Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I did not intend to speak on these amendments, although we support them from these Benches, but I have to take issue with what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said—I think, quoting the noble Lord, Lord Black, from the previous debate—about how we do not need any of this stuff because people can sue the newspapers and achieve redress through those means.

When I was a commander in the Metropolitan Police Service, I was subjected to a kiss and tell story on the front page and eight inside pages of a tabloid newspaper. The story was a mixture of lies and intimate details of my private life and my relationship with somebody I loved and lived with for three and a half years. We broke up in acrimonious circumstances and subsequently he was paid £100,000 by the tabloid newspaper to tell these lies and intimate details of my private life. Thankfully, a group of solicitors and barristers agreed to a conditional fee agreement to pursue the newspaper. However, half way through the preliminaries leading up to the court case, it became apparent that I was unable to secure insurance against losing. Therefore, I was faced with a situation where if I pulled out of the action I would have to pay both sides’ costs—the newspaper’s costs and my own side’s costs because the conditional fee agreement would happen only if the case went to court and I lost—and could have lost my home.

The point is that there are many ordinary people, less high-profile than even I was at that time, who cannot get conditional fee agreements. They do not have the means to sue newspapers. Certainly, I would not recommend anybody going through the stress that I was put through by that newspaper and its lawyers, who tried every trick in the book to try to get us to fold before the court case happened. As it happens, two weeks before the case was due to be heard, they agreed to settle, although they claimed that it was not on the grounds of a breach of privacy but because everything that had been printed in the newspaper was untrue.

For noble Lords to say that there are sufficient safeguards at the moment for ordinary people to take the newspapers to court is, in my respectful submission, completely untrue.

[Lord Pannick]

I am very sorry to hear about the noble Lord’s personal experience and of course I accept everything he says. But will he accept that hundreds of people have brought legal proceedings against national newspaper groups for their wrongful, unlawful action in accessing personal data—for example, by listening to their mobile telephone calls—and publishing articles in consequence of that, and they have recovered very substantial damages, and rightly so, against those newspapers?

[Lord Paddick]

I completely accept what the noble Lord says but there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of other ordinary people who have not been able to claim redress for the wrongs that have been meted out to them by the press.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton]

This is not simply about money; it is what it does to your reputation. That is much more important than money.

[Lord Paddick]

I am grateful for the noble Lord’s intervention. Obviously, despite the fact that we won the court case in the end and that there was a small apology in the said newspaper—I think it was on page 6—I was not able to recover the serious damage done to my reputation. I am grateful to be standing here in the House today to address noble Lords on this issue, but there are many people whose reputations have not recovered.

[Lord Blencathra]

Perhaps I may give the noble Lord some information which he may not have been aware of, as he may have left the Met by then. The reason that maybe up to 100 people were able to sue on the hacking was because their names appeared in the Mulcaire diaries, and the Met team kindly went and told every single person who had possibly been hacked, “They’re after you. You’re in Mulcaire’s diaries and you may care to contact some lawyers. Here are some lawyers who are doing a group action. If you join that, there is no great risk to yourself—you will be in there with a lot of others. The lawyers will be there on a no-win no-fee basis and you’re perfectly safe to do it”. That is why most of those people were able to go together in a joint action, but the thousands of individuals do not have a hope.