Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Monday 9th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

For the sake of absolute clarity— because there has been a great deal of confusion about these aspects of the Bill—can my noble friend say whether it is correct that his Amendments 4, 5 and 6 make no difference whatever to the purport of the Bill, are merely clarifying and have no substance?

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

I join in thanking the Minister for what he has done in reaching the right conclusion, particularly with regard to academic freedom. Balancing security with liberty and freedom is a very difficult business, and he has brought to this issue sensitivity, intellectual rigour and great listening skills. He has performed his function as a Minister in the most exemplary way, and I hope that others will follow suit. I wanted to thank him formally.

Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I support the amendments and welcome the framework agreed by the parties. It is not perfect Leveson, but it is about 80% or 90% Leveson. In fact, the 10% to 20% that is not Leveson is a compromise in favour of the press, and we should be clear about that. It cheers my heart to hear those who have absolutely railed against the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the court in Strasbourg suddenly praying in aid that great wealth of rights law, now that those people are confronted with the possibility that the press might have to be properly regulated.

First and foremost, only a week ago last Monday night, we created an entrenchment clause to protect the charter from meddling from behind closed doors by politicians, privy counsellors and Ministers. It was a way of using law to protect press freedom; indeed, I hope the Defamation Act will do so, too. The other way in which we can protect press freedom is by returning to high ethical standards. That is what is forgotten by those who hyperventilate about the great horrors of a regulatory system. It beggars belief that the noble Lord, Lord Black, who sat on the PCC for years and was basically hugger-mugger with those who were not really interested in what was happening to the victims of press excesses, now speaks about the “chilling effect” of this regulatory framework.

The costs element in this new arrangement is an important aspect of the Leveson incentives and is at the heart of the matter. The problem with the PCC was always that it had no teeth, and one had to find a way of dealing with that. However, as for the business of exemplary damages, perhaps we should make it clear that they would be used only in the most exceptional circumstances where the most egregious conduct took place. Almost invariably, it would go hand in hand with criminality of some kind. The criminality can be dealt with in some ways, but we know that the civil and defamation courts should have at their disposal some way of registering the horror of what happens to victims.

Noble Lords should have in mind circumstances such as when medical information has found its way into the hands of journalists that discloses, for example, that a woman has had an abortion, that someone has had psychiatric treatment, or that someone has a disease such as Huntington’s chorea that will manifest itself at a certain point in their lives. How dare the media expose such information? It is right that the courts should be able to respond appropriately when such things are done. We know that, except in exceptional circumstances, they are going to be dealing only with those who refuse to sign up to being part of this regulatory framework. This hyperventilation about exemplary damages is yet another manifestation of the huffing and puffing that we have seen in the press recently about the Rubicon being crossed and the end of freedom of the press as we have known it for hundreds of years, when the reality is far from that.

This is a moment for this House to reflect on the fact that over the past few months, while Lord Leveson was conducting his hearings and since he reported, there have been regular polls, and every poll conducted with the public showed that they want to see a proper regulatory framework. Indeed, all the polling indicates that the public support Lord Leveson’s report. More recently, as agreement has been reached across parties this week to create the framework that we are discussing tonight, all the polling indicates that the public want something of this sort to happen. So we should welcome it.

I am a human rights lawyer who believes strenuously in the freedom of the press, but I also have seen the horror of the impact on victims. They are not celebrities and the famous, but ordinary people. We in this House have to bear them in mind. That is what this framework seeks to do. I, like others, have concerns. I am worried about who will be given immunity and believe that we still need careful thought about who is covered by the immunities that we are talking about. I, like the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, want reassurances about freedom of information applying to these processes. However, we in this House should welcome the fact that somehow we are going to move forward on this and that we are not going to say that it is business as usual. Business as usual is not good enough.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I declare an interest as having been for a few years a member of the appointments commission of the Press Complaints Commission and for 10 years on the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, the Observer and other newspapers.

I congratulate the three main parties and their leaders on coming to an agreement over what must surely be as difficult a set of issues as one could devise. No one in this House is mindless of the fundamental importance of freedom of the press in all its guises. Having said that, I am afraid that I reject the hypothesis very eloquently put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Black, that anything by way of control of the press is beyond the pale. The measures that the three leaders of the three main parties came to agreement on are profoundly sensible and, I believe, modest, and I think they deserve support.

I do not say that because the British public are expecting it. There are occasions when this House has to stand against the vast majority of the public if in all conscience we believe that they are wrong. We have done that many times in our history. However, I do not think that this is one of those times. This it not the thin end of the wedge, as is constantly said, because we will all be on our guard over the next few years to see whether what we intended comes about, and whether what we did not intend comes about. I have no doubt that the overwhelming sense, in this place and the other place, is such that if our hopes and expectations are not realised, we will do something about it, and that will be to protect the freedom of the press, not to grind away at that freedom.

I will make a couple of quick points. The first is that you could not have a more modest provision of exemplary damages than you have in this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, if I may say so, did not give the full picture. He gave a telling account of the meaning of the word “outrageous”, but not the full context in which that word appears. New subsection (6) in Amendment 11 says:

“Exemplary damages may be awarded under this section only if the court is satisfied that … (a) the defendant’s conduct has shown a deliberate or reckless disregard of an outrageous nature for the claimant’s rights”.

“Outrageous”, “reckless” or “deliberate” is an extremely high hurdle, and I think that judges can be relied upon to keep it as an extremely high hurdle. I do not share the noble Lord’s misgivings in that regard.

The second issue relating to exemplary damages is as follows. New subsection (2) in Amendment 13, on the amount of damages that can be awarded, is worth quoting in full. It says:

“The court must have regard to these principles”—

the ones mentioned earlier—

“in determining the amount of exemplary damages”.

The first of these limitations is that,

“the amount must not be more than the minimum needed to punish the defendant”—

not the minimum needed to adequately punish the defendant, or to sufficiently punish the defendant, let alone to effectively punish the defendant.

My noble friend Lord McNally might like to take that away and think about that, because it actually rather screws the Bill, if I can use that common phrase. It seems to me that £1 of damages would, on that definition, satisfy that test, because £1 is a punishment, even if it is utterly inadequate and rather laughable. There are no qualifications to that phrase. That is another reason why the noble Lord, Lord Black, and the newspapers, are getting overly concerned—let me put that kindly.

Finally, I make a point about the meaning of “publisher”, because the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and others have mentioned the extent to which this could impinge on smaller publishers rather than the great national newspapers and so on. I am sympathetic up to a point, but I do not like, and I hope the House will not like, the provision in Amendment 18 that is headed “Meaning of ‘relevant publisher’”. Subsection (3) of the new clause says:

“A person who is the operator of a website is not to be taken as having editorial or equivalent responsibility for the decision to publish any material on the site, or for the content of the material”,

and—this is the killer—

“if the person did not post the material on the site”.

In other words, if you are the operator and you did not actually post the offensive, outrageous, et cetera, material, you are free. That is quite inadequate.

If this provision is to be in the Bill, it needs to be expanded. This would allow a publisher or operator of a website to get away in the circumstance where, for example, the person who posted the awful stuff was a subsidiary company or a partner or was paid to put the stuff on the website. If you were a really malicious operator, you could think up a shell company in the Seychelles that could post the most dreadful stuff about a person or a group of people, and under this clause the operator of the website would not be liable. That needs looking at. However, as I say, all in all, I believe that, in this most difficult of circumstances, the Government, aided by the Opposition, have come up with a good set of provisions.

I end by asking my noble friend Lord McNally to tell the House, when he sums up, whether there is another example in our legal set-up where damages are dependent not on the offence but on the nature of the offender. This plays back to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood. I am concerned that it is legally unprecedented to punish not according to what you have done but according to who you are. I think that we should know that.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I refer the noble and learned Lord to the fact that the sentence within the brackets which qualifies the obligation of the Lord Chancellor to secure includes the words,

“within the resources made available and in accordance with this Part”.

If they are in conflict—namely, that the resources made available are insufficient to meet the demands of this part of the Bill—then we are in a bit of a muddle, are we not?

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, my starting point was the same as that of my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith, in that I, too, felt very alarmed that this amendment seems to be too concessionary because it was acknowledging too much on the resource front. However, I acknowledge now that it pins down the question of whether there is a constitutional issue here. If there is, it has to cut across all the areas of law.

I was always battling the previous Government over their cuts to legal aid because of what they meant to quality. What concerns me about the Bill is that it takes whole sections of law out of the purview of legal aid so that medical negligence is not included, and nor are family matters unless there is domestic violence. It is the business of creating whole areas that are not covered by legal aid that is a source of alarm to me, and that is met by the amendment. If you are committed constitutionally to access to justice, you cannot create whole areas that are excised from legal aid. That is how I would read it now.

There are two things I want to say pre-emptively before the Minister stands up to reply. First, one of the things that is always said by the Minister responding on issues like this about legal aid is, “Look how many lawyers have spoken”, as though somehow or other we are the beneficiaries, we are all in this great trade union and we are basically protecting a closed shop. I say to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, known to us all as a decent and fair man, that it is not surprising that lawyers will by and large be the people who speak on this. We know from our work in the courts that it is the poor who will be disadvantaged. It has been my experience while acting in the courts that the disadvantaged will always be those with few resources. We have to make provision for them. That is what access to justice is all about; we know that from our experience. This is nothing to do with protecting the interests of lawyers.

Secondly, on looking for cuts, I have always said to the Government, and I said it to the previous one, that there are other areas where we can make savings. It has always been a source of amazement to me that when the Government need lawyers—for example, when Treasury Counsel sought representation for different government departments—they are not paid at legal aid rates; they are paid at commercial rates. They are paid the sort of money that the corporate sector pays its lawyers. If we want to save money, we should be making serious savings in what government departments pay lawyers for representation. It was always a source of amusement to me that when the Hutton inquiry took place and the Prime Minister at the time, Mr Blair, needed representation, it was to Mr Sumption that he turned—one of the most expensive barristers around. I do not think that it was Mr Blair’s own purse that paid the bill; it was the taxpayer. I would like to see the Government making cuts with regard to the lawyers that they choose to represent them and that pocket of money distributed to those who really need representation—the poorest in our society.

We are concerned that there is a constitutional issue here. Whole areas of law should not be taken out of the purview of legal aid.

Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment. I want to thank the most reverend Primate for his remarks. It would be very easy for this to become a debate in which lawyers hold the floor, but it should not be, because this is so fundamental to who we are and what our system is here in Britain. We are talking about the rule of law and about liberty and the protections we provide for it.

I wanted to pick up what my noble friend Lady Hayman said when she answered the question: what is so special about judges? Her answer was that they are not politicians. It is more than that. Our judiciary is independent. We spend time—I certainly do—speaking to lawyers and judges in other jurisdictions about what the meaning of an independent judiciary really is, and how it protects our politics. As the most reverend Primate has said, it is a protection for the politicians and for our polity that we hand over issues to do with something as precious as liberty to judges—even in these exceptional circumstances—because that way we are adding weight to the importance of liberty’s meaning in all of our lives.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I support strongly the last point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, which has been indirectly referred to by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy and Lady Hayman, and by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven. I hope that my noble friend will take full account of the political importance of this group of amendments. The psychology of extremism feeds on a sense of unfairness and oppression. The law as it stands, and indeed as it is improved in the Bill, will inadvertently provide to those who already feel hard done by, or the subject of extreme unfairness, a spur to yet further, potentially terrorist, activities. That will be the case if an important decision of this nature— which has, as other noble Lords have said, extreme repercussions—is not the decision of an independent judge but that of a politician. However good the politician is, the person who may be converted to extremism will view that politician as an agent of politics and not as an agent of justice. For that reason, among many others, I urge my noble friend to adopt these amendments.

Legal Aid and Civil Costs Reform

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, first, are the Government aware that the greatest advances in the development of law happen in legal aid cases? By diminishing legal aid, you end up undermining law as a whole. Secondly, family law has already suffered cuts, and we are seeing legal aid deserts in certain parts of the country. Women, for example, are not getting the kind of expert help that they need in cases of domestic violence. Thirdly, if the Ministry of Justice is concerned to look at spending on legal matters, has consideration been given to the money paid to lawyers by government, not as legal aid money but money paid by government departments to lawyers at the market rate, which is often excessive? Perhaps we should do something to drive those costs down instead of limiting access to the law by the poor.