Cairncross Review

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, my favourite newspapers are the Racing Post and the Brecon and Radnor Express. How do I love thee, Brecon and Radnor? Let me give an example. Not so long ago, there was a story that police were asking the public to come forward with information following the theft of a pint of milk from a doorstep in Llandrindod Wells. That may seem a purely trivial thing. I live in Streatham, where we have been reading about horrible murders and large numbers of police caught up in trying to stop terrorism. That is one reality of our national life. I find it refreshing to be reminded that bits of the country are not like this. There are bits of the country where sensible and sane people mostly go about their legal business so that the police have time to issue appeals for information on the theft of a bottle of milk.

Dame Frances concentrates very much on local and regional newspapers, although I think her terms of reference allowed her to go much wider. I have some sympathy with the dilemma in which she found herself. She is a distinguished, serious journalist—or was, when she worked in the trade. She therefore values serious journalism. That is one side of it. The other side is that she was a journalist on the Economist. I was lucky enough to work with her for a while. The Economist teaches one that certain doctrines are absolutely unbreakable. One of them is, “Watch out for public subsidy, which usually goes down the drain.” It can have serious side effects and take money out of poor taxpayers’ pockets and put it into those of rich newspaper owners—and she was obviously cautious throughout that she was going to do that.

I am delighted that the Government have accepted most of her recommendations. The question is whether they live up to the task she was set of saving serious journalism, particularly since the Government have turned down out of hand one of her recommendations for an institute for serious journalism—I cannot recall her exact words, but let us call it that. I like the report and agree with the Government that most of its recommendations should be accepted, but I seriously ask whether this is too little, too late.

Brexit: Movement of People in the Cultural Sector (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Black, I come at this topic from a music background. As he kindly mentioned, I was chair of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance; I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Classical Music here in Parliament; and I serve under the noble Lord, Lord Burns, on the Mid Wales Music Trust, which supports music there.

I have done some in-depth research to find out who said that this would be the easiest negotiation of all time. Some say Liam Fox and others say David Davis, so shall we call him David Fox? Briefing oneself for this debate, one finds not simplicity or ease but a complexity that defies the imagination. I shall cite one example—I may cite it wrongly, because it is a citation of CITES—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Why does that apply to music? It applies to articles that have rare flora and fauna in them, which include musical instruments. Let us say that we go down the new no-deal route. Certain ports are designated to allow instruments to pass through them under CITES. They do not, however, include Dover; they do not include Holyhead; they not include Eurotunnel. Can you imagine an orchestra with hundreds of instruments looking for some far port which has the CITES ability to allow its instruments to be taken to Europe for it to fulfil its cultural engagements? It is not possible or practicable, yet that is the kind of complication that comes out of this dog’s dinner that we have in front of us.

I shall make a few points to supplement what the noble Lord, Lord Black, said on conservatoires. Twenty per cent of Trinity Laban students come from Europe. It is not easy to get them, because they tend to pay higher fees when they come here, but we have them because of our high standards. Will they still come when they face this bureaucratic mess that we are creating? It is not only their number and the money that comes with them; it is also their importance to the cultural experience. Music is a universal language, but it is spoken in a great variety of accents. If you took away the European students and, still more, the European teachers that we have, we would diminish the product catastrophically. We would also leave some big holes in provision; for example, there is a shortage of really good strings players here; contemporary dance is a bit short—you would lose all that.

Finally, there is the uncertainty. We are starting to recruit now for 2020. When students ask, “What’s going to be the position if I want to work? What’s the position if I want to go to and fro from home? What’s our position when I want to get my instrument, which has got a tiny bit of ivory down there, through the ports?”, we cannot tell them; we do not know. The Government have not told us—they cannot even decide whether we are going to get Brexit or not and under what terms. We are completely bemused as to the future.

I turn briefly to orchestras. I do not really know where to start. The Arts Council Wales/Wales Arts International told the Select Committee:

“Any reinstatement of mobility restrictions … will create new borders … for the smaller-scale companies and artists such barriers might become insurmountable”.


That is in paragraph 44 of the report. I do not think that they were speaking in any way out of turn.

What is going to happen when a performer in London is taken ill, the only feasible replacement lives in Europe and you have to get him over here quickly, within hours? What happens if instruments of a certain kind are in short supply in a given orchestra and the only available capable musicians are in Europe? They will come nowhere near the £35,000 earnings limit that the Government have floated—or, probably, the £30,000 limit, because musicians are great talents ill paid. What about the uncertainty for our orchestras? Orchestral concerts are planned a good two years in advance—in the case of opera, four years in advance. What are they going to do now to get on with planning when they have no idea under what conditions those plans will have to be carried out? What about carnets? What about health insurance? What about insurance contributions? What about health itself? What about the funding that comes our way through Creative Europe?

I could go on and on—I could read my briefing if the House has several months to spare—but I hope I have said enough to show that Brexit is a fundamental threat, as much through the complete uncertainty in which the Government have left us as from the realities.

I am sure that no Minister would be so cynical as to say, “Who cares about classical music? A few people in the House of Lords, maybe. Yes, a few people go to it. Hmm—they do not care, we will get away with this”. They should think again. What about Glastonbury? What about WOMAD? What about Bestival and the Green Man? What about the huge, burgeoning music festivals, which are already reporting difficulty in recruiting the top acts they want? It will not be old fogies like us complaining; it will be the kind of people who have been on the streets in the last few weeks, determined young people who will not have their pleasure taken from them by this bungling, bumbling Government.

The Politics of Polling (Political Polling and Digital Media Committee Report)

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lipsey]

That this House takes note of the Report from the Select Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media The politics of polling (HL Paper 106).

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I understand that our debate this afternoon is not time limited, so it may give comfort to noble Lords if I assure them that I intend to resume my seat in time for anybody who wishes to catch the kick-off tonight.

It was a real pleasure and privilege to chair this committee. The self-congratulatory phrase “the House of Lords at its best” is grossly overused but I am going to use it once more, because I think if anyone attended our evidence sessions and the grillings that we gave to our witnesses, they would feel that sentiment was justified. We were wonderfully well served by our two clerks—Helena Peacock, until she left for the BBC, then Sarah Jones—and our peerless policy analyst Beth Hooper. We were also well guided by our specialist adviser, Patrick Sturgis, of the University of Southampton, who has also served us subsequently by convening a conference of polling’s good and great to discuss our report.

It was a pleasure to chair this group of people, but it was not easy. At the beginning, the committee members had a range of instincts, from one who was in favour of strict regulation of polling to one who thought that everything was fine and dandy as it was. They were, incidentally, both members of the same political party.

My confidence as chairman was not exactly boosted when, at the end of each of our sessions, the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, would mutter: “I can’t see how we are ever going to get agreement on this”. Little did she know that, as we entered the last stages of our drafting, I would be borne off to Guy’s and St Thomas’. Thanks to them and the NHS, I am standing here this afternoon. That left her to persuade the committee that it would agree on something. I am very grateful for her efforts in that regard.

Most Select Committees of this House are about agreeing a set of recommendations to government for changes in policy and the law. Ours was, I think, slightly different. Three successive votes—the 2015 general election, the 2016 referendum and the 2017 general election—had produced results entirely contrary to what the polls had led people to expect. To misquote Oscar Wilde, to get one election wrong may be regarded as a misfortune, to get two wrong looks like carelessness, and to get three wrong suggests that something somewhere has gone horribly amiss. So our first and fundamental task was to assemble evidence on whether these were blips or might go on happening. Was polling no longer fit for purpose, serving only to mislead voters as to what they collectively thought?

The good news from polling’s point of view is the research by Will Jennings of the University of Southampton, which we quote and shows that internationally there is not much evidence of a decline in polling accuracy over the years. Of course, that could mean that it has not got worse but it could also mean that it was always pretty bad and continues to be bad. That is a matter of opinion. However, these three successive setbacks will have pollsters on tenterhooks about the results they will achieve in the 2022 general election. Even if they get it right, it must be said that, as happened in 2010, they sometimes get it right because their errors cancel each other out.

There is good reason to be cautious in trusting the polls. First, polling is, by common consent, getting more difficult. Our report highlights two main reasons. One is non-response rates. A pollster might approach upwards of 10 people to get one who is prepared to join in and answer the questions, whereas far fewer used to be required. That creates a bias towards those interested in politics, who are much more likely to say yes than someone who knows nothing about it.

The other reason is the decline of social class as an indicator of voting intention. Once upon a time, as long as pollsters got the right proportions of working and middle-class people, they were all right. All the middle-class people voted Tory, all the working-class people voted Labour and pollsters would get the result right. That is not the situation today. Today, Labour gets more middle-class votes than working-class votes. No doubt that makes it much more difficult for pollsters to know whether their samples are right.

Beyond that, there is the separate question of the margin of error. Strictly speaking, there is no scientific way of measuring the margin of error for non-random polls, which all pollsters use today, except one or two state-backed pollsters. Since we reported, however, the British Polling Council has put the margin of error at 4%, based on past poll errors. Let us be clear about what this means: it is not a measure of the margin of error in the total lead of a party. It does not mean the Tories are on 42% and Labour is on 38% within the margin. It is the measure of the error in each party’s share. Say you have a poll that tells you Labour and the Tories are both on 40%. Within the margin of error, that could mean that Labour is on 44% and the Tories are on 36%, or it could mean that the Tories are on 44% and Labour on 36%. If you see a 40:40 poll, is your immediate assumption that either party could be well in the lead or that they are level-pegging? Not many people realise the margin of error—certainly not the hedge funds, which apparently pay huge sums for sophisticated polling that still gives them no more insight into the true state of the parties than anyone else.

The polls, therefore, are not very accurate. What if, via the commentators, the public believe what they say? Will that affect election results? Did Labour lose in 2015 because voters believed Britain was headed for what the Tories called a coalition of chaos? On what basis? On the basis of the polls. Did Jeremy Corbyn do so well in 2017 because the polls meant that no one thought that he had a chance in hell of winning?

We discuss the evidence in our report, and it is mixed. However, we do not recommend a ban on polling in the run-up to elections, such as is in place in 16 of the 28 EU countries. Nor do we recommend the statutory regulation of polls. We were not for a ban on polls largely because we thought that polls would be done anyway, probably overseas. Badly reported offshore polls would be even worse than well-reported onshore ones. We were not for state regulation because we felt it might inhibit innovation in polling; and because we did not think it would work. The example of the Commission des Sondages in France was not encouraging. However, if they get it wrong again in 2022, the question of banning or regulating will be revisited, and probably should be.

We made a more modest suggestion of a greater role for the Electoral Commission with regard to polling during elections. The Electoral Commission last week produced its own agenda for changes in its powers, and the Government are consulting on that—I hope in a more positive spirit than when they responded to this report. We did want increased regulation in the sense of increased self-regulation. When there is a choice, self-regulation is always better because it gets into the culture and changes how people behave, whereas regulation always seems imposed. We want the British Polling Council to take on new responsibilities, including holding a public inquiry into the performance of the polls after each election and providing an advisory service on poll questions.

We concluded that many of the problems with polls are down to media reporting of polls. There are some reporters and commentators who have a good grasp of what polling is about and its limitations. There are some who are less good. It is a perennial temptation in today’s competitive news environment to distort and exaggerate. “May soars”, when a poll shows a 1% increase in the Tory lead—well within the margin of error—makes a better story than “parties remain level pegging”. In my many years of reporting polling, I would not guarantee that I had made no such distortion. The media is also prone to report, as if they were polls, surveys carried out by pressure groups which are neither representative nor random. We look to IPSO to strengthen its efforts to crack down on those who seek to mislead the public about what the polls are saying.

Finally, and briefly, I will refer to digital. This was included in the committee’s remit, but the problems associated with it mushroomed during the committee’s lifetime, and we were forced to conclude that we could not do proper justice to it. We asked the Liaison Committee to set up a Select Committee specifically on the digital side of our work; sadly, it has not yet agreed. Time heals many things. We commended the Government’s digital charter and the work going on on it; and noted the work of the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. I will just say this: if some of the fears that have been expressed about what is being done to our politics in the digital space are correct, the threat is surely graver that anything that arises from opinion polls misleading, as they may occasionally do.

I look forward to this debate. I trust that we have provided both a guide to those interested in where polling stands today—a reference volume of its strengths and weaknesses—and a road map of the direction in which it needs to go tomorrow if it is to retain any credibility within our democratic system. I commend our report to the House, and beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

I shall be very brief, or kick-off really will be threatened, certainly for participants in the next debate. I thank the Minister for his reply and in particular for the tone of that reply, which was in contrast to the official government response to the committee. I welcome in particular what he said about the British Polling Council, although I do not agree with all of it. Transparency on its own is not enough. That was the old BPC doctrine; the new doctrine goes further than that. For example, it staged an inquiry into the 2015 general election and, if self-regulation is to work, it must have an increased role. I take the Minister’s words to mean that the Government would in no way be opposed to that and, indeed, would welcome it, because that would secure the self-regulatory alternative that he and, on balance, I would prefer.

I thank all those who have participated in this debate and the kind words that were said about the committee and its work. It was comforting, as chairman, that most of the debate was about two issues—digital and social media and the Bloomberg affair—which were not covered by the committee. So I assume that we got the rest of it right.

Motion agreed.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prescott (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has said, but equally I think that we are in danger of making this yes or no, black or white and getting ourselves boxed into corners. Something remarkable happened a couple of weeks ago. The Sun carried a story based on a report from the Resolution Foundation. I shall not go into the full details, but the Resolution Foundation had found that private renting was likely to increase by one-third over the next couple of decades and the Sun reported that there would be an 80% fall in owner occupation in that period, which it had somehow deduced from the one-third increase. That is not remarkable, but what is remarkable is that the charity Full Fact, of which I am deputy chairman, pointed out the error to it and—do you know what happened?—it apologised and corrected it.

This may just mean that the Sun has completely changed its coat and that, in future, we can expect page 3 to consist entirely of corrections of its errors, but there is another explanation, which is that the Sun realises, as does the whole press, the pressure that it is under from these Houses of Parliament and from the victims to mend its ways. The danger, however, is that that will last just so long as Section 40 has not been repealed and there is no Leveson 2, and then it will return to its old ways.

I think that there is a way through on this. In Amendment 109, the Government are introducing a requirement that the Information Commission review after four years how the press and media are getting on with data protection. If they were to widen that concept of a review after four years, it would keep the pressure on the newspapers to behave differently. I believe that they have made some progress. The institution of the arbitration scheme by IPSO, which was the glaring fault in its original constitution, was a big step forward even though it has its flaws. If we can keep the pressure on in the way that I suggest, by Ministers agreeing to extend Amendment 109 to a wider forum, we may find a solution to this mess without us having Lords versus Commons. Rather, we would meet a common need to have a better press free to report, as is its duty.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting Hansard: House of Lords
Wednesday 10th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham]

That may be so, but Parliament makes errors, and this House is in the business of looking again at what we have done in the past. We have to ask ourselves: what is just and equitable in the context of this case? I therefore very much hope that we will not approve a new inquiry and that the proposed new clause so eloquently moved by my mentor will fail.

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am one of those who backed the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and I want to intervene briefly to make a point about the beast with which we are dealing. I refer noble Lords to the piece in today’s Times—a newspaper at which, incidentally, 25 years ago I was deputy to the editor. The headline reads:

“Peers hijack data bill to attack free press through back door”.


In today’s Times, evidently, the facts are free but comment is sacred.