Leveson Inquiry

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde]

My Lords, we owe a huge debt to Lord Justice Leveson and his report. The press do, too, although it may not choose recognise it at the moment. In retrospect, in the years to come, I think that it will accept that it was very helpful to its industry.

After many months of listening to over 300 witnesses and taking over 300 written submissions, paragraph 8 of the executive summary of Lord Justice Leveson’s report says that,

“the British press—all of it—serves the country very well for the vast majority of the time. There are truly countless examples of great journalism, great investigations and great campaigns”.

Those great assets are something that all of us in this debate today are seeking to protect and enhance. I agree with that view, as I agree with most of the report. I recalled, when reading it, many journalists losing their lives to bring us a story, such as Maria Colvin last year. Indeed, News International, which has received quite a hammering in the debate today—and rightly so—has even over the past few months run an extremely good campaign on the sexual grooming of young women in the north-west and other parts of the country. Yet the Leveson inquiry was the culmination of the pent-up contempt of the British public for the appalling actions of journalists and photographers, but not all; of editors, but not all; and of the police, but not all. There have been 90 arrests, a damning statement in itself.

I declare an interest: in my previous career, I was proud to be the general secretary of the one of the unions involved in the national newspaper industry. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, who is not in his place, referred to proprietors. I believe that I have negotiated with every single one of those that he named. Indeed, I well remember having to go to Paris to negotiate with the late Lord Rothermere because he was a tax exile.

I was also a member of the Press Complaints Commission, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said, in his time there. That was a complaints commission; it was not a regulatory body. It had, and has today, something called the editors’ code. It was not just for the editors—the editors wrote it. It was that which the commission had to follow.

In the whole of this debate over the years, there is one group that I believe has snuck through quite comfortably without enough attention on it, and that is the proprietors of these newspapers. I am not saying that they signed the cheques in hacking; I do not believe that they did and most of them would not have known about it. However, I question them as the owners of these newspapers. If you go back a few years, Clive Goodman, a journalist, and Glen Mulcaire, a private investigator, were jailed for hacking into the Royal Household’s telephones. They went to jail and, when they came out of jail, News International paid them substantial amounts of money in compensation. What company would pay compensation to an employee who had gone to jail, having been found guilty in a court of law, unless there was something else there? That is no leading example.

The proprietors appoint the editors; the proprietors set the environment in which the editors work. None of this would have happened if the proprietors as a group had taken responsibility for the environment within their titles. Yet, when it came to paying the price as we saw the News of the World close—I was not a reader of it; many of us were not—who paid the price? Thousands of workers—innocent people from the production and journalism sides who knew nothing and were not involved in this disreputable activity—lost their jobs. Moreover, they did not go out the door with a multi-million pound settlement, as one of the people wholly responsible did.

The press have been claiming that if you are in favour of some statutory underpinning, then you are in favour of state control of the press. That is nonsense—a three-card trick—and I hope we do not fall for it. Lord Justice Leveson was perfectly clear in the report that not one of the more than 300 witnesses called for state control of the press; he said he never even contemplated it. I do not support statutory control of the press, but I have reluctantly come to the view that to have even a strengthened regulatory body without some kind of statutory underpinning, there is no guarantee that it will work next time either. The press have had no fewer than seven chances in seven reports over 70 years to get their act right. If they had got it right we would not be having this debate today and there would have been no need for Leveson.

I take the point about the Irish regulatory body, which I gather is working well but has not been put to the test in law yet. That is certainly something worth looking at.

The new regulations will not be complete unless journalists have a conscience clause. Lord Justice Leveson refers to this in his report. He also talks about a hotline for whistleblowers. Any decent company today has such a system in place and I hope the new regulatory body will take that on board. He talked about plurality and I totally agree: the trade unions have been asking for that to be addressed for over 20 years. Now perhaps it will be. One big omission in the report is the digital media. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, was absolutely right that it is no good regulating for the printed press if we have no control of any kind of standards of the digital media. That is certainly lacking at the moment.

There has to be a cross-party outcome of this. Members of the public had the guts and courage to come forward and speak in public and knew they were being televised. If we do not get this right on this occasion, we will have badly let them down and missed a major chance.