Leveson Inquiry

Lord Janvrin Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Janvrin]

My Lords, while it goes without saying that a robust, free press is an essential ingredient in a free society, even the most cursory reading of Lord Justice Leveson’s excellent report confirms that there have been major problems with the culture, practices and ethics of some parts of our press.

As many noble Lords have alluded to today, this is not a new problem. The fact that in the past 70 years there have been seven major inquiries, including three royal commissions, suggests that this is the case. But what is new today is that the internet is now posing a fundamental challenge to, and major economic consequences for, the newspaper industry. This, as Lord Justice Leveson observes, is particularly severe for Britain’s regional and local newspapers, which provide a major contribution to the life of the communities within which they operate. I join the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich in paying tribute to the unique contribution made by the local media to local life. I hope that their voices will be heard in this post-Leveson debate.

The internet poses a much greater challenge to the future of a robust newspaper industry in this country than effective, independent self-regulation. If new providers are going to survive and prosper, either in print or digital form, we the public are going to have to continue to want to read those publications and pay for them in preference to free online blogs, social media or whatever comes next. We will surely do so only if the quality of the news coverage, the investigative reports, the features and the comment—whether in red-tops or broadsheets—are of a standard that makes us wish to do so. Faced with increasing choice, we will surely be willing to pay only for standards that we trust and are of the highest quality, and for more accurate, more challenging, wiser, and more entertaining words than are ever likely to be consistently available from other online sources. Standards will become more, not less, important and are, above all, about culture rather than only about rules, as my noble friend Lady Boothroyd expressed. An effective system of self-regulation, as put forward in the Leveson report, has a vital part to play in ensuring that these standards are met, primarily by providing an effective means of arbitration when they are challenged, and that redress is accessible to all when things go wrong. An effective regulatory system can also provide, in a sense, a kitemark trusted by readers.

However, such a system will be trusted only if it is seen to be truly independent, certainly of both the newspaper industry and the Government. I welcome the fact that much of the newspaper industry now seems to accept that although it will pay the bills for the regulatory system, it would do much better by not trying to control the system—or appearing to control it—as has been the case in the past.

Two vexed questions remain. First, how can we devise the process of validation for this independent self-regulatory system? Who verifies the work of the regulators? Secondly, how do we ensure the fullest coverage of the new independent self-regulatory system in order to prevent major newspaper groups exiting from the regulatory system, as happened under the Press Complaints Commission?

Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, eloquently argued, it might be better to avoid statutory underpinning, if there were an easy way to do that, although I share the view that here we are considering statutory regulation of process and emphatically not of content. It may be that some sensible non-statutory basis for the validation process can be devised, although I remain to be convinced. An additional advantage of some statutory underpinning is that it could allow some benefits in law to provide the incentives to ensure the widest possible membership of an independent self-regulatory system.

My view remains—and here I join the noble Lord, Lord Giddens—that an effective regulatory system, trusted by the general public, is very much in the long-term interests of the newspaper industry itself in the digital age and that some very limited statutory underpinning may well be a sensible price to pay to ensure that this system is credible, long-lasting and widely accepted. As so many noble Lords have said today, the Leveson report provides us with a unique opportunity to grasp this nettle. I add my voice to those who say that we should do so.