Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Lord Paddick and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, we spent a considerable amount of time earlier in Committee on the question of the powers that would be allocated to any regulators appointed under the Bill. We did not spend much time on who the regulators would be, although some concerns were raised. However, over the weeks and even today, we have increasingly gathered that the Government’s intention is that the British Board of Film Classification, the BBFC, should be given a major role in the work discussed in this particular part of the Bill.

I will start with the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which has already been extensively referred to in the debate. It raised questions about what the position would be of any regulator appointed under the powers being taken in the Bill. It said, for example, that the age verification regulator—without naming that regulator—will have powers including,

“to require the provision of information … impose substantial civil penalties … take steps to direct internet service providers to block access to material … and … publish guidance”.

Of course, there is a quite a lot in the report that we have already discussed about how and under what conditions a body such as the regulator that will be appointed should be able to publish guidance, particularly if it is on behalf of the Secretary of State and has not been subject to discussion within Parliament.

Without having any expert knowledge of the work of the committee, I think that, had they known directly who the regulator would be, they might also have raised the issue in my amendment: the status and constitution of the body that is likely to be appointed. I assume that the comments made by the Minister earlier in this Committee session that the BBFC is to be appointed will be carried forward in due course. If I am wrong, obviously the points I make are still valid—although they may apply to a different regulator of a different nature.

The issue I want to pick up comes in paragraph 15 of the DPRRC report, which talks about a memorandum exchanged between it and the department in relation to the powers that would be applied to the regulator. It starts by saying where those powers are found: in Clause 17. It explains that the department feels that it is important to retain flexibility as to who is to be appointed to ensure that the right person or persons are appointed as a regulator. Of course, that point has probably now been overcome by time. It also makes the point that the functions could be regulated. Indeed, we had earlier recommendations that suggested quite persuasive arguments for the regulatory burden to be carried by more than one body. I hope that we will be able to make progress on this as we move through the Bill.

It is clear that if the regulator is to be the BBFC, the work of which is really the basis for the classification system that will be relied on in the legislation, it has a designation to do only part of its work under the Video Recordings Act 1984. It is important to pause here. The amendment that I am putting forward asks the Government to think hard about the correctness of a decision to appoint as a regulator a body that is only partially covered by statute at present. Does the Minister think it right that a private company over which the Secretary of State has limited powers in relation to who is appointed to that body should take on the sorts of responsibilities on civil penalties and the blocking of activity, as well as regulatory functions?

As the amendment suggests, does he not think that it might be more appropriate to look carefully at the body that takes on these responsibilities and to propose, as I do, that it should be either a body corporate or subject to more extensive powers of direction as to who is appointed and how any appointments are made? If that were the case, we could have more confidence in the ability of that body to make the right decisions in relation to all the functions that it has, which extend quite widely, and in particular to age verification, which is the subject of the Bill.

The British Board of Film Classification is a private company. Its number is 00117289. I checked today on the company’s register and, limited as the information is, it is quite revealing. It was first incorporated on 17 August 1911. So for nearly 107 years it has been a monopoly operator in a private capacity, acting in some senses on behalf of the Government in some of its functions. As I said, there are statutory functions in relation to video and now DVD, but none to any great extent in relation to film classification, which is the basis of the work that is being carried on in the Bill.

It is well known that, in its original form, the BBFC was called the Incorporated Association of Kinematograph Manufacturers Ltd. It was created by the then manufacturers of projection equipment to protect the investment that they made in cinemas up and down the country against the watch committees, which had sprung up before but were now displaying an active concern about the impact of films on the morals of the population. This still exists. Technically, films are licensed for exhibition in the United Kingdom only through the local authorities. They normally take the advice of the BBFC. That was a clever move by the manufacturers of the equipment, which was at risk, to ensure that they stepped in ahead of the possibility of moral outrage by creating a situation in which they said and alleged that people would not be shocked by the sorts of thing that might cause alarm and despondency around the country. At that stage they could not have anticipated that Life of Brian is still banned in Glasgow—I think that I am right in saying that. That may or may not be of interest to anybody in the Committee, though perhaps it woke your Lordships up a bit. That is the kind of thing that can come from this rather unfortunate arrangement.

I will recap slightly. This private company last year made a profit of approximately £1.5 million on a turnover of £5.4 million. It owns freehold property not a million miles from here worth quite a lot of money. It has a board appointed by itself and a membership that is not disclosed in the company’s records. It operates in an area of considerable complexity and certainly some moral concern—and it is about to be given additional statutory responsibilities. Those are the main points that I want to make in this amendment.

I do not know whether what I propose in this amendment is right. It is an issue that should be thought carefully about before we move further. For instance, within the BBFC structures at the moment there is no appeal system. The regulatory functions of the Secretary of State are limited; they are mainly related to video and not to film. The powers that are about to be referred to it are mentioned by the Delegated Powers Committee as being of concern, so we need to find a way through that. We have yet to see how that will happen because we have not yet had the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Lord Paddick]

My Lords, I support the amendment but not necessarily for the reasons articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. Our concern is that if the Government started to appoint members of the British Board of Film Classification and therefore it was not independent of government, we would have a situation in which the Government would potentially be involved in deciding which films or material should be censored or not, which is not a path we would like to go down, particularly in the current climate of populism and the historical issues that that raises.

Press Matters

Debate between Lord Paddick and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord for repeating the Statement by the Secretary of State in another place and welcome him to the Dispatch Box. I hope it will not be a single guest appearance on this occasion.

We can judge from its opaque title and surprising appearance that the Statement, “Press Matters”, has very little to do with the substance of either the commencement of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 or announcing a date for Leveson 2 to commence. Its purpose seems to be to muddy the waters around the remaining stages of the Investigatory Powers Bill, which is about to be debated in the other place.

Surely the right thing to do is to honour the Government’s commitment to the victims of press intrusion and harassment. Let us remind ourselves what the test is for this process. The former Prime Minister summed it up on 14 June 2012 when he said, having met the Dowler family in Downing Street:

“It’s not: do the politicians or the press feel happy with what we get? It’s: are we really protecting people who have been caught up and absolutely thrown to the wolves by this process? … that’s the real test”.

Labour supports a free press as essential to democracy. We do not support any state control of the press. It is 1,324 days since all parties agreed to implement the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry in full. The Leveson inquiry looked into press behaviour following the public outcry over illegal phone hacking and after it emerged that there had been many victims of press intrusion.

A key recommendation of the report was the creation of a,

“genuinely independent and effective system of self-regulation”.

The new system was debated in Parliament and received unanimous cross-party agreement. It involved creating the Press Recognition Panel by royal charter in October 2013 as an independent body to oversee press regulators. Has the Minister read the recent annual report of the PRP? If so, he will be aware of what it says about the need for Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 to be implemented. Does he agree with the chair of the PRP, David Wolfe QC, who says:

“There has been a significant delay in doing this, despite the Act being enacted nearly four years ago. Commencing section 40 will strengthen the public’s access to justice. Everyone agrees that politicians should not interfere with the running of the press, but paradoxically, the failure to commence section 40 has kept a political presence in place. The new system intended by Parliament is not in place, and the public interest has not been safeguarded in the way that was expected”?

On Leveson 2, is the Minister aware that one of the original terms of reference given to Lord Justice Leveson was:

“To inquire into the extent of the corporate governance and management failures at News International and other newspaper organisations and the role, if any, of politicians, public servants and others in relation to any failure to investigate wrongdoing at News International”?

This part of Leveson was delayed—as the Minister knows because he has been answering my questions on this matter—until all outstanding court cases are dealt with. Can he confirm that that is imminent?

As my right honourable friend the shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport said in the other place, Leveson 2 is the investigation into how the cover-up of phone hacking was conducted, but what the Government are in effect announcing today is a consultation on whether the original cover-up should be covered up. This is shameful. We need the immediate implementation of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 and we want an early date for the second part of the Leveson inquiry. We do not need a faux consultation on these matters. If the Government are to proceed on this route, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain in some detail what elements of the recent police investigations referred to in the Statement—the Hillsborough inquiry and its findings on misleading police statements to government officials and subsequently newspapers; the case of Mazher Mahmood, who perverted the course of justice to secure his scoops and left scores of previous convictions unsafe; senior police resignations; the new revelations on the Daniel Morgan case; and what we have just heard about Orgreave—persuade him that further consultations are not now required.

We must not miss this historic opportunity. We must ensure that what the press did to the Dowlers, the McCanns, the family of Abigail Witchalls and others who suffered so terribly, can never happen again.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble and learned Lord for repeating the Statement. I must declare an interest, in addition to being a victim of phone hacking by the press. In 2002, I was the subject of a kiss-and-tell story on the front page and eight inside pages of a Sunday tabloid newspaper. Many of the allegations were untrue and the rest were a massive intrusion into my private life by a former partner whom I had lived with for four years. He was paid £100,000 for the story. In the absence of an effective and independent press complaints system, my only course of action was to sue the newspaper and although I was able to secure a conditional fee agreement, many ordinary people are not. Lawyers acting for the newspaper tried every trick in the book to get me to concede, in which case I would have been liable for both my own and the newspaper’s costs and I would have been made bankrupt. If the paper had not admitted libel and agreed a settlement a week before the case was due to go to trial, and had I lost the action, I would have lost my home.

If newspapers do not sign up to an independent, royal charter-compliant, press complaints system that the public can have real confidence in, the press must be prepared to cover the costs if their refusal to sign up results in complainants having to take action through the courts. This was a cross-party agreement, reached at considerable effort and cost, resulting in a royal charter that the Government are preparing to consign to the dustbin. Not only that, they are preparing to ditch detailed scrutiny not only of the matters detailed by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, but of the relationship between the police and the press—issues that were to be covered in Leveson 2—despite such recent cases as that involving South Yorkshire Police, the BBC and Sir Cliff Richard.

If the Statement is designed to head off amendments to the Investigatory Powers Bill currently being considered, does the Minister not agree that it adds fuel to the fire, rather than dampening things down?