one or two—do not cost the Government any money. They are not an ideal system of achieving access to justice, but they are a way of allowing those without access to funds from trade unions, companies, employers or others to bring or resist actions for defamation. I therefore hope that the Government will consider carefully—if not today, during the gap between the Bill leaving this House and its consideration in the other place—arrangements whereby those without funds can defend either their reputation or a defamation claim.
That said, I hope that the Minister’s speech will persuade the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South that it is not necessary to press new clause 2 to a Division. I hope that we can take the Minister’s word that the matter will be given a lot more thought before the Bill reappears in the other place. Knowing my hon. Friend, I think that we can be reasonably sure that that will be the case.
Paul Farrelly
I support the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) and the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr Garnier), who I see is still plain “Mr Garnier” on the monitors.
It has been a long road to libel reform. For newspapers and other media, the real issue is cost. Responsible newspapers have been concerned about conditional fee agreements with 100% success fees and the sheer costs involved in such cases, especially as it seemed to be a case of “always win, double the fee”. Of course, we have heard examples where that is not the case: my hon. Friend cited the case of Dr Peter Wilmshurst, consultant cardiologist at Royal Shrewsbury hospital and our local University hospital of North Staffordshire, who needed that measure to be able to defend himself and give some certainty in a fraught situation to his family that, if he were to lose his case, all their worldly goods would not be forfeit.
Over time, proposals have been made, including by Lord Justice Jackson and my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), who laid a statutory instrument which was—almost uniquely—defeated by a cross-party ambush in Committee, because Members felt so strongly about the issues involved. In addition, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, of which I am a member, produced proposals to limit the uplift in fees to 10%, rather than 100%, and not to recover after-the-event premiums—often, there is a false market in those premiums. I will put on the record now my belief that, in that report, we went too far, but our proposal was not to abolish an uplift, which would encourage lawyers to take on difficult cases, in their entirety. On the one hand, we are reforming libel law to protect responsible journalism, but on the other hand, we are potentially denying people access to justice, and I think the whole environment has become unbalanced.
What we have to remember, with phone hacking and Lord Leveson soon to report, is that we have a macho media world and some highly aggressive corporations. If we remove people’s ability to fight to restore their reputation, we risk giving a carte blanche to libel and going back to the bad old days when the only questions a newspaper asked were, “How much have they got? Can they afford to sue us?”
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
There seems to be some consensus that the main obstacle to pursuing a defamation claim would be lack of cash. Does my hon. Friend agree that, rather than resolve that crucial issue, the Government’s proposals could make the situation worse?
Paul Farrelly
I entirely agree. I do not propose a return to the bad old regime, but I hope that the Government will give some thought to the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South and the hon. and learned Member for Harborough. The situation is unbalanced now and we need to address that.
So often, if people do not sue, our media do not take them seriously. That simply increases the licence to libel. I know people who defend responsible journalism and investigative journalists who have had to take that course of action because newspapers with an agenda have been out to get them; if they did not threaten or take legal action, the situation would never change. I believe the culture of our media needs to be borne in mind, as we will be reminded when Lord Leveson reports next month.
Simon Hughes
I welcome back to our debates the former Solicitor-General, whom I thank for his work in that office. It was much appreciated and I wish him well in considering things from a non-Government and non-Law-Officer perspective.
I declare an interest that means that I will not vote on the new clause if it is pressed to a Division. I am the recent recipient of a conditional fee agreement in the well publicised series of actions against News International. Even though, like all my colleagues here, I am on a parliamentary salary of more than £60,000 a year, had I not been offered a conditional fee agreement the prospect of taking News International to court subject to the risks that, in theory, followed from that might well have dissuaded me from doing it. If those risks might have dissuaded me and anyone on a salary similar to mine, how much more would they have dissuaded people earning a lower salary, much less experienced than I in such matters—not a lawyer—and not used to dealing with the media? We have to be realistic about the relevance of the issue and be aware of the need to continue the debate.
Paul Farrelly
I am fully aware of the provenance of the new clause and of the sterling work done by the Libel Reform Campaign, and I am very sympathetic to what the right hon. Gentleman is trying to achieve, but I want to ask him a question. Let us suppose that an innocent mistake is made, which may not be apparent to the newspaper. When a complainant writes to the newspaper saying “I want an apology”, the newspaper gives the standard response, “We stand by our story: it is true and in the public interest.” I fear that in those circumstances there will be no defence for responsible journalism, because under the new clause it falls away.
Simon Hughes
I accept that, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s work, which has been gleaned from his experience in his previous life as a journalist.
What we are trying to do between us is ensure that if we are to replace the common-law defence with a statutory defence, we not only deal with the general proposition that if something is in the public interest, that should be a defence, but find ways of giving the public a remedy—which they do not currently have, short of going to law—and ratchet up the probability that a public interest defence will be unsuccessful if the defendant has been malicious.
As the hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out, the definition of “malice” in the new clause is not my own handiwork. Others have been working carefully to craft what they consider to be the right second-tier definition. The aim is to establish two tiers of consideration: there should be a general public interest defence, but the situation should be deemed to have gone beyond that when a publisher has flown in the face of the facts or the evidence. That would not apply to the example given by the hon. Gentleman, because if a newspaper could honestly argue that the statement that it had published was ignorant and innocent and that there had been every reason for believing that it was true, it would obviously have a much more complicated public interest defence case to argue. In the absence of my new clause, it would then have to rely on something like the clause that is currently in the Bill.
Let me make just two more substantive points. I am keen for us to end up with legislation that will give people a way out of the legal process when that is possible. Who knows what the Leveson inquiry will produce? I sense that one of its main recommendations will concern how we should deal with the public’s desire for inaccuracies to be corrected. I gave evidence before Lord Justice Leveson, as did others, and that was a major subject of debate. We may have to legislate if Lord Justice Leveson proposes legislation, and I hope that that would happen in the Session that will begin next May. It is therefore possible that we will return to this issue.
There is a debate about when the Leveson report will be ready, but if it appears as early as October, it may give us time to incorporate any proposals in this Bill. If it does not produce its recommendations until December, which now looks more likely, I sense we will have to come up with further legislation specifically to deal with the Leveson recommendations. Although we may not come up with a perfect solution in this Bill, however, both Government and Opposition parties have said they want to try to get this issue sorted now and get a better definition of public interest defence.
I want the House to agree to a measure that adds to the current clause 4, with a new defence available to publishers who are prepared to correct the record or publish a right-to-reply response promptly and prominently, thereby avoiding the use of lawyers. That answers the need in the internet age for a much speedier response—otherwise many readers are unlikely to see both the original content and the later clarification. It offers newspapers and other publishers a way of being responsible after the publication of the initial story, too, because they can be shown to have corrected what they have published. It will also serve not to permit the repetition of a defamatory allegation that has been promptly or prominently corrected or clarified. It would, therefore, take disputes out of the courts, thus saving people money, and it would speed up justice and make it more publicly accessible. It would not apply if the author were motivated by malice in its widest definition, which includes political or personal ill will or vendetta, rather than just the old honest opinion defence. The information must also be understandable to the public.
The Reynolds defence no longer works. Everybody accepts that we must move on from that common-law position for all sorts of reasons. We are in the age of the citizen-journalist, and we need to adapt the rules to accommodate that. We need something that will work for conventional newspaper groups and new media organisations. The Reynolds defence has outlived its time. It will no longer be sufficient to have a checklist of tests in every court case. Perhaps we ought to debate again whether to have early strike-out clauses in order to get other kinds of cases out of the courts, too. We need a measure that sorts out at the beginning of proceedings, rather than the end, whether there is a public interest component.
Paul Farrelly
Amendment 9 is the first of a series aimed at either improving or clarifying the Government’s thinking on clause 4 regarding “responsible journalism”. Clearly, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) has given the Government more food for thought, and he usefully clarified that his new clause 4 would in no way be a replacement for clause 4 but that it would be an additional safeguard. I want to say at the outset that I welcome the Bill’s recognition that responsible journalism should be protected, in the public interest. However, during the passage of the Bill we want to make sure that what is codified is not a step back from the current case law that has been largely welcomed, and we also do not want to give a charter for sloppy, frivolous, inaccurate or sometimes downright nasty journalism.
The clause in effect codifies the defence of qualified privilege established in the judgments in the cases of Reynolds v. Times Newspapers Ltd and then Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe, as we have heard. One of the concerns among serious journalists about the current state of the law, and therefore about the construction of this clause, is that the list has the potential to be interpreted by lower courts in particular as an inflexible tick-list: a set of hurdles, each and everyone of which needs to be surmountable before the defence can be deployed.
In his landmark judgment in the Reynolds case in 1999, Lord Nicholls enumerated 10 different matters that a court could take into account in allowing a defamatory article the protection of qualified privilege. They are slightly different from the nine in paragraphs (a) to (i) in subsection (2), but clause 4 seeks to capture their essence. Lord Nicholls made it clear from the start that his list was by no means exhaustive and was meant to be flexible, depending on the circumstances. He said:
“The weight to be given to these and any other relevant factors will vary from case to case”.
That important point was underlined in 2006 in the very different case of Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe. The first case concerned an article in The Sunday Times regarding the former Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, whereas the Jameel case concerned a Wall Street Journal article in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 saying that US law enforcement agencies and the Saudi Arabian central bank were monitoring bank accounts associated with prominent Saudi business men. The central question was what sort of reporting might be in the public interest, even when the imputations and the allegations carried might be untrue and defamatory. In the Jameel case, Lord Bingham of Cornhill set out very clearly how the Reynolds factors should be interpreted:
“Lord Nicholls....intended these as pointers, which might be more or less indicative, depending on the circumstances of a particular case and not, I feel sure, as a series of hurdles to be negotiated by a publisher before he could successfully rely on qualified privilege.”
That is indeed how the lower courts had interpreted the list. In the Jameel case, the House of Lords was critical of the High Court—in that instance, Mr Justice Eady—and the Court of Appeal in denying qualified privilege on one narrow ground taken from the list.
Indeed, because of the operation of the lower courts, newspapers and non-governmental organisations also prepare for and approach Reynolds defences according to a tick list. That accounts for the complaints about how costly it is in practice to “run a Reynolds”. The likely bill would be calculated by totting up how much it would cost to satisfy the court that each of the 10 factors had been satisfied.
In Committee, the Government said that the wording in the preamble to subsection (2) of clause (4) already made it quite clear that the list was not exhaustive. The purpose of amendment 9 is to make it even clearer that a court should take all circumstances into account. I admit that the wording is essentially not mine, but is taken from the noble Lord Lester’s Defamation Bill, a private Member’s Bill that gave much impetus to the Bill that we are now considering.
Amendment 10 is aimed at probing, as we did in Committee, whether or not clause 4 is a step back from the case law as it has developed. The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark mentioned the case of Flood v. Times Newspapers, which came up in Committee. For the uninitiated, that concerned the case of a policeman, Detective Sergeant Gary Flood, who was being investigated internally by the Metropolitan Police over alleged corruption by wealthy Russians but who was later cleared. The central question for the case was whether it was in the public interest for the fact of an investigation to be reported, with the officer’s name, even though the allegations were plainly defamatory and he was eventually cleared.
The Supreme Court found this year that in the circumstances of that case, the newspaper group could rely on qualified privilege. The case is very recent, coming just weeks before publication of the Bill, and I mention it in relation to the amendment because there is concern among serious journalists and defamation lawyers that the clause as drafted is a step back from Flood. Indeed, the case is not even mentioned in the explanatory notes.
The concerns crystallise around the drafting of clause 4(2)(g) and the question of whether courts will require newspapers in every case to investigate and prove the truth of allegations that are subject to investigation—for example, by the police, as they were in the Flood case. As drafted, paragraph (g) appears to go beyond Reynolds, where one of Nicholls’ factors or tests is to “verify the information”, which is a very different thing to verifying the truth of the allegations. That is where the concerns about paragraph (g) lie.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point about the reporting of investigations, but is not one of the problems with the potential removal of paragraph (g) the fact that it essentially enables journalists to print almost anything, subject to the other conditions, without taking any steps to verify the truth of something that is not under investigation? If the paragraph is removed from the Bill, it will amount to a charter for libel.
Paul Farrelly
The hon. and learned Gentleman makes a fine point. The purpose of my amendment, which I shall not press to a Division, is to probe the Government’s thinking. Other suggestions for amendments were made in Committee and some of those might reflect the judgments given in Reynolds more closely than paragraph (g).
Any decisions by lower courts can be appealed, but going all the way to the Supreme Court is very time-consuming and expensive. The purpose of my amendment 10 is therefore to get the Government to clarify what they mean by paragraph (g) and whether they have fully taken into account the most up-to-date case law, and to give them the opportunity to state to the House that there is no intention that the clause should be at odds in any way with how the “responsible journalism” defence has been developed by the courts over the years.
Amendment 11, which relates to subsection (2)(h), simply reflects the actual wording used by Lord Nicholls in his list in the Reynolds case, in which the court considered whether a newspaper might reasonably have delayed publication—for instance, to wait longer for a comment from the subject of an article—rather than going to press when it did. The concern in the legal profession about the current wording of sub-section (2)(h) is that it is neutral and does not capture the essence of the urge, or the urgency, to publish. It is a concern for weekly, fortnightly or monthly publications, for example, that withholding a comment can be used to try to ensure that a story does not appear in a particular edition. I shall pray the noble Lord Lester in aid again. Urgency appears explicitly in his list of factors that the courts may take into account. In his private Member’s Bill, he proposed that they may consider
“whether there were any factors supporting urgent publication”.
Amendment 12 is lifted word for word from Lord Lester. It is intentionally broader than amendment 3, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) will speak to shortly. It also seeks to address a concern that was not addressed in Committee. Following the phone-hacking affair and the failure, yet again, by certain aggressive tabloids to put their own house in order, there is now a crisis of confidence in the press in this country. The Press Complaints Commission palpably failed over phone hacking, and in cases such as that of the McCanns. It is broken, and the “son of PCC” advanced by the industry to replace it looks all too much like the PCC itself. The mantra in the industry often seems to have been never to let the editors’ code of practice get in the way of a good story or good business. I am sure that, when Lord Justice Leveson reports next month, he will make similar damning judgments about the practices of the press, or certain parts of it.
The amendment seeks to give statutory recognition, if that is the right word, when newspapers are seeking to rely on qualified privilege, to the importance of journalists following a relevant code of practice—be it their own publication’s code, the editors’ code, one from a regulator or that of the profession. It also seeks to bolster the position of journalists. They are frequently asked by editors to do things that breach those codes: “Leave your morals at home or you’ll be colouring in the black squares on the crossword before we sack you” can instil genuine fear in many parts of the industry. Only editors and proprietors have been consulted on the proposals for the reform of the PCC; journalists have not. I believe that in striving for better quality journalism, we should give good codes of practice more weight. The amendment seeks to do that.
Mr Edward Garnier
I listened with the greatest possible care to what the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) said in moving his new clause, but I confess that I was either unconvinced or did not entirely understand the thrust of his argument. I am sure that that is entirely my fault. I also listened with care to the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), and I found him a little easier to follow. Both those contributions have persuaded me, however, that the amendments are not helpful to the wider debate. They have further persuaded me that, if we are to legislate, clause 4 is the way to do it.
Clause 4(2) proposes that, when determining whether a publisher has acted responsibly, the court may have regard to a list of factors, “amongst other matters”. The phrase “amongst other matters” reminds us of the words of Lord Nicholls in the case of Reynolds. His list of factors was non-exhaustive. In an ideal world, however, legislation is not the right way to go about this. The proposals in clause 4 are better to be found in the common law and in the development of case law. I appreciate that if courts are to develop the common law, that leads to a need for litigants to litigate, but such an approach provides necessary flexibility. By setting in stone clause 4, or another version of it, we will face the problem that it might not always be fit to deal with future circumstances. We are probably unwise to be doing that, albeit not so unwise that I would suggest removing clause 4 from the Bill. I do not think that we should have started from where we are, but I did not draft the Bill, and in so far as I had any influence on the people who did so, they sensibly ignored my opinion.
Sir Peter Bottomley
I welcome this debate. I understand that new clause 4 is not going to be pressed to a Division, so I do not need to declare my intentions on that.
Those associating themselves with the new clause include Sense about Science, Which?, Citizens Advice, Mumsnet, Nature, the British Medical Journal, the Association of British Science Writers, Global Witness, the Society of Authors and the Publishers Association, and I am sure that many others would do so. If they believe that Parliament should pay attention to what is in the new clause, I agree with them, and I hope that there will be serious discussion about it in another place and before the Bill gets there.
I want to draw the House’s attention to a case whose decision was reported on 6 July this year by Mrs Justice Sharp. The case was brought by Mohamed El Naschie against Macmillan Publishing, the publishers of Nature, and against the journalist Quirin Schiermeier. In essence, Mrs Justice Sharp decided that what was written was honest, that it was fair opinion, and that it had justification. It was about comments made on the retirement of the editor of a journal called Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. Most of us know what chaos and fractals are. Solitons were, I think, first described in 1834 by someone who had observed a wave go through a canal; they relate to how a wave can be self-perpetuating if it goes at a constant speed. The journal, published by Elsevier, was regarded as a joke and described as such on mathematical websites. In theory, it was peer reviewed. The degree of seriousness of the peer review is described well in the judgment. In June 2011, Mr Justice Eady made various decisions and struck out some parts of the claim. It took until July 2012 for the case to be disposed of. The article was pretty mild, and the problem is that clause 4 or new clause 4 would not do enough to stop that kind of action being taken.
Let me return to clause 1, which needs a bit of attention between now and when it reaches the Lords. It says, under the heading, “Requirement of serious harm”:
“A statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant.”
That is not the best way of putting it. I would say that a defamatory statement is not actionable unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant. If something is said not to be defamatory when clearly it is defamatory, that is worth giving some attention to. I was brought up with the idea that a defamatory statement could be actionable only if it fulfilled three criteria: first, that it was not true—I can think of various defamatory things that could be said about me that are true; secondly, that it should be damaging, and I agree that it should be seriously damaging before it is actionable in court; and thirdly, that it should not be privileged. We might have returned to the question of what is privileged had there been other amendments.
New clause 4 relates to what the person who has published the defamatory statement has done after publication—whether they have, at the request of the person who has made the claim, provided an explanation, an apology or a clarification, or whether they have done that without being asked. That should be taken into account. If the new clause is accepted in another place, I hope it will encompass what a respondent has decided to do off their own bat.
To give a small example, the last time I noticed that I was being seriously defamed was when a Sunday newspaper said, in effect, that I was far too close to the IRA. As it happened, the IRA paid rather too much attention to me in my ministerial jobs, but that is a side issue. I rang the editor and said, “What you’ve said is wrong and very damaging. What did you mean to say?” He said, “That we disagree with House of Lords on its decision on Private Lee Clegg”—who had shot somebody—“and we disagree with you appearing at a meeting next Thursday at the Quaker meeting house on Euston road with a senior Sinn Fein person.” I said, “If you put out a statement to the Press Association by lunchtime saying that that’s what you had in mind—if you want to offer me a new lawnmower I would be grateful, but the key thing is to get out a statement today—I won’t take this further. If you don’t, tomorrow—Monday—we will issue a writ and serve it.” That led to a week and a half in the High Court, where George Carman lost a case for his client. I was not his client.
We should be putting pressure on claimants to stay out of court and find a way for courts to throw claims out. The case involving Nature magazine and its comments on the retirement of the editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is the kind of case that even a clerk at the court should have said it would not accept. The first time the judge read the papers, they should have said to the claimant, “Sit down and tell me exactly why you think this needs action in court.”
Paul Farrelly
I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to new clause 5, which was tabled by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) but was not selected for debate because it was essentially the same as a new clause on early strike-outs that my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) tabled in Committee. That new clause lost a Committee vote by nine votes to seven, with Conservative members voting against it and Liberal Democrats abstaining. I urge the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) to ask the Government to consider that new clause again when the Bill goes to the other place.
Sir Peter Bottomley
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and will end my remarks on this point. It is important that a case does not fall only when it gets to a hearing. At an early stage, a judge should have the responsibility and the opportunity to ask what it is about. If a claimant will not take the advice of a judge, the judge should have the opportunity to refer the case to a small claims court. Once that happens, the small claims court should be able to order a limit on the costs that can be claimed at the end of a case, with or without a conditional fee agreement or qualified costs shifting. We need to cap these things and have a way of laughing people out of court even before they can get a full hearing.
Paul Farrelly
I, too, welcome the new Secretary of State, but I do not want to forget the outgoing Secretary of State, the long-lasting, right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who ensured that the Government found time for the Bill in their manifesto commitments. I am sure that all Labour Members wish him well in his new roving role. We hope that he ruffles feathers across the Government in his inimitable way.
The Bill is welcome and has much to commend it, including giving scientific and medical communities protection from abuse of our libel laws in order to stifle debate and proper investigation. When our libel laws have been used and abused in the past, it was often by large corporations. The action brought by Tesco four years ago against The Guardian was perhaps the starkest case in recent times of an inequality of arms. The main ambition of the determinant litigant was not really to settle, but expensively to bog down the newspaper and its journalists for as long as possible, as a warning to it and others in the future.
The Bill does not address corporation suing, and we have heard from the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr Garnier) about some of the anomalies regarding who can and cannot sue. I hope that those issues will be looked at afresh when the Bill proceeds to the other place.
The Bill does not include an explicit early strike-out clause to ensure that actions with no merit, that are designed to chill and intimidate at maximum cost, do not proceed. The devil is in the detail of how the courts operate. It is therefore a shame that we do not have the changes to the civil procedure rules that we need to give effect to many of the intentions of the Bill, as the Joint Committee on the draft Bill recommended.
We have discussed conditional fee agreements. As I have said throughout years of trying to bring about sensible libel reform, including via a long inquiry by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, of which I am a member, it was never intended that success fees should be abolished in their entirety. Given the behaviour of some parts of our press, there is a real problem with access to justice, and reputations are unfairly ruined. I hope their lordships and the House return to that.
As the Bill proceeds, we might have the benefit of Lord Justice Leveson’s detailed thoughts on other issues, such as on a low-cost body or tribunal to settle libel disputes quickly and more cheaply, and on how the Bill might be amended to incentivise the use of such a forum.
Finally, I should like to thank everyone who has helped to inform the debate and me, including the Libel Reform Campaign, Index on Censorship, Sense about Science and English PEN. I also thank a small group of serious, superbly professional journalists and progressive lawyers who work at the coal face and who have given me and other hon. Members invaluable comments and insights. The lawyers include Hugh Tomlinson and Heather Rogers QC, Tamsin Allen of Bindmans LLP, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, Robin Shaw of Davenport Lyons, and Michael Nathanson of Thrings, who represents booksellers. The journalists who have been helpful to me include David Leigh of The Guardian, and my former colleague on The Observer—the doyen of investigative journalism, if I might call him that—the legendary Michael Gillard Senior, who has done so much to advance the cause of responsible investigative journalism in this country over many years.
I also thank the ministerial team for the way in which the debate has been conducted, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), and the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) for all the work he put into the Bill.
I welcome the assurances that the new team have given on their open mind. I hope their lordships seize on that assurance, because the test of the Bill is whether the abuses that hon. Members have highlighted can happen again. If they can, we need to return to the nitty-gritty and ensure that they cannot.