Media Bill

Debate between Viscount Astor and Lord Hunt of Wirral

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend, but first I declare my interests as set out in the register. As colleagues will know, I was the independent founding chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation. I have listened carefully to the speeches that have been made, but I strongly agree with my noble friend that we are really going back over the debates we had a decade ago.

I want to go back to the first principles that my noble friend enunciated. In many ways, free expression is the bedrock of our society, but it is also a privilege—one not enjoyed by many millions of our fellow human beings, and which therefore must be matched by a sense of public duty and responsibility.

We are all familiar with all those egregious cases. As chair, like my noble friend Lord Grade, of the Press Complaints Commission, I found that it was powerless in many cases. I had to have face-to-face meetings with victims to hear for myself their harrowing accounts of their experiences. The PCC was powerless in many cases, particularly where criminal acts had taken place; it was up to the police. One of our sadnesses was that the police seemed so slow to act. Most of the phone hacking cases have now been resolved in the civil courts, but that should not blind us to the fact—I say this to all those who have spoken—that serious criminal acts took place, not just regulatory breaches. So far as regulation is concerned, the key question we have to answer is how to police culture and standards while maintaining independence of thought and deed. It is a very difficult balance.

The rock on which the system is built is the editors’ code, a living document that, as I understand it, is still recognised right across the world as an excellent code. I believe that IPSO has been very effective at holding publishers and publications to account. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, said that IPSO had not been effective because there were a relatively low number of adverse adjudications, and those who have mentioned that have given specific examples. However, press behaviour has improved over the last period. The Press Recognition Panel, which has been lobbying us—lobbying me all the time—pretty hard, largely in its own interests, is funded by the taxpayer, as my noble friend pointed out. I am all for trenchant, highly politicised contributions to this important debate, but I wonder whether it is fair to ask the taxpayer to fund them.

[Viscount Astor (Con)]

My noble friend says that the PRP is funded by the taxpayer, but IPSO is funded by the newspaper industry. Which does he regard as the more independent process?

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

When I gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry, Lord Justice Leveson pointed out to me that it was up to the industry to fund the regulator. When I first gave evidence to him, he asked me to sit down with the main newspaper groups and find a way forward whereby they would fund an independent regulatory process. My noble friend is quite right: it is very important that the industry itself funds the regulator, but the regulator should be independent. That is what I reported in my second line of evidence to the Leveson inquiry, and that is what I believe I managed to achieve.

The proponents of statutory regulation invariably nod sagely and sympathetically when I say all this, but honestly, they have no answers. I believe that state interference is not the answer. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Watson—he sits on a committee with me and I have great respect for him—that Amendment 87A is state regulation in all but name. The system proposed would grind the free press into the dirt with both statutory interference into editorial decision-making and the prospect of endless and often frivolous litigation. Experience also tells us that the principal beneficiaries of such an arrangement would be not individuals who had been misrepresented or traduced but deep corporate pockets and their expensive lawyers, who want to challenge the press at every turn in a war of attrition.