The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Fleet Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fleet (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, and I congratulate him on the work that he does at IPSO, which is much appreciated by newspapers. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Stowell on the excellent The Future of News report and her speech today. I declare my interests as set out in the register.

I am proud to have been a journalist in Fleet Street—indeed, I took “Fleet” as my title—and now in this place am honoured to speak up for my trade. It is a trade. My contribution to this debate is not an appeal for the nostalgic days of Fleet Street’s power and influence, which older Members will recall. Instead, I am raising the alarm about the threat to freedom of the press: the threat from lawyers, who are blocking promised legislation to protect this freedom.

Newspapers and the general media are the principal source of information to hold to account the Government, industry, the City and the powerful in general. Without a vibrant newspaper industry, there is no democracy. Everyone in this House will pay lip service to freedom of the press. I know they mean well, but it seems remarkably difficult to hold this Government to account when it comes to implementing protections vital for the freedom of the press.

I go further: it is Members of this House, the noble and learned Lords who sit in the Supreme Court and the lawyers and activist judges in the lower courts, who have consistently failed—with a few exceptions—to protect the freedom of the press, by allowing unscrupulous lawyers to use so-called SLAPPs, already referred to today, to defeat the exposure of their clients’ alleged crimes.

We are faced with a Government who, in opposition, supported legislation to remove the scourge of SLAPPs. They have reneged on that promise. Proposed changes to civil behaviour are simply not good enough. It is remarkable that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, the Attorney-General, prides himself as a champion of human rights but apparently resists being a champion of journalists’ rights. Many journalists ask themselves why the Attorney-General took the brief to assert the rights of Gerry Adams to claim compensation, but throughout his career was never seen in court fighting for a free press. Human rights depend on a free press.

The same lawyers obsessed with protecting the rights of, say, Albanian rapists threatened with deportation, are not prepared to protect the freedom of the press. Lawyers have been all too willing to pocket the roubles of billionaire oligarchs often linked to organised crime. Exactly what is happening to the rule of law in this country, when the Government are so passionate about advocating human rights and the rule of Strasbourg but ignore in our domestic courts the rights of journalists and newspapers?

At their best, newspapers hold the powerful to account. When I was editor of the Evening Standard, we exposed corruption in Ken Livingstone’s City Hall. Ken was enraged that anyone should challenge him. He went on television to call for me to be fired. We published; we were damned, but we won that battle. I doubt that newspapers could afford to take that risk today.

Outstanding investigations resonate for years; the wrongdoers are held to account, policy is influenced and politicians—when brave—change laws to protect the innocent. Fighting off complaints has become so financially onerous for newspapers that they prefer not to challenge wrongdoers. Courts have been repeatedly told to make it easier and cheaper for litigants to bring cases, but courts and the legal profession have resisted. Newspapers play a vital role in our democracy and must have the freedom to do so. I look forward to the Minister’s response.