Defamation Bill

Debate between Lord May of Oxford and Lord Hunt of Chesterton

Tuesday 15th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, that was the first time I have moved an amendment, so I hope you will excuse me.

This is an important amendment in an important Bill, particularly for scientists, engineers, doctors and writers, who approached me to take up the issue, particularly regarding the internet when used in a rather specialised way by these organisations. I have met many engineering and science institutions, whose membership comes to around 450,000 people, and on whose behalf they speak. I was also contacted by the coalition of Sense About Science, the Penn Club and the Index on Censorship.

This Bill offers legal protection, and in this clause there is emphasis on the peer-review process, which as a scientist and former editor I am very familiar with. I am also familiar with the fact that many scientists and engineers who are involved in public debate use the internet. The internet that they use is regulated by the institutions involved. We are talking about a much narrower brief; I do not know whether these people count as “little people” as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, but they are pretty important people and there are quite a lot of them.

This clause refers to the words “scientific or academic”, and I understand from earlier discussions that this includes engineers, medics and technologists. The amendment proposes that the privilege enjoyed by peer-reviewed articles should be extended to websites controlled and edited by chartered organisations and professional bodies. It attempts to build upon the current system, which is practical and financially supported.

The Institution of Civil Engineers, of which I am an honorary fellow, having studied engineering as a student, and the Institution of Structural Engineers have highly regulated websites on which people can make comments about, for example, a structure such as a bridge or some machinery. Those comments are then edited very vigorously, they talk to their lawyers so that they will not be defamatory or cause any difficulty and then they put the comments on their website, so it is a highly controlled system. They would welcome a clause along these lines, because they would then spend less time talking with their learned friends and would perhaps save money. They feel that this clause would put what they already do into practice or into a legal framework, which is a good way to proceed.

Some noble Lords have said in discussions this afternoon that we do not need this because it happens already. This is an example where things are happening already but they could work better and more effectively. Some people wrote to me from some institutions to say, “We’re not doing this very much; this would enable us to provide a better service to our members, who are very worried about a slightly increasingly litigious world”.

I will go through the clauses and will read each clause, as that will make it easier to understand. Clause 1 as amended would read:

“The publication of a statement in a scientific or academic journal or on a website edited and controlled by a chartered professional or learned body (a ‘recognised website’) is privileged if the following conditions are met”.

In a sense, some of the work has been done for this Parliament by the Privy Council procedure of providing chartering to professional bodies. Some of these professional bodies, of course, may be in considerable conflict with other professional bodies. The chiropractors, for example, are now a chartered body, and not all other scientific bodies are entirely in agreement with what they do. Nevertheless, this could still be within that framework.

The first condition, as we read this,

“is that the statement relates to a scientific or academic matter”.

“Scientific”, as I commented, includes engineering, technological and medical matters. If my amendments were accepted, subsection (3) would read:

“The second condition is that before the statement was published in the journal or on the recognised website an independent review of the statement’s scientific or academic merit was carried out by … the editor of the journal or recognised website, and … one or more persons with expertise in the scientific or academic matter concerned”.

If my amendments were accepted, subsection (4) would read:

“Where the publication of a statement in a scientific or academic journal or on the recognised website is privileged by virtue of subsection (1), the publication in the same journal or recognised website … is also privileged if”—

and then there are three conditions, the third of which is added by my amendment—

“the assessment was written by one or more of the persons who carried out the independent review of the statement; and … the assessment was written in the course of that review”—

and—

“the assessment was written by one or more persons with expertise in the scientific or academic matter concerned and was approved by the editor of the journal or recognised website”.

As I understand it from these institutions, this is all quite a rigorous process. Subsections (5) to (8) are also modified in that way.

This amendment is in the spirit of the clause, but it would extend it and would certainly be very much welcomed by these institutions.

[Lord May of Oxford]

I agree with all of this. It is very good and I want to do something, if I am allowed, that is probably improper. There are two issues in Clause 6 that I would like to have clarified, but I did not see the need to put down an amendment merely to raise the issue. Clause 6(6) says:

“A publication is not privileged by virtue of this section if it is shown to be made with malice”.

Am I correct that the word “malice” has a fairly explicit legal meaning? Anybody familiar with the academic world will know—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

I thank noble Lords for their very constructive response. I want to emphasise the respective memberships of the institutions which wrote to me. The Institution of Civil Engineers has 80,000 members; the Institute of Physics has 45,000 members; the Institution of Chemical Engineers has 35,000 members; the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has 100,000 members; the Institution of Engineering and Technology has 150,000 members; the Royal College of Physicians has 30,000 members; and the Institution of Agricultural Engineers has not so many.

I have published papers in the scientific literature and for those institutions, and I can tell your Lordships that the standard of refereeing in most of our engineering institutions is extremely high. There are excellent scientific journals, but there are an awful lot of scientific journals with peer review in them that are pretty poor. That is why I was surprised that the clause as originally drafted set no quality level for the journals; no quality level has been supplied. It is not as if these are journals of institutions. The quality level that I want to introduce for the websites—“chartered”—is a great deal higher than is the case for the journals.

[Lord May of Oxford]

Some of the journals.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Some—I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord May.

This is an extremely rigorous process, so I do not recognise the notion of dilution suggested by the noble Lord, Lord McNally. This is not a free-for-all. If one civil engineer writes a letter to a journal about, let us say, a bridge, it is an extremely serious matter. This is now done regularly without many court cases, but it would be better if it were in the legal framework. We would be building on an established tradition.

However, time has been running on. I am appreciative of the Minister’s constructive response. I should like to talk to the drafters, and I hope that this matter will come back. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.