Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

Lord Fox Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

Protecting the principle of a free press while ensuring its financial sustainability is not easy, but it is vital. Democracy does not require our news organisations just to be editorially independent; it needs them to survive. The path to this legal framework that prevents foreign powers owning, controlling or influencing our news industry has been longer than it should have been, but I am pleased that the final piece will soon be in place.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, where we are now is, I think, not where the Minister expected to be when the previous statutory instrument was introduced. So how did we get to this point? With great haste, and I would say possibly fuelled by intense pressure from beyond these shores, the Government tabled the secondary legislation that, as we have heard, allowed an unlimited number of 15% stakes to be taken by funds that, to all intents and purposes, have an element of control by foreign Governments—the FOCIs. Then, in late July, when I tabled a fatal Motion, the Minister agreed at least to deal with the multiple-stake issue, which is what we have here.

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, who managed to explain to me the convoluted nature of this SI, having herself presumably had some coaching from the department. It is clear that this is not an easy piece of statutory legislation and her suggestion regarding future changes to the Enterprise Act is something that I do think the Government should consider.

Although the Minister agreed to deal with the multiple-stake issue, she did not agree with the strong yet minority view of the House that even one 15% stake was one too many. That is because, at the time, in my view, this regulation was designed to achieve just one thing: the sale of the Telegraph Media Group to RedBird IMI, which of course included the 15% stake from Abu Dhabi. This is moving into the realms of a dangerous dogs Bill approach to legislation, but actually it is bespoke regulation for a discerning billionaire.

Just as that flawed SI had been rushed through, the RedBird bid backed out, leaving us today with handmade regulation but no obvious client. Had the Conservative Party, with obvious honourable exceptions, not backed the Government and voted through the last SI, I would have suggested that we do not need this one at all. But this at least deals with the multiple-stake issue while, in my view, leaving the substantive elephant in the room.

The other pachyderm lurking behind this statutory instrument is, as the noble Baroness broached, the future of the Telegraph Media Group. As your Lordships will be well aware, and as was outlined, the Daily Mail and General Trust group has tabled an offer of £500 million to acquire it, and this has apparently been agreed by RedBird, with detailed negotiations proceeding.

I do not expect the Minister to offer judgment as to whether this should succeed, as she will correctly cite quasi-judicial qualms in this area. What I would welcome is an overview of process going forward and some element of timescales. As I am not a quasi-judge, I am happy to offer your Lordships some thoughts and point to some key issues that I hope the Minister will be able to elaborate on.

First—and here I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—the continued involvement of Redbird IMI in the sale process is almost certainly counter to the long-term interests of the Telegraph and its readers. This situation means that the UAE, through the back door, is currently deciding who will own the Telegraph in the future. Will the Minister give assurances that there will be full transparency, if a deal is done, on the funding and structure of any deal?

Again as the noble Baroness has pointed out, the Secretary of State has given the Mail group a very short time to demonstrate that it can go through with this acquisition. Can the Minister outline what steps the Secretary of State will take to ensure the timely sale of the Telegraph in the public interest, should the deal not be ready by the deadline in the Secretary of State’s Statement of 24 November, or should the proposed deal fail the tests also contained in that Statement?

Secondly, there are not many modern precedents, but the Murdoch acquisition of the Times newspaper is perhaps a helpful example. Until the intervention of Nadine Dorries in 2022, the Times and the Sunday Times had been subject to legally required independent directors on their parent company’s board, following Rupert Murdoch’s News International acquiring them in 1981, specifically to safeguard editorial independence after the takeover. These arrangements created, and later updated, an independent board that approved key editorial appointments and was designed to prevent undue interference. I am sure this was far from a perfect solution, and I am also sure that Lord Rothermere is a different sort of owner from Mr Murdoch, but I ask the Minister to take this on board as an option going forward, should the Daily Mail group bid succeed.

Thirdly, the public interest on plurality grounds needs to be assessed, particularly given that both the Telegraph and the Daily Mail occupy similar political spaces. This almost certainly creates a concentration of ownership. Ofcom is the place to make this determination, and this bid should be referred accordingly. I would welcome the Minister’s general response on these three points.

This is secondary legislation that seeks to correct an earlier piece of misdrafted secondary legislation—regulation that we do not now need and that many of us did not want in the first place. It is a living example of how the folly of pandering to specific interests that are themselves mercurial and subject to summary change based on self-interest is the wrong way to legislate.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister, who opened this, the second part of our foreign investment regulatory double bill, this evening. I thank her for the remarks she made in outlining these regulations.

Like other noble Lords who have spoken, I broadly welcome these regulations, to which the Government committed when we were discussing the No. 1 set of regulations before the Summer Recess. We are here today thanks to careful scrutiny, not least by my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston, who should be congratulated on helping us get to this point. As she says, we could perhaps have got here through a different route and rather more elegantly, but I am glad that she welcomes the closing of the loophole that she and others identified when we looked at the previous set of regulations earlier this year.

Unlike the guidance on football governance, which we were discussing earlier, these regulations have been drawn to the special attention of the House by your Lordships’ Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Like others, I thank the members of that committee for their careful consideration and for the report that draws our attention to the points that they have raised.

The most serious question the committee raises concerns the 5% carve-out, as we have heard. It quotes the correspondence it has had with the noble Baroness’s department, about that carve-out and the way it will be used. DCMS said:

“Our judgement is that the possibility of the carve out being misused is remote”.