Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment. I declare an interest: I understand that Mr John Ford has alleged that 15 years ago he went through my rubbish on a regular basis at the request of the Sunday Times. I find it impossible to believe that anyone would find my rubbish interesting. That has had no effect whatever on my opinions with regard to this issue, and I supported the continuation of Leveson 2 even before I discovered that Mr John Ford had apparently been going through my rubbish.

I am strongly of the view that this House should send the amendment back to the Commons for further consideration, for the following reasons. First, there is no doubt, despite what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, just said, that there was an unequivocal promise by the House of Commons and this House that there would be part 2 of Leveson. I quote the then Prime Minister:

“One of the things that the victims have been most concerned about is that part 2 of the investigation should go ahead … and that is fully our intention”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/11/12; col. 458.]


That was said by the Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, after the delivery of part 1. To my mind it is incredibly important that, if you set up a public inquiry, before the public inquiry has been able to reach findings on who was responsible for what happened—probably because of pressure from the people who might be responsible—the second part of that public inquiry is not scrapped. But that is what is happening here. My experience of when the justice system fails is that the victims feel that they have nowhere to go, and that corrodes not just their view of the justice system but a large number of people’s view of it. I particularly have in mind the Hillsborough victims, who were denied justice by a coroner’s system and who felt that the whole justice system let them down.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, says, “Oh, things have changed”. Who is the best judge of that? I suggest it is Sir Brian Leveson, who said that,

“there is still a legitimate expectation on behalf of the public and, in particular, the alleged victims of phone hacking and other unlawful conduct, that there will be a full examination of the circumstances that allowed that behaviour to”,

take place. He said that when he was consulted on the question of whether part 2 should be scrubbed.

Therefore, I regard the promise as important and the reneging of it as something that will corrode justice. It will affect not only the victims but other people, and I utterly reject the complacency of the noble and listed Lord, Lord Cormack, to the effect that we should not press this any further. Yes, we sent the Bill back with a clause which the Commons took out, but the right thing for this House to do is to ask them to think again, particularly when last time there was a majority of nine. If we debate this well and give the reasons, it is worth doing.

Therefore for me, the first point is the promise. The second point is that the problem is still there. The speech given by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, was appalling, not in its quality but in what it told us. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, suggested that the solution to this was “civil litigation or criminal proceedings”. Can you imagine the people that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, described, who have been hounded—his word—by the press, thinking of bringing civil litigation to complain that the first they heard that their loved one had died was when a representative of the press came round? Pull the other one! Get out of the courts and think about what the real world is like.

Then people said that IPSO had made a difference—the IPSO that two weeks ago, in the face of this Bill going through Parliament, in a great rush and with no explanation of why it had not done it before, suddenly introduced a low-cost arbitration scheme. Why did it do it? It did it because Parliament was breathing down its neck. If Leveson 2 is got rid of, let us be under no illusion that that will be the end of that. Things will be just as they have been in the past. I cannot remember which Peer described IPSO as absolutely marvellous. It might have been the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. No, I am sorry; it was another noble Lord. So far IPSO has not imposed a single fine; it has not demanded a single equal-prominence front page direction; and it has not launched a single systematic inquiry, as it has the power to do. There have been 8,000 complaints about hate crime so far and only one has been upheld. We should not accept the proposition that IPSO has solved the problem.

The fourth reason it is said that we should not have this inquiry is that, as the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish of Little Venice, said, it would threaten to chill investigative journalism. However, what is being proposed here is not a specific provision to change the press. It is for a judge of standing to see what should be done next, and I have absolutely no doubt that a new judge would be able to do so, having no doubt heard the evidence from the people the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, was speaking to on the telephone this morning, and just as Sir Brian Leveson managed to do.

Fifthly, people ask, “What about social media?” Exactly: what about social media? Facebook and so on are a real problem, and that is why the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, has included social media in her proposed new subsection (3)(d). Sir Brian Leveson wants to have part 2 of the inquiry and it has been amended to deal with the changes. It would be a disgrace and a betrayal of the victims if we did not go ahead with it. I strongly support the amendment.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, first, I declare former interests as the last chair of the Press Complaints Commission between 2011 and 2014, and then as the first chair of the new Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO, together with my other interests as set out in the register.

As the Secretary of State said in his Statement of 1 March this year, repeated here, we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Sir Brian Leveson. His inquiry and subsequent report showed rigour, diligence and a judicious balance between competing interests. When his report was published in December 2012, Lord Justice Leveson recommended a new, tougher form of voluntary self-regulation of the press. As chair of the PCC at the time, I welcomed his proposals and suggested that they should be implemented in full.

The Leveson proposals were largely implemented between 2012 and 2014, but I was not able, at that stage, to persuade the newspaper industry to embrace them in their entirety. Since then, under my successor, Sir Alan Moses, the new arrangements have bedded down and IPSO has gradually become more and more compliant with the Leveson recommendations.

I strongly welcome the introduction of the new arbitration scheme, which was introduced not in a rush, as the noble and learned Lord has just said, but after extensive consultation, and it is a major step forward. I say to a number of other speakers that illegal activity, as distinct from breaches of the editors’ code, is best dealt with by the police and the courts, and that has now largely happened—belatedly, yes, but also comprehensively.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

The amendment includes the words,

“to investigate the dissemination of information and news, including false news stories”.

It would have said “fake news” but the draftspeople said that that would not be the right way to term it. Therefore, I think it covers the sorts of things that the noble Lord thinks it should, or am I wrong?

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

I raise fake news as an issue not because it is or is not covered by the amendment but because it must concern us all, particularly as a society.

There are good reasons for rejecting the amendment. It would be an analogue inquiry in an overwhelmingly digital age. It would also—rightly, in my view—be seen as yet another attempt by politicians to meddle in the internal affairs of news media and, ultimately, to muzzle free expression.

This country, which should be a beacon of free expression in a world bedevilled by state censorship, has just fallen from 30th to 40th in the global ranking for free speech, according to a survey conducted by independent minds right across the world. Let that sink in my lords: from 30th to 40th. It is shaming. What message are we now to send out? That the free media are enemies of the state? They may be unruly and they may challenge us in ways that make us uncomfortable, but they are not our enemies.

Furthermore, it concerns me that we are playing around with the Salisbury convention. The noble and learned Lord has just spoken about promises. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, pointed out, this amendment flies directly in the face of last year’s Conservative Party manifesto. On page 80, that document said that,

“we will not proceed with the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press”.

That was pretty clear. I know that the Labour Party had a euphoric moment after the last general election, almost persuading itself that it had won, but it did not.

I take no comfort from the qualifying words that the noble Baroness has added to her amendment this time around. We are dealing here with profound matters that touch on the very basis of our society and our political philosophy, and the question of whether we truly cherish our freedom of expression and our free media. I suppose ping-pong can be an enjoyable pastime but at some point the views of the elected House must prevail. I have the utmost respect for the noble Baroness and the greatest sympathy for the unacceptable treatment that she and her family, and far too many others, have received from the press. Having said that, I sincerely hope she will not seek to divide the House again on this matter.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, said, this has been a passionate and, actually, very balanced debate. A number of noble Lords have expressed concern about the amendment before us and have, sort of, made a case against it.

When the noble Lord, Lord Black, came in, struggling on his crutches, I did think: is there no end to which this man will not go to get sympathy from this House? I wish him a speedy recovery.

When introducing the debate, the Minister said first that these amendments have no place in the Bill because it is about data protection and then began to dazzle us with the number of government amendments that pertain to the media. Of course it is perfectly sensible that this matter should be in the Bill.

By the way, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish, that I did not say I object to journalists; I object to journalists at the Times. She mentioned the growing power of the ICO in all this, which is something that the press should think hard about. The press have been so busy trying to avoid having a proper regulator for themselves that they find themselves well and truly regulated by a powerful ICO. Where the ICO does not regulate the press, the courts may with some of the judgments that are coming down the track.

As always, the perorations against, as with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, have been about freedom and liberty, as though we on this side are not as passionate in our defence of those. Today’s debate has produced the usual press stories that crop up when either House debates the issue. They always either rubbish one or other of the more popular proponents of reform or carry, as did the Evening Standard just before the Commons debate, such headlines as that from the Commons Culture Minister, Margot James: “We will lose freedom of the press if MPs back new curbs”. It is my belief that the real defenders of press freedom are not the Ministers scrambling to close Leveson down but those of us who want to see a press that is respected and trusted, as well as free.

When the Commons debated our amendment, Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new Erskine May, said rather imperiously that Parliament had every right to renege on promises made by a predecessor. Of course, he is right—we know that, Jacob. However, it is also a long and honourable convention that there is a continuity of responsibility from one Parliament and one Government to another. We saw it last week when the Prime Minister gave a full and unequivocal apology to the Libyan family for Britain’s part in their rendition and subsequent torture, although it did not happen on her watch. The long tradition of continuity of responsibility means that a promise given by one Prime Minister and one Parliament is unlikely to be abandoned by another. There is a double matter of honour when the promise in question was made by a Prime Minister of the party now in power. David Cameron gave such commitments, and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, gives the House of Commons a way of redeeming that promise while taking into account the passage of time since it was made.

I often find that, when I am indignant having read in the newspaper or seen on TV some summing up or sentence by a judge, my lawyer friends will say, “Ah, but the judge who has heard all the evidence is the best placed to make a balanced judgment on the matter”. In this case, we have the balanced judgment of Sir Brian Leveson himself. Let us remember, after the speeches of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that Sir Brian had all the information they had to make their speeches but came to a different conclusion: that it should go on. As I said when the Leveson letter first came up, here is the third most senior judge in the land taking six pages in a very carefully argued letter to give his views on the inquiry on which he spent a year of his life. Some noble and learned Lords in the House should have a little modesty when challenging his judgment because it is absolutely clear that Leveson 2 should go ahead. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, has already quoted from the letter, so I will not waste time.

The amendment before us is proportionate to the task at hand in addressing issues not yet adequately addressed. It redeems a solemn promise made by our Prime Minister and our Parliament. Jodie Ginsberg, the CEO of Index on Censorship, when briefing against these proposals before the Commons debate, said that she wanted,

“a free, vibrant, independent and troublesome media”.

So do I, and so does the proposer of the amendment. The biggest threat to a free, vibrant, independent and troublesome media is one so held in public contempt because of corrupt and illegal practices that few defenders will come to its aid if press freedom is really threatened.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish, that, when the Leveson inquiry exposed sins and criminality, the Government of the day could at that time have done anything they liked to the press. What they did was make a strong attempt to create something as far from political control as possible—I was one of the privy counsellors who signed the royal charter. It is absolutely false to claim that the attempt was to create a state-controlled press. That was never on the table and it is not on the table now.

The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, who has been brave in carrying through on Section 40, has said that we will not press it beyond tonight. I am interested to see which bit of legislation will include its repeal and how that will be favoured when it comes back to us. I say to the Minister: this is not the end of Section 40.

Tonight, we are looking for something more. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, have shown, we are looking at something for the victims. The noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish, should note that it is also something for journalists who need protection from being bullied into illegal acts by their employers. Most of all, it is for our own self-respect in keeping a promise made. I urge support for this amendment.