Press Regulation (Communications Committee Report)

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by saying how welcome the report was when it was first published by the Select Committee chaired by my noble friend Lord Best in 2014. It described a distressing lack of progress by the industry with respect to the Leveson reforms. I remind noble Lords that I gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry.

In the time since, we have had one general election, one national referendum, a change of Government and no progress on regulation of the press. Indeed, the press remains the only industry in the country without proper regulation, and it shows. Editors know that they can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time—a combination that allows some of our papers to go to print every night. Words really matter. There are too many words written without enough care and with no comeback. In a regulated world, journalists would keep their words spicy and strong, but given they might have to eat them later they would not make them toxic to the host. At the moment some editors seem to encourage journalists to write anything as long as it is sensational, but there is no comeback.

So what kind of regulator is IPSO? According to Hacked Off, which I asked for a briefing, IPSO has so far failed to carry out a single regulatory action in the two years of its existence—no £1 million fines; no fines at all. In fact, there has not been a single standards investigation. I suggest that IPSO is no more a regulator than the PCC, and, from what I have heard, may be even more biased in its complaints handling. On not a single occasion, I am told, have any of the front page code breaches committed by newspapers been ordered by IPSO to be corrected with equal prominence, or even on the front page at all. We still live, two years on, in the pre-Leveson era of buried corrections and a feeling of impunity for newspapers, which are content to breach their own code, knowing there is little or no consequence.

IPSO claims its independence should be accepted on its own assertion. It refuses to apply for the test of recognition for independence and effectiveness. I might have “Lady Hollins” embroidered on an England football kit, but wearing it would not make me an international footballer. The truth is, neither of us would make the cut. In these two years the press has been able to smear, intrude and discriminate with impunity. It has been a lost two years in press regulation.

It has now been more than 10 years since my family suffered appalling intrusion, but now let us think of all those attacked, harassed and victimised by some of the press over just the last two years: survivors of terrorist atrocities like the Bataclan, who have been intruded upon; partners and loved ones of those who lost their lives in the Shoreham air disaster, whose personal information was stolen; the woman who lost her husband and children in Northern Ireland, and found that a national newspaper reporter, posing as a well-wisher at their funeral, published comments made at the funeral as if an exclusive interview. In all these cases over the last two years, and many more, national newspapers have acted against those they claim to defend.

These are just a few of the people let down by newspaper editors and executives, even since the Leveson report was published, and the Government and Parliament accepted his recommendations and passed a law to implement them—executives who, instead of speaking truth to power and defending the voiceless, have sought the complicity of the Government in maintaining their stranglehold on their own internal mechanisms of so-called regulation, allowing them to get away with promulgating rumour and gossip. Indeed, their opposition to part 2 of the Leveson inquiry must be the first time in the history of journalism that large numbers of newspapers are desperately lobbying for information not to come out. Where is the appetite for investigative journalism? I for one dislike descriptions of our society as post truth. Having been brought up in Yorkshire, I call a spade a spade. Now I call lies, misrepresentations and spin what they are—lies.

Paragraphs 135 to 146 of my noble friend’s report deal with Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act. The report anticipated the commencement of Section 40 and focused on what steps the Government should take if the Section 40 incentive proved ineffective after it was introduced. As noble Lords will know, those provisions were enacted by Parliament but not commenced by the Government. Instead, after meetings with national newspaper owners and executives, the Government intervened to suspend their commencement. That in itself was a violation of the freedom and independence of the press by the Government—something all sides in this debate claim to oppose but which, on this occasion, was welcomed by press editors and owners. It is notable that working journalists in the National Union of Journalists and victims protested.

The situation today is worse than no change. Back-tracking by the Government has in fact moved the situation backwards. The Government have been defeated three times on Section 40 in the last three months in your Lordships’ House and they have been defeated once on their reluctance to start part 2 of Leveson. None of us who was personally affected by these issues expected to be debating this five years after the terms of Leveson 2 were agreed, four years after Leveson 1’s recommendations were published, and more than three years since the cross-party agreement was signed and Section 40 enacted. Few of us will want to continue proposing legislation defeating the Government on Bill after Bill to keep the Leveson recommendations on the agenda, but as long as the Government persist in capitulating to press interests, frustrating the Leveson recommendations and the settled will of the House, it feels as if there is no choice but to take forward these matters in just this way.

The Government have announced a consultation that creates many problems. I am sure other noble Lords will speak to it in more detail. My family and others did not give evidence at Leveson, reliving the trauma and intrusion we suffered—I stress that—so that the Government could require us to do it all over again. This time, instead of an independent judge listening to the evidence in public, a somewhat conflicted Minister will receive the so-called evidence in private. Noble Lords will be unsurprised that I have little confidence in that.

Our evidence remains on record; Leveson’s reasoning and consequent recommendations remain on record; and the circumstances remain unchanged, except for an apparent lack of government resolve to deal with this once and for all. Compromise, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is not something that the victims of an all-powerful press industry should be expected to initiate.

I began this speech by saying that this committee report was welcome in 2014. The inaction, indeed the reversals, since then have made it even more relevant and urgent today. The Government said in their response that they would,

“observe with interest as the sector takes forward … important steps to ensure a responsible and accountable press”.

Does the Minister agree with my observations about the continuing failures in the sector to move towards a “responsible and accountable press”?

I hope the Minister will stick to his party’s manifesto and recommit in his response to Section 40, to Leveson part 2, or to considering further action if this impasse persists, and I do not mean just waiting for the consultation. I look forward to his response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I should perhaps start by noting that I was one of the committee of five which appointed IPSO and its chair, Sir Alan Moses, an old friend and colleague, and someone in whom I had and have full confidence. He is someone of robust independence and absolute integrity, and no respecter of persons.

In response to the title of this debate, so brilliantly introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Best, it would be my basic contention that we are now in a reasonably good place—certainly one that would be worsened rather than bettered by bringing Section 40 into force. This debate, fortuitously perhaps through its long delay, clearly feeds neatly into the ongoing consultation process on Section 40 and Leveson 2. I hold no particular brief for the press, least of all the Daily Mail. How could I when it published an outrageous piece so recently on judges—“Enemies of the people”, if you please? But I gently point out to the House that even in the fanciful event of the Mail signing up to Impress, there would be no sanction for headlines of that sort. The brief I hold is not for the press, but it is strongly for freedom of expression, subject only and always to the laws of the land, civil and criminal.

Section 40 was of course passed in the wake of the hacking scandal, the revelations of which shocked the nation.

In the febrile atmosphere that followed Leveson, the political parties reached agreement on a detailed future regime for press regulation, Section 40 being, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, described, designed as carrot and stick to cajole—one could say, to bribe and bully—the press into signing up to an ultimately state-approved regulator, something not easily seen as self-regulation.

Hacked Off, whose members include some, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, for whom I have the most profound respect—

[Baroness Hollins]

Excuse me. I am not a member of Hacked Off. Hacked Off does not really have members. It has advised and briefed me, and it represents victims, but I am not a member of Hacked Off.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood]

Forgive me, that is my mistake and I stand corrected, but I hope that the noble Baroness will allow me to say that she is, so to speak, entirely sympathetic to its approach. One understands that; she has an understandable grievance against the press for its appalling treatment of her. Hacked Off was involved in the agreement. I do not know whether the press was that closely involved but, in all events, although there are those who say that an agreement is an agreement and that it must now be fully honoured by activating Section 40, I respectfully disagree. I give just four brief reasons why.

First: can anyone doubt that life for newsprint publishers is becoming ever harder? There are ever fewer readers and, perhaps, more importantly, ever fewer advertisers, as online competition becomes ever more successful. Of course, Leveson regulation does not extend in the same way to online material. Secondly, not only have the courts shown themselves well able to deal with hacking and other criminal behaviour, with regard to the civil law, the right to privacy is becoming increasingly entrenched. Prior to the Human Rights Act, there was no right to privacy under English law, but now, one has only to consider Max Mosley’s case, in which he was awarded £60,000 damages against the press for an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, as the court held—your Lordships will need no reminding of the particular circumstances of the case—to see how far privacy law has come. That said, it is perhaps something of an irony that it is now Max Mosley’s money that is behind Impress, with its guarantee of four years of cheap arbitration.

Thirdly, when Section 40 was enacted, the PCC was still the only regulator in town. It was regarded by many as toothless and ineffectual. I suggest that IPSO is an altogether more effective, powerful body. It is now well established, widely respected and already trialling its own arbitration scheme. Its editorial code is wholly unexceptionable and, for good measure, following Sir Joseph Pilling’s report, to which the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, referred—quite unjustifiably rubbished as a whitewash—Mr Dacre has now retired from the code committee. As Peter Preston, a most respected ex-editor of the Guardian recently wrote in the Observer:

“Ipso, if you look hard at the detail, has made a pretty good stab at improving voluntary regulation. Set the Ipso and Impress editorial codes side by side and no one can see much difference. Apply those codes to current cases and there’s no obvious gap either. The problem for Ipso isn’t performance but perception”.

Fourthly, the FT and the Guardian are of course entirely self-regulating, declining to sign up even to IPSO. The great majority of newspapers, however, have signed up to IPSO, but they have made it crystal clear that under no circumstances will they agree to regulation by a recognised body. They are, as Sir Alan Moses first put it, “theologically opposed”. They see it, and it is widely seen by many abroad, as a form of state control. The Section 40 carrot has plainly failed to seduce the press into the Impress scheme. Do we therefore now want to watch as the stick is applied? Judges already have very considerable discretion with regard to costs orders. Are we really intent on punishing newspapers which, as a matter of principle, are simply not prepared to be regulated by Impress? Do we want war?

This being Christmas week, I hope your Lordships will indulge me if I finish my speech with a brief reminiscence about one of my own old cases. I promise that it is of some slight relevance. Over a quarter of a century ago, I presided in a jury trial at the Royal Courts of Justice over what was then a very high-profile libel case involving the late Robert Maxwell who was suing Private Eye. Mr Maxwell was complaining of a piece in the Eye which he said insinuated that he— Maxwell—had been trying to bribe Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party, with free holidays and the like, into recommending him for a peerage. The thrust of his complaint was that he was falsely being alleged to be corruptly attempting to get a peerage. Well, the case was opened at great length, as all these cases always are, and the witnesses started going through the witness box, and the case proceeded. On the fourth day, when I came back from lunch in the Inn of Court, Middle Temple, I found a note from the jury which read simply, “Please sir, can you tell us what a peerage is?”.

There it was. We were four days into the case and I solemnly had then to explain the nature of a peerage and what was the underlying complaint. The next day I went back to lunch and could not resist telling my fellow benchers of the remarkable thing that not a single one of the jury of 12 knew what a peerage was, to which one rather dry old judge said, “That doesn’t necessarily follow. One of them might have known and explained it to the others and been flatly disbelieved”. It is fair to say that this was before the great reforms of 1999. It did not do much to improve my faith in juries.

I should note that Mr Maxwell, before his roguery was uncovered, won that case. The jury gave him £55,000 damages, of which £50,000 were exemplary damages; he promised to give the money to a charity but never did. I wonder what your Lordships think of Private Eye. I need hardly say that it has not signed up to regulation of any sort and never will. Do your Lordships want to mulct it in costs as well as in exemplary damages so as to eventually drive it out of business? For my part, I hope not. My plea therefore is: let things be; let well alone.