Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is not sounding any more convincing than he did in his statement on Thursday. Failure to proceed with part two of Leveson and section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 is a disgusting and cowardly betrayal of the victims of media harassment. It does not even leave those victims in the same position as before, because since Leveson the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 has hobbled the ability of claimants in privacy and defamation actions to access no-win, no-fee representation. Therefore, section 40 is now the only way to ensure access to justice, which is as helpful to small publishers as it is to citizens. Why does the Secretary of State not put their interests before those of big newspaper groups, instead of currying favour for himself and his weak Government?

[Matt Hancock]

We debated this at length on Thursday and discussed the fact that it is vital that we look to what is needed for the media now, to ensure that instead of having a set of proposals that were designed several years ago and that would lead to any claimant being able to claim costs no matter the merits of their case, we have measures that enable our press to be sustainable for the future.

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[Tom Watson]

The Secretary of State is obviously living in the analogue age if he thinks that he can accept a coupon from The Sun but ignore 200,000 citizens expressing their concern about the inquiry.

I have only one question for the Secretary of State. Will the Government be able to detail what they will do if evidence of wrongdoing is revealed, in particular if editors misled or were partial in their evidence to the original inquiry? We still need Leveson 2, and Sir Brian agrees.

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is making excellent work of exposing the Government on this point, but things go a stage further than this. Abandoning Leveson against the wishes of Lord Leveson is a constitutional provocation, because it puts party interest above due process. If that is going to happen with one inquiry, why will it not happen with Grenfell or contaminated blood? What will stop the Government doing things that are in their own interests, not those of victims?

[Tom Watson]

My hon. Friend makes an important and fair point that I hope the analogue Minister will reflect on.

Rather than protecting the public from the abuse of their data, committed by or on behalf of newspaper publishers, the Government have capitulated to the media. In his letter, Sir Brian said that

“the press is in a unique position because there is no other… body in a position to hold the very real exercise of power by the press to account and to expose its wrongdoing to the public”

In short, the press has no predators. As this Bill makes its way into law, we will be voting to redress that imbalance and to keep our promises.

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[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I had a lot to say about IPSO and IMPRESS along the lines that my hon. Friend has laid out, but I am aware of Mr Deputy Speaker’s strictures. I have tried to take as many interventions as I can, and page 2 of my remarks will be put down on this green Bench very shortly.

I move on to the second issue that I wanted to raise: the second amendment sent to us by the other place saying that we should commence section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. That would not be the right way to proceed, and I am grateful that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made that point so clearly on Thursday. Many local papers in North Devon have written to me on numerous occasions expressing deep concerns about the impact that section 40 would have. I mention just three: the North Devon Journal, the North Devon Gazette and the South Molton & District News, which is, incidentally, one of the few papers to have signed up to IMPRESS, the new press regulator.

Freedom of the press is absolutely essential in a democracy. Let us think carefully about what section 40 says: if a paper not under the auspices of a Press Recognition Panel regulator is sued for defamation, for instance, it has to pay the legal costs of both sides, even if it wins the case. How can that be sensible? We might argue that that is a pretty blunt instrument with the intention of coercing newspapers to sign up to one of the approved regulators, but 90% of the national press have not done so, so the blunt instrument is clearly not being effective. The biggest danger, however, is that many small, local media companies, such as those in my constituency that I have mentioned, would simply not be able to run a viable business if section 40 were enacted. Financially, the court costs would cripple them. Individuals could make vexatious claims in the knowledge that there was no chance of their ever having to pay costs, whatever the outcome. That is simply something up with which we will not put.

The local press in North Devon and many other parts of the country is still extraordinarily important. The two main papers I mentioned are still read widely today and help to maintain our sense of community. We cannot face a situation in which such papers are threatened by what could be a series of vexatious claims, encouraged by the fact that there would be no risk to the person making that claim.

[Andy Slaughter]

rose—

[Christine Jardine]

rose—

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[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

It is a genuine pleasure to speak under your chairmanship after your absence, Mr Deputy Speaker. Welcome back; it is lovely to see you here.

I was a journalist for 17 years: five with the local press, two with the local media and ending up with 10 years at the BBC. I therefore have an interest in this debate, particularly in the Lords amendments, with which I entirely disagree.

In my very brief speech—time is pressing—I would like to take the House back to the royal charter. Everyone in the House will remember that all parties agreed at the time that, as a consequence of the phone hacking, there should be a royal charter. I have been in this place only seven years so I am still a whippersnapper in that sense, but I have always been very concerned when parties on both sides of the House agree with something. It normally means that something is dramatically wrong. Fifteen MPs voted against the royal charter. I and 14 others realised that there was some state control or state implication that would interfere with the free press. We were not happy with that, so we voted against it.

The key point—a point that I have yet to hear from any party on either side of the House—is that phone hacking is illegal. People are not allowed to do it, and as some journalists have found, they go to jail if it is done. Now, I do not want to take away from those who have suffered or the victims of phone hacking, including the royal family, of course. It was simply appalling. As a former—I would like to think—honourable journalist I personally never took part in that activity; nor did I know anyone who did. This is another point: phone hacking was done by a tiny minority of journalists, who were wrong and who caused immense damage to the reputation of the press in this country.

In my very humble opinion, the press in this country is one of the cornerstones of our freedom and democracy. As I have discovered in the short time that I have been here, when we tinker with legislation it is all too often a huge sledgehammer to crack a nut. Those who are introducing legislation and those who are debating it often do not think about its consequences. What would happen if we started to impede and encroach on the freedom of the press? The press understandably reacted with anger, claiming that the royal charter would destroy local papers who simply could not afford it. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) said—this is true and quite extraordinary—section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 forced newspapers that had not signed up to a state-supported regulator to pay their own and, indeed, their opponent’s legal costs in libel cases, even if they won the case. That is not freedom of the press. It is not even fair law. It is bad law, made on the back of a terrible wrong committed by a very few people in what is generally, across the world, a highly respected business or profession—that is, the press in this country.

I have been the victim of some pretty interesting press reporting. I confess that I have been trying to put some solar panels on my land. I remember that one columnist in the Daily Mail wrote a double-page spread that was inaccurate. Having read it, I felt as though I had almost murdered someone. I was somehow this appalling landowner who wanted to do these appalling things. I had imposed my will on my tenants, crushed debate and all these things, but none of it was true. In fact, the opposite had been true and always is in that case. To be fair, the paper did ask me for a comment but I knew that, were I to comment, it would be a small piece at the bottom right of the article, and that the other two and a half, three or four columns would all be anti-Drax. But I can live with that because I want a free press in this country. I want a free press to hold us, businesses and powerful people—yes, like Mr Mosley—to account. If I were in the wrong, the press would have a right to dig out of me what I had done wrong, even though I might not want them to do so.

[Andy Slaughter]

Does the hon. Gentleman think that people such as the McCanns, Milly Dowler’s family and Christopher Jefferies should live with the consequences of being traduced and victimised by the press? Does he not feel that casting the press as the victims, when we know that they are actually controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy and irresponsible individuals, is putting things exactly upside down?

[Richard Drax]

Forgive me, I did not quite hear the first part of the hon. Gentleman’s question, but I think that I got the general gist. The point about multimillion pound media barons is a red herring. I have worked in many media institutions, including newspapers and other organisations, and those people do not get involved. We were left very much to our own devices to report accurately, fairly and truthfully. Yes, they may be very wealthy, but good luck to them. They—or their fathers or grandfathers —have worked extremely hard to build up a business that employs tens of thousands of people in this country.

The point must again be made that the online media in this country—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who I seem to recall told us that there was no money left, groans from a sedentary position. Online, anyone can say what they want, and they do. There is no recourse for the many thousands of victims of online abuse, intimidation and threats—threats to kill. What comeback is there for them? Nothing at all. That is where I urge the Government to look very carefully to ensure that the online media face the same standards that the national press would face.

I am not going to keep the House waiting much longer, because others want to speak. It is my view—along with others, I would think—that only those with anger, revenge or even guilt in their heart would support these amendments and damage a free press, which is the cornerstone of our democracy. The Leader of the Opposition wants to crush the press; I think, “We’re coming for you” is what he said. No, that is not what the British people want and they certainly will not vote for it. A free press is all important.

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[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am very pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), not least because it allows me to dispense with the first part of my speech, which will please the whole House. He has made exactly the right points in relation to what is known as the immigration exemption. It makes unnecessarily contentious a technically complex and, as Members on both sides of the House have said, necessary Bill. It makes EU citizens second-class citizens and allows the Home Office to collect and store data in a way that undermines other protections in the Bill, which means that it is something that we should not support. I hope that the Government will reconsider it.

I will spend what time I have dealing with the other matter of contention, which a number of Members on both sides of the House have raised: the amendments made in the other place. There are two. One is a requirement on the Government to proceed with a Leveson 2 public inquiry, and the other would effectively bring in, for the purposes of data protection offences, section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which introduces costs. It would ensure that individuals affected by data protection offences—one could read across into defamation and other matters—committed by national newspapers had affordable access to justice in any action against those newspapers. That is the essence of it.

The second part of the Leveson inquiry was promised to the victims of press abuse by all party leaders in the clearest possible way, and it is difficult to see what has significantly changed since that time. Despite that, and perhaps even more surprisingly, despite the wishes and views of Sir Brian Leveson himself, the Government announced in an arbitrary and rather casual manner in the statement last week their intention to cancel part 2. If we do not have Leveson part 2, we will not know the extent of corruption across newspaper groups, the extent of corrupt relationships with the Metropolitan Police Service, and the extent of illegality and cover-up at newspaper titles.

We need to proceed with Leveson part 2 because we owe that duty to the Hillsborough families, to the families of Milly Dowler and of Madeleine McCann, to Christopher Jefferies and to others who deserve to know the truth about what happened to them. That would have been an uncontroversial thing to say even two or three years ago, but it appears to have been forgotten. The innumerable meetings that now take place between senior members of the Government and senior people in the press—and the paucity of such meetings with the victims—speak for themselves. We have not got to the bottom of the hacking and data scandals at the News of the World, the Mirror Group titles and other newspapers. This issue does not affect only the newspapers of the right or of the left; it affects newspapers across the spectrum.

The fact that Sir Brian is firmly in favour of finishing the inquiry with extended terms of reference—we know this now, although I do not think that anyone who heard the statement last Thursday believed it to be the case at the time—really sets a precedent. I wonder when it has previously happened that the views of an inquiry chairman have been disregarded and overturned in this manner, part-way through an inquiry. If this were a scandal in any other industry, the press would be firmly behind finishing the inquiry. Public confidence in the press, and in us, will suffer if inquiries into press misconduct are abandoned, effectively at the instigation of those who run the media in this country. As I said in an intervention, if we can do this with one inquiry, we can do it with another.

The Government have quite rightly set up inquiries into the Grenfell Tower disaster and the contaminated blood scandal—two extraordinary scandals affecting millions of people across this country and our major institutions. What is to prevent the Government from stepping in at any time and saying, “We’re not happy with the direction. We believe that this inquiry is now irrelevant. We won’t continue it anymore.”? This weakens faith in our constitution.

I turn to the amendments made in the other place regarding section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. I have heard comments that are just plain wrong, particularly from Government Members. It may just be coincidence that many of them began their remarks by saying that they were former journalists, but they then misrepresented what is intended by—and, indeed, the actuality of—section 40 and the amendments made in the other place. In any event, their comments were miscast.

Cost shifting is often a part of the cost regime in our courts. It is done to increase either access to or the administration of justice. It is done not punitively, but to encourage, and to ensure that justice functions effectively in everyone’s interests. In this case, it works by giving newspapers the option of signing up to an independent regulator that offers compulsory arbitration, or meeting the court costs of reasonable claims made against them. This ensures that members of the public affected by press illegality can either bring a claim under low-cost arbitration or have costs protection in court. Arbitration is cheaper and quicker for both sides.

Newspapers also benefit from cost shifting, because they enjoy costs protection if they are in an independent regulator offering arbitration and a claimant rejects the arbitration service on offer. That is the key point. This is not there to punish newspapers but to protect impecunious claimants. It will also protect small, genuinely independent newspapers and small publishers. One hears that the whole local newspaper industry is against it, but 80% of that industry is owned by the big conglomerates, which have exactly the same interests—financial—as the major national newspaper chains.

The purpose of cost shifting is to enable an individual who—in the way suffered by the Dowler family, Christopher Jefferies and those in the other cases that we are all aware of—has been horrifically maligned and harassed by newspapers to go to court, to get justice, and, in this case, to go to arbitration without the risk of losing their house and savings, or of simply being unable to get into court at all.

That risk was partly resolved—not deliberately; it came about through the way in which the law developed —by no win, no fee agreements, which meant that somebody who had been defamed or had their privacy threatened in this way could go to a lawyer and ask them to take their case. The lawyer would say, “Let’s see if it’s a good case or not,” and if it was a good case, they would agree to take it on a no win, no fee basis. That protected the litigant both from their own costs and from the costs of the other side if they lost. It was no longer the case that if someone took the Daily Mail or The Sun to court, they risked everything because the newspaper group had been able to build up costs on the other side to discourage, in effect, even the most meritorious litigation.

With the passing of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, that option went, and it is far, far more difficult to get any type of no win, no fee assistance, so we are not at that status quo; we have moved several steps backwards, and if section 40 and the amendments tabled in the other place are not passed, litigants will once again be at risk in this way. Low-cost arbitration and the need to incentivise media groups to join that service—not, as the IPSO scheme would, allowing them to pick and choose—is essential to that. It is a low-cost way of doing it, but it works just as much for the press as for the individual litigant.

Apart from the fact that a promise was made to the victims of press abuse, and the fact that this provides cost protection to newspapers and ensures that small and local newspaper groups are protected from powerful and wealthy litigants, cost shifting encourages the use of arbitration, which is quicker and cheaper for all sides and is increasingly a feature of all parts of our legal system. This poses no threat to the local press.

The alternative is IPSO. I was incredulous to hear IPSO described as a move on from the Press Complaints Commission. It is the same people running the same racket, with the same failure to address the issue. The hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin)—I do not often find myself on the same side of the argument as him—got it exactly right. This is a sham, and if we support it, we are going along with the sham.

This is not about punishing and silencing the press, as though they are the weak vessel—it is about protecting the people to whom all parties and almost every Member who was in this House at the time made a promise: the victims of egregious press harassment who suffered terrible campaigns against them. We forget that at our peril. The Government have simply waited until they think that time has moved on and the heat has gone out of this. Well, I hope that the heat has not gone out of it. I hope that the public and sufficient numbers of Members on both sides of the House will remember the duty that we owe to those victims. These are modest amendments from the other place. The idea that this is in any way tying the hands of the press is pure hyperbole. We need to incorporate the amendments, and we need to fulfil Leveson 2, because otherwise we are failing terribly the victims of press harassment.

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[Mr Speaker]

No, but the hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. The fact that he has done so has given me an opportunity to clarify the matter for the benefit of the House.

[Andy Slaughter]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. If the Minister has concluded, or was at the point of concluding, her remarks, may I seek your guidance? We have had an excellent and very full debate on this matter. I was here for the opening speeches and decided to stay and speak in the debate. I noted that the Secretary of State said that this is a Bill with 208 clauses. We have had a full debate, but the Minister, in a matter of two or three minutes, has not in any conceivable way replied to it, despite having time available to do so. What can be done to ensure not only that this House has a full debate, but that matters are responded to by the Government, as they are duty bound to do?

[Mr Speaker]

It is very much for a Minister to decide for how long he, or in this case she, responds to a debate. I understand that the hon. Gentleman is somewhat agitated. I am saddened to see him in a state of perturbation about the matter, but there is no immediate relief, other than the fact that he has registered his concern and it is on the record. There is, however, nothing to be added by me in response to his point of order.