Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord McNally and Lord Skidelsky

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 6th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky]

The noble Lord, Lord Black, paints an incredibly rosy picture of the state of press regulation in the last 20 years. What he ignores is the background to the Leveson inquiry itself and the statutory system—the royal charter and so on—which followed it. There were years in which many newspapers grossly abused their freedom of speech. That is why this interlocking set of propositions, as he calls them, got going and produced a system which all the parties in Parliament accepted in 2013. He says that no other country in the world has a system like ours. No other country has had such an abusive press in parts, though not all the press by any means. These amendments seek to create a balance between freedom of speech and the right of privacy by setting up an auditor to determine how that balance is kept. It is an independent auditor, not part of the Government or the state. The noble Lord, Lord Black, seems to confuse the role of the state with that of an independent auditor, so the argument falls to the ground.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, so that my noble friend Lord Lester can come in in due order, I will speak to Amendment 88. I also draw the Minister’s attention to Amendment 91, which relates to the City. It is clear from the ICO guidance that journalistic exemption was intended to apply to non-media companies, but this is not made explicit in the Bill. In addition, the Bill does not address whether material can be considered published if it is behind a paywall, or mainly addressed to corporate subscribers. That is the thinking behind Amendment 91. We were discussing earlier the concerns of some in financial services and companies such as Thomson Reuters about how the Bill affected them, and that is my probing for them.

I would like to speak to Amendment 88. I was one of the four privy counsellors who signed off the royal charter. I was in government when this went on. It was not an attempt by government to regulate the press. In fact, the coalition Government twisted and turned to try to find ways of taking this forward, as far away from state regulation as we possibly could.