Education Bill

Debate between Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I can remember an occasion that illustrates my noble friend’s last amendment. Some boys went to a headmaster and asked if they could have a videotape to use for a project they were doing. He picked one off a shelf and gave it to them, and it was the evidence. People do put these things in the public domain by mistake. I particularly welcome my noble friend’s Amendment 73HJ. There has to be the right for pupils and parents directly affected by this to discuss things. It is the obvious way in which things will come forward. Anyway, it is going to happen. You cannot criminalise that sort of conversation within a school community about something that is happening within the school, so it has to be possible. It will be done on Twitter and on Facebook. These things will not spread. No teacher is Ryan Giggs. There is no national interest in the person’s name. They will remain in a little corner of the social media, of interest to pupils in the school and to the parents of the children, and that is where it will remain. No great harm will be done because, frankly, the school community knows already. I do not see any objection in the wider media carrying just a basic statement that so-and-so has been accused and has taken leave of absence from the school as a result. That is scarcely something that in that form is going to hit the national media, but it at least means that the basic facts that that has happened are, as they should be, a matter of public property.

Surely the evil we are trying to prevent is a newspaper aggressively trying to dig up information about a particular individual in order to make a story, which you might call a human interest story, for people who have never heard of this person and have no interest in him otherwise. It is just a composed story that might be about anybody, but it is immensely harmful to the teacher concerned. That is the sort of thing that we are trying to prevent. The fact that an allegation is made is there and is fact. It should surely not be hidden. We are not in super-injunction territory. I find my noble friend’s amendments very persuasive.

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Phillips and will speak also to Amendment 73M. Just for the sake of the record, I draw attention to the interests I declared earlier. I was very struck by what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said earlier. She said that this clause as currently drafted is unworkable and that unworkable legislation simply brings the law into disrepute. My noble friend has just said that we are not in super-injunction territory, but I fear that, because of the impact of digital media, which I shall talk about in a moment or two, we will be in super-injunction territory at a sort of local level that will cast this legislation into that disrepute.

If we are to have legislation, at least let it be workable. I believe that the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, try to do that by importing into new Sections 141F and 141G the concept of the public domain and the public interest. The exclusion of any mention of the public interest in Clause 13, as it stands, is quite remarkable. I cannot think of any other legislation dealing with incursions into the freedom of the press and freedom of expression which do not have a public interest defence. That must be put right.

In my view, these amendments are crucial because the real problem with this clause—the unworkability factor—is that it takes no account of how allegations are spread and the damage that they can do to schools and to innocent teachers in the absence of responsible press reporting. As I said at Second Reading, my concern is that this legislation will simply drive innuendo and rumour underground and new Section 141F(12) will encourage that. Its definition of “publication” is designed to catch the media, which is not at the root of any mischief here, by tying it to material addressed to the public at large. That is the wrong target. The Minister in another place, Nick Gibb, made it clear that this legislation is not intended to capture private conversations, which include e-mail exchanges, texts, Facebook postings, Twitter and all sorts of other mechanisms. That is precisely where allegations and innuendo, which it seems to me that the Government want to be at the root of this legislation, will build up, now that Clause 13 makes it impossible for them to be dealt with in a responsible way in the press, which is constrained by the laws of libel and contempt. In a short space of time, the weight of individual private exchanges may mean that in a small school everyone knows when a teacher has been accused of something, but only the local newspaper will be unable to report it.