Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Prescott

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prescott (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot give this House a legal opinion but I can give an opinion based on experience. I declare an interest: I attended the Leveson inquiry because I was on the end of illegal tapping of my phone. Public interest was not defined there; it was defined by the editors of the papers. They said it was not illegal, but clearly it was.

I support what the noble Baroness has said tonight. She is absolutely right and I am glad that there is a lot of support for her amendment. However, I am concerned that it addresses only a small part of what Leveson recommended. He made recommendations about public interest—it is an important issue and I welcome the amendment—but even though we all voted unanimously for the royal charter and the proposals of Leveson, we keep hiding away from debating his main recommendations. He made 37 recommendations and only 12 have been implemented. We have taken a small step forward but to have a serious debate about public interest you have to cover all the things that Leveson recommended—and we do not do that. We have to ride on the back of a single piece of legislation, and the answer always comes that it is not realistic to put such a proposal in the legislation. I am glad that tonight there has at least been agreement—presumably by both sides, for whatever political reason—that we have to move to do something about the important issue of public interest.

I will not go on about that. I have a couple of questions for the Minister, which I hope he will answer. I wonder whether we are taking into account here the hacking actions that are going on at present in the courts. The Government have always said that they will wait until the courts have finished, but hacking actions are continuing. Statements have been made in court that hacking is still going on, involving and paid for by some members of the press.

The royal charter involves the monarchy in politics. It is where the divisions are and why I resigned as a privy counsellor. I thought it was designed to keep the monarchy out of it, but now it is right in the middle of it as we get more and more into whether we are for or against the Leveson proposals. Is it still the Government’s policy that they will wait until all the court trials have finished before they give their view of the many recommendations in Leveson? Is it the position that the Government do not want to accept Leveson’s recommendation for a second inquiry into the relationship between the police and the press, which is still at the heart of many of these problems at the present stage?

To show that I am intellectual, I read in the Times—which is not a paper I support—an editorial headed “Free Speech in Peril”, which covers the very things we are discussing at the moment. It states:

“A number of peers have seized on a chance to curb press freedom by meddling with new data protection legislation. They should desist”.


I hope that tonight we will not desist but will carry it through.

The charge levelled in the Times—that this is an attack on press freedom—is signed by 70 newspaper editors. In fact, that means it is signed by seven owners of different papers. Seven cabal owners decide to describe Leveson as a big attack on press freedom, so why is it that the same papers that object to interference, in regulatory form or by government, all sign up for press regulation in Ireland? Every one of the papers we are talking about, which tell us that we are threatening freedom, have now signed up recently. I do not know whether they are less democratic or whether their freedom is threatened in Ireland, but they are the same people. It is hypocrisy.

Have the Government looked at what they have done in Ireland? A Minister is in charge in Ireland, not an independent regulator as proposed by Leveson. In Ireland a government Minister—a direct political person—decides whether the press is acting in a responsible way and, presumably, in the public interest.

The amendment is a small step forward and there is a long way to go yet, without a doubt. I hope that we will give more consideration to those factors. Basically, there is a lot more to be done. I am thankful that the Government, as I have heard, are supporting the proposal of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. It is a small step but there is a lot more to be done. These threats to press freedom are not coming from the politicians but from the press—and it is about time we took account of that.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, as these amendments deal with the media, I declare my interest as executive director of the Telegraph Media Group and draw attention to my other media interests in the register.

I will say a brief word first about Amendment 50 and the other government amendments in this group. These amendments seek to deal with a number of the problems raised in Committee by noble Lords across the House, as my noble friend said. I have a number of times during the course of the Bill commended the Government for their commitment to consultation on all the issues impacting on media freedom and for their willingness to discuss them with interested parties. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for the way in which he has approached these issues and I strongly support the amendments.

Manuscript Amendment 50A, like Amendments 51 and 52—especially in combination with later amendments with which we will deal in due course—point, I fear, in absolutely the other direction. The issue surrounding them has been eloquently and cogently set out by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, and the noble Lords, Lord Lester and Lord Pannick. I could not improve on what they have said in any way, shape or form. Those amendments would, in short, cripple investigative journalism for all the reasons the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, set out.

Above all, they would create a deeply repressive data protection regime for all those involved in journalistic, academic, literary and artistic activities. It is not only journalists on national newspapers, who are so clearly targeted by these amendments, who would be punished but the local press, broadcasters, academics, film producers, playwrights, book producers and many others. As they all use data regularly in the course of their activities, it would make their day-to-day work almost impossible. This House, which contains so many people drawn from academia, the arts and the world of literature—I see many around me here today—has always prided itself on championing the UK’s creative industries. How ironic that we should even be debating these repressive amendments, which would be a body blow to the entire sector. They would place all those who work in it—many tens of thousands of people—at a huge disadvantage compared with their colleagues and competitors in the rest of Europe and elsewhere in the world.

On the amendments concerning the designation of codes by which the media should reference the public interest in publication, Amendments 54 and 56 seek to downplay the role of the Ofcom code, BBC guidelines and the Editors’ Code of Practice, all of which the 1998 Act sought to safeguard, and Amendment 55 would sweep them out completely. Amendment 55 seeks to give a statutory regulator, the Information Commissioner, power to determine codes of practice and guidance for the purposes of operating the journalistic exemptions and applying the public interest criteria within the Bill. This, again, is a significant departure from the terms of the 1998 Act, which has worked so well.

The Information Commissioner could choose not to determine particular codes even though they are recognised by the courts and elsewhere in legislation. She could even draw up and determine her own codes and guidance, without any reference to the long-established regulators of the broadcasters and the press, which would then have legal status. Even to a non-lawyer such as me, codes and guidance with legal status determined, drawn-up and administered by a statutory regulator is a system of statutory press regulation in the making—to which the vast majority of Members of this House say they are opposed—and is therefore a dangerous step which we should not take.