Media Bill

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 7. The listed events regime is something that we all agree should happen—for sporting events and events of national importance. This amendment, initially moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, is an attempt to make sure that in the current viewing world, they are still relevant in the way that they should be. Not everybody watches these listed events on an ordinary television and, if you do, you may be watching on internet television. One of the joys of this is that you have highlights and replays and can watch out of sync. I would hope in this modern world that those are guaranteed, because if you do not guarantee that these sporting cultural assets, which the nation has said should be available to everyone and there is cross-party consensus on, are made available for free then you are going to take them away.

Also, if there is any danger of these highlights being taken away—when it comes to the Olympics, for example, determined as I am, even I cannot watch 15 events at once, especially not at various times—we must make sure that they are readily available. This is the second go at this. I hope that the Minister can give us a definitive reassurance that we will have this available to us now, in this Bill, because if not, the Government have thrown away, in effect, half the listed events.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 1 and to echo some of the concerns raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, in her Amendment 8. It is a very great honour to speak to her amendment. I congratulate her on her very important recognition with her BAFTA award last week. She has been a tireless campaigner for children’s television, which is why these two amendments are perhaps the most important that we are discussing today.

To put at the heart of the Bill the notion of public service broadcasting and to modernise it for the digital age should surely be what we are trying to achieve today. I am a member of probably the first generation of comprehensive school children who were taught using terrestrial colour television—creative programmes such as “Words and Pictures” and—dare I say it?—“Play School”. I still remember “magic e” when I write speeches for the Lords. What is sitting here is a failure to realise that we are the generation that lived in information scarcity and our children are swimming in an ocean of information abundance. That notion at the heart of public service broadcasting—good, thorough content creation that is age-appropriate and relevant to the educational journey that we ask our children and their families to go on—is what we should be addressing.

I hope that all Front-Benchers will be able to take the comments made by the movers of those amendments very seriously when they respond to the debate.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 9 because the quality of news in total has deteriorated over the last few years, and we definitely need more regulation to deal with this.

As far as local TV is concerned, there is a suggestion that it should be put under Ofcom and monitored. In Liverpool, for example, we have a local TV service, but most of the time it is not local at all. It is GM News. Anyone who knows Liverpool knows that it is probably one of the most left-wing cities in the country. To have thrust on it GM News as the major contributor to local TV is very strange indeed. You need some understanding that there needs to be far more local content than there has been in the past and it needs to be regulated.

I have a problem with Ofcom because even if we put it under Ofcom, as the amendment suggests, Ofcom has failed to do its duty on a number of occasions. It is still allowing GM News to put out propaganda, to allow one Tory MP to interview another Tory MP, and we see no action on this.

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[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

My Lords, as a relatively new Member of this House, I rise with great trepidation, following the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. As a new Member, I have noticed that every time I enter the Chamber with one view, when I hear his intellectually muscular contributions and his laser-beam legal brain, I usually end up leaving the Chamber with a different view. I do not think that is going to happen today.

I say to the noble Lord that criticisms were made of IPSO made in Committee yesterday. He may not think that they were legitimate or hold water, but they were closely felt. I am not going to criticise IPSO again in this debate, except possibly to add, as I tried to yesterday, to the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, that my criticisms of IPSO are about the institutional structure and the governance arrangements. They are nothing to do with the professionalism of the staff, whom I only hear excellent things about when they deal with individual cases. Also, as a former colleague of Sir Bill Jeffrey, I understand that he is as intellectually muscular as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and I am sure that he did a very independent review of IPSO.

My concerns today are why now, and why in this debate. On the circumstances that led to the creation of Section 40 in 2013, we had numerous Select Committee inquiries, and we had several criminal inquiries. We had independent journalism investigating criminal wrongdoing, and we had a judge-led public inquiry that did quite an unusual thing. It united both Houses and all political parties to draw a line in the sand and say, “We’re going to do something completely different—we’re going to find a way of holding tabloid media to account”. What we have been asked to do today, nearly nine years later, is to repeal Section 40 because we are being told that we have a legal framework and an independent set of governance rules, which means that we no longer need the Leveson recommendations.

What we are not being told is what we know now that we did not know in 2013 when, with great urgency because there was great public concern, we decided that we needed to act. We actually know that there was much more criminal wrongdoing, that it lasted longer, and that it was not for just a few years but nearly a decade. We also know that Parliament was misled, that members of the DCMS Select Committee who were investigating criminal phone hacking were the subject of intense media criticism—some covertly surveilled by private investigators working for News International. We know that they were lied to. The “one rogue reporter” defence was held for numerous years, but there was actually a corporate consciousness that this was not true in 2005. We also know, because we have seen the criminal case and conviction of Mazher Mahmood, the “fake sheikh” in 2016, that people were framed. Celebrities and people in the public eye were accused of crimes and set up to sell stories. As far as I can see, there has been very little contrition from the newspaper groups that were responsible for that.

I really could go on and on about the wrongdoing, the deceit, the lies, the criminal behaviour and the constant intimidation, but I truly think that everyone, wherever they stand in this debate, already knows about those.

Earlier, the Minister cited Bruce Springsteen, and I was very disappointed when he did that because I was supposed to have lunch with him today. I decided it was better to stay here to try to convince him, at this 11th hour, of the errors of his ways. I know he may be “born to run”, but I feel like “we are dancing in the dark”, as we have so often in this debate. I want to convince him of the merits of these three amendments in this little basket of discussions, and—who knows?—we may even have “glory days” together, whatever the outcome of the general election.

There are some principal reasons why this clause should be opposed. First, there is a convention that controversial policy should not be rushed through in the wash-up. We have done it before and came to regret it—I mention the Gambling Act 2005.

Secondly, when it comes to media reform, we must be incredibly transparent. The public need to understand that, if we are going to concede to media barons—and let us not deny that this is what this represents—we need to be seen to do the right thing. In trying to railroad all these amendments through in an afternoon, on the day after the announcement of a general election, you cannot make the case that this is anything other than a venal deal.

Thirdly, perhaps more importantly, I believe very strongly that, wherever you sit on the ideological spectrum, whenever we talk about regulation—this is a highly regulated market—people always tell me that when you regulate things you have to be worried about the consequences of your decisions because they are very hard to map out. We appear to be dropping the creation of a new regulator for that reason when it comes to football, and I do not understand why we are interfering with a regulated market in wash-up.

There are some principal reasons why it is time that we took a pause, and what we have is either a concession that could unite us or an argument that says let us not deal with Clause 50 in the wash-up of a general election; let us pause and come back to it, whoever wins that election.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

We on these Benches are in favour of these amendments and think we should proceed now.

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[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

Yes, there was one little thing I wondered. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, said that he was going to have lunch. For a moment, I thought it was with Bruce Springsteen.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

Yes, it was.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

You were not—oh, my goodness. Anyway, as I was saying, I thank everyone, including the Government for making the Bill happen. It is hugely important for our public service broadcasters. That is enough of my thanks and I have not cried.