Telegraph Media Group Ltd: Acquisition

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Many of the provisions we have made in the digital markets Bill require the Bill to receive Royal Assent, which I hope it will very soon, and they will come into force then. Once that has happened, we will be able to bring forward the measures we have committed to via secondary legislation. I will be writing in the coming days with a bit more information about that and about the consultation process on some of the points my noble friend raised, and we discussed in debates during the passage of the Bill. I will write to all noble Lords with further information about that very soon.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, the questions so far have focused on the intersection between this and the previous regime, which was established, as noble Lords have already said, by Lord Puttnam and his Enterprise Act—it was not exactly his; it was the House’s Enterprise Act, and it was published by a Government we were proud to be part of. That has stood the test of time, but I am afraid time is accelerating. We are now in a situation with a rather hard edge.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, whom I worked with on the amendment we eventually put through, which will also be referred to within the forthcoming digital media Bill. However, that provides an absolute block against further foreign ownership; it is not just ownership, but interests in the freedom of the press and the plurality of it. Of course, there are other issues, which under the old regime would be considered, including those looked at in detail by Ofcom and the CMA.

I want to pick up on the exchange the noble Lord, Lord McNally, quoted, between the Secretary of State and John Whittingdale. In response to his question about whether these things need to be brought forward and accelerated, she said that she was

“looking at whether online news should be included in the scope of Ofcom’s powers ”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/4/24; col. 165.]

I rather had the view that Ofcom had those powers. Could the noble Lord explain a little bit where he sees a gap and, if so, given what he said about timescales, whether we can look forward to the gaps being filled in? That seems to be a very important part of it, in the context of us needing to look more widely at what we want out of a free press, without reflecting government intervention and recognising that plurality is one of the main concerns. There are other bidders for the current holdings in the Daily Telegraph, one of which is a media interest. I wonder if the Minister would like to opine on that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord’s question gets to the heart of an important distinction: there are newspapers that have websites, there are websites that are news providers, and there are online services that are not principally news providers but from which people increasingly derive their news. It is right that we look at all those things. He is right that the Communications Act 2003 has served us well for the last 20 years but, as we said in our debates on the Online Safety Act, it was written at a time when the internet was in its infancy and did not look at it. Of course, we touched on that in the debates on that Act and will return to some of the points in the Media Bill. We will shortly consult on expanding the existing media mergers regime and the foreign state ownership provisions to include online news websites, and we will touch on other matters when we discuss the Media Bill.