Media Ownership (Radio and Cross-media) Order 2011

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prescott]

My Lords, I cannot declare any interest in the radio, media or press. What a pity that they did not have less interest in me over the last 40 years. But I want to refer to the debate about the public interest. I read the Hansard report on the discussion in the Delegated Legislation Committee that dealt with this matter, and I want to address my remarks to those made by the Minister. I shall quote some of them. He said in introducing the order that,

“a vibrant media sector is an essential part of a healthy society”.

I agree with that. He went on to say that the,

“principles of plurality and diversity have long underpinned the legislative and regulatory regimes that govern our media industry, and they remain relevant today”.—[Official Report, Commons, Third Delegated Legislation Committee, 22/3/11; col. 3.]

The noble Baroness quoted those words today, and said when repeating the Statement regarding BSkyB that these principles would govern how they would make a judgment on whether to hand over or sell BSkyB to the Murdoch press. In reality and in my view, to achieve a vibrant media in a healthy society, plurality and diversity are not enough. There is the definition of public interest, and there is the issue of competition, which has been dealt with and referred to. The Minister claims that all these are just as relevant today.

I think not. It is not sufficient just to have those principles. Today we are witnessing criminal activity on a massive scale by our press. It involves thousands of our people, subject to criminal acts of phone hacking conducted by the press. It is a matter of major concern to us. It is worrying enough that our press feel that that they can conduct these criminal acts, and pay for information to sell papers. It is precisely what they have been doing. Indeed, they have admitted it today in the apology made by News International. It has said that it should not have asked for this information, it should not have paid for it, and it should not have printed it. That apology was made in regard to Sienna Miller. It is an apology by one of the major papers in this country, explaining what News International was doing at that time.

But it is not only that, although it is bad enough in itself. We need to condemn it, and many inquiries are under way. What worries me is that it has polluted a number of our own institutions in this country in the process, and it is all connected to the hacking of phones. The first, of course, is the Metropolitan Police, which in the initial stages refused to accept the case, even though it had evidence to show that this had been going on. It was said constantly, for years, that it was a rogue reporter. We now know that to be untrue. Even the media themselves said that it was not true, saying that it was a rogue paper or a rogue reporter, and concentrated on the News of the World. But it was not true. Information was withheld by the Metropolitan Police from the proper authorities in that matter, and now another inquiry is under way. One inquiry having told me personally that my phone messages had not been tapped—that there was no evidence for it—the next inquiry comes along and tells me that it happened on 44 occasions. You cannot trust the police if they are in fact deliberately giving misleading information. But another inquiry is on the way, and I welcome that.

What then worries me is the role of the Crown Prosecution Service, which has actually played a part in this by agreeing with the Metropolitan Police, although knowing that the information was there and withholding it. Even today, there is more information, and the Crown Prosecution Service has not carried out its proper job. Not only is it bad enough that this concerns our main police force, the Metropolitan Police, but the Crown Prosecution Service has also actively been involved in the same process and is now reopening its inquiry.

The courts have been polluted by this process. Indeed, I did not believe the police in my own case and I wanted to go to judicial review. The first judicial review was refused. Why was that? It was because the police did not give up all the information that they had. It took another judge and another inquiry to overrule that first refusal and grant the review. What is worrying is that our police authorities can fail to give up information after all the offences that have gone on and allow a court to be kidded into thinking it was making a judgment. But not all the information was available. It took another judge to change that. In the circumstances, those are very serious charges.

We might talk about the Press Complaints Commission, a body that is there to hold the press to account of some kind. That is the job Parliament decided to give the commission, but it did not give it any powers to do it. Editors are allowed to appoint their own people. The chair of the commission, the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, is a Member of this House. Even the Press Complaints Commission failed to investigate anything to do with phone hacking, something which I believe it has the authority to do. Indeed, it is even worse than that because the chair was fined for libel and damages of £20,000 for being misleading, in libellous statements, about the inquiry that was going on into phone hacking.

That is the body that should have something to report. The police are meant to investigate. The Crown Prosecution Service is not doing its job properly. We are right to say that something is rotten in the state of England at present—that it is not an acceptable proposition. If you talk about a healthy democracy and a healthy media, you had better start doing something about the people who control it because they are in contempt. News International publishes the News of the World, whose owner is—can I say it?—Rupert Murdoch. Nobody wants to use his name; that is the scale of power in the way it is distributed at the moment. When he made that apology, Rupert Murdoch made it for the company. It is no longer just the News of the World; it is the company itself. He is making an apology for the criminal acts that his company was carrying out. This is the very man, when we talk about media ownership, to whom we propose possibly to pass over BSkyB. All the noble Baroness would say when we questioned her about it was: “plurality and diversity”. Well, that is not enough. It does not put any fear into Mr Murdoch. He knows how to use and control that power. We should now be saying that.

For example, when we talk about the fair distribution of information, we are now all agreed that News International was involved in criminal acts. Just look at the papers. You get pages about it in the Independent and the Guardian—the one justification for our good media system is these two papers, which have exposed it years later. But if you look for the apology, where is it in the “Thunderer”, the Times? I invite you to look for it. It is 11 lines stuck on a quarter of a page. Eleven lines about one of the most hideous criminal offences, carried out by the company, and it cannot even acknowledge it.

There is something wrong in the judgment of people who have a large share of our media. If we want healthier media, people should be able to trust them. I therefore put it to the House that the present situation is unacceptable. A healthy democracy does not mean simply diversity and plurality; we now have to do something more about it. We need an independent public inquiry; we need to know what the facts are. If anyone is in doubt about that, they should look at the settlement with Sienna Miller. It said, “We settle; we did wrong; we should not have printed it; we should not have paid for it”. But how did they do it? The settlement means that she will be told in private how the company did it. There is no open court situation exposing it. We listen to all the hypocrisy from the press about super-injunctions. They tell us that we should have open courts and should be given the information, but when it comes to a criminal act, they do not want an open court; they settle with money; they settle with power; and they settle with an agreement not to tell the public how they did it. That is unacceptable; that is not the force and influence that create a democratic society.

We know that there is a delay in the takeover of BSkyB; I hope that that is a good sign that we are not going to give it to News International. I do not know whether the Minister can tell us any more about what is going on with the inquiry, but I ask her to pass on the message that this Government must now consider an independent public inquiry for the health of our own democracy and the media. That is what we should be debating, because that is the issue that the public are concerned about. Let us have that open public inquiry so that we can get to the bottom of this matter and prevent it happening again.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, as one of those who had the pleasure of serving under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on the Communications Select Committee and contributing to the report that we have had referred to, I add my welcome to the order. It is a dramatically important step forward. Certainly, at a few meetings that I have attended recently, it has been indicated that new plans are in hand to provide back-up for companies in facilitating more independent, local programmes in both radio and television. That is all to the good.

I should like to take up one point about the public interest. Controls exist in the form of Ofcom and the Competition Commission intervening as and when necessary. Although I quite accept that the previous speaker does not think that that goes far enough, it will be of some reassurance to us. The question has been asked as to what the public interest is. Is it really to ensure standards and quality in what is put over? Are we to be certain, for example, that a few eyes will be kept on some of the extremely bad taste which has crept into a great deal of broadcasting, both before and after the watershed? Then if we look at what has happened with children’s broadcasting, we see that the BBC has rather dropped out of it in a number of areas, particularly in radio. Organisations such as Sound Start will be particularly pleased, I am sure, if we have rather more children’s content coming in. Children should be able to draw their own imaginative pictures of what they are listening to, something of which my generation and most of your Lordships’ generation certainly had plenty of experience. Nowadays, there seems to be rather less of it for the young child growing up. With those questions, I should like to be reassured by the Minister that a high standard will be set for “public interest” in the output that we are going to expect.