Royal Charter on Press Conduct

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

It is difficult to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s question, because of course it depends on the timing of the police investigations. What I am clear about is that the police must have the proper resources to carry out their work, which they do. On that basis, the second part of Lord Leveson’s investigation should indeed go ahead.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

rose—

[The Prime Minister]

I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman who has a number of amendments in his name on the Order Paper, but let me briefly address the concern raised on whether the “no change” clause in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill could be used for a more aggressive approach to regulation of the press.

In my view, because the clause does not mention press regulation, or even this specific royal charter, it is no more in danger of being used in this way than any other piece of legislation on our statute book. That is an important point to make. It merely ensures that for generations to come Ministers cannot interfere with this new system without explicit and extensive support from both Houses. That is an important step forward.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I am grateful to the Prime Minister for giving way, and I commend him for his statement. Will he explain to the House exactly what it is that has changed between Thursday, when he pulled the plug on the all-party talks and described the gaps as “unbridgeable”, and today?

[The Prime Minister]

What has changed is that the party for which the right hon. Gentleman used to speak from the Front Bench on these issues has come forward with a royal charter proposal which, with some changes, could be made acceptable. My concern was that last week the talks were drifting on and on and on, more and more issues were being asked for, and less and less was being dealt with. The move I made on Thursday has, I believe, unblocked the logjam, which is why we are here today.

Let me explain another way in which the logjam was unblocked. We have agreed that all Leveson-related clauses in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill will be opposed by all three main parties unless they are withdrawn. They include the clauses in the name of the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw). His clauses on the Order Paper have to be withdrawn, because they are unacceptable clauses of legislative press regulation. If they are not withdrawn, the agreement between all parties is that they should be voted against. The Defamation Bill will proceed. Its clauses relating to the Leveson report will be reversed by all three parties voting together, so it can now go through the House. All the other Leveson-related clauses in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill will be opposed by all three main parties unless they are withdrawn. As I have said, all parties have agreed that statutory underpinning clauses must be opposed in both Houses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

For me, this day marks the end of a journey that began 21 years ago when I became Chairman of what was then the National Heritage Committee. Our very first inquiry was into privacy and media intrusion. At that time, we were particularly concerned not so much about what the press does to public figures—although sometimes what it does to public figures can be cruel and unjustified, but we are in the game and we know what we face—but about what the press does to private individuals who have never had any experience of a journalist knocking at their door or coming through their garden gate, and who suddenly, through no fault or initiative of their own, find themselves hounded and harassed by the press. We referred in that inquiry in particular to families of murder victims. We referred to families of soldiers who had been killed in action. They could neither control what had happened to their families nor in any way respond or cope with journalists looking for a story.

We made a recommendation that the remedy should be a privacy Act with a public interest defence. We were looking at parallels with the United States constitution, which defended the freedom of the press while at the same time defending the freedom of individuals. It is very sad that although the remedy that we proposed might not necessarily have been the most effective or the most appropriate, nothing was done. Nothing was done by the Government who were then in power; nothing was done by the Labour Government who succeeded it. We are having this debate today only because of the exposure of the scandal of phone hacking, particularly concerning the Dowler family, but also relating to a considerable number of victims of intrusion into privacy.

I congratulate all involved in arriving at the solution that has been put before the House today. When the Prime Minister made his initial announcement, I made clear, as I did in the subsequent debate, my opposition to statutory regulation of the press. I was a working journalist for nine years on Fleet street, and I was proud of the privilege of working in communications, establishing facts and investigating wrongdoing. Whatever we might think of some of the worst excesses of the press, a free press is indispensable to a free democracy. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if the choice were between a corrupt and irresponsible press or a state-regulated press, I would—obviously with great reluctance and while biting my tongue—opt for the irresponsibility and corruption. I want a free press in this country, and I want it to be able to do what it does without fear or favour. Today we are getting the possibility that that can be achieved while protecting decent, innocent people from intrusion.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the leader of the Labour party. Other leaders of the party could have worked on this but did not, however much I admired them and however much they were my friends. I congratulate the Prime Minister, because his agreeing with my right hon. Friend to have a royal charter—I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman who thought that up, because it was very clever indeed—made what is happening today possible. I congratulate the Deputy Prime Minister, too, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the deputy leader of my party, on her hard and detailed work.

What we have today is the possibility of proper regulation. All my experience of the Press Complaints Commission, both personally and as Chair of what became the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, showed me that it was a total waste of time. It was a façade behind which the most irresponsible parts of the press did whatever they wanted. Over the years, and even after publication of the Leveson report, they still dragged their feet and had many more drinks over the eight in the last chance saloon. Well, the last chance saloon is putting up its “Closed” sign today, which is a very important achievement.

Although no newspaper is faultless, I think that it is appropriate to pay tribute to the journalists on The Guardian, who worked very hard on this and were not stymied or deterred. That is important, because they demonstrated that in the middle of all the scandal and uproar, journalists could still do the job of a journalist.

[Mr Bradshaw]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that as well as The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Independent and the Mirror Group deserve credit for having last week agreed with the Labour and Liberal Democrat versions of the charter?

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I do agree. Of course, I am always ready to pay tribute to the Mirror Group in view of the fact that it paid my wages for nine years and I wrote leading articles for it.

We now have a chance—the equivalent of a public interest defence. With luck, but with far more than just luck—with an enormous amount of detailed consultation and work—we have got to this position today. When I spoke in the debate on the previous occasion, I said that when I was a working journalist I was proud to be a working journalist. The House of Commons, working as a British Parliament should—it does not all that often do so—has now made it possible to restore the pride in being a journalist, and that is a great achievement for all of us.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

I start by acknowledging that the discussions and negotiations on this matter have been incredibly difficult and contentious for those of us who have been close to them. It would be fair to say that no love has been lost between the editors on the one hand and the Hacked Off campaign group on the other. It is also no secret that immediately after the Leveson report was published, I found myself in the slightly unusual situation of being closer to the position of the Opposition Front-Bench team than to that of my own Front-Bench team.

[Mr Bradshaw]

At the risk of doing dreadful damage to the hon. Gentleman’s career, may I congratulate him on his courage and attention to detail on this issue? To be perfectly honest, without the work that he and other Government Members did, we would not have produced an agreement today that was compliant with Leveson.

[George Eustice]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for doing that damage. Before I move on, it is important to note that all party leaders have behaved very responsibly in this matter and I would like to give credit to the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), for the way in which she has approached it; she genuinely tried to seek agreement in a very difficult situation. I find myself in the unusual, almost unique, position of agreeing even with the Liberal Democrats. I speak as someone who campaigned against the euro and dislodged a Lib Dem MP to get elected here. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] I campaigned against the alternative vote and then voted against Lords reform to boot. On this issue, however, I have been able to work with the Liberal Democrats.

Most of all, I want to thank and congratulate the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and, indeed, the Minister for Government Policy, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr Letwin), because it is good to be re-united with my own party on this issue. The Prime Minister told me back in November not to worry, as he had a plan to deliver Leveson, and I think that what is before the House today does deliver the Leveson proposals—perhaps even in a slightly better way than in Leveson’s own plan, as I shall explain in a few moments.

As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) pointed out, the important thing to understand about the Leveson report is that it explicitly said that statutory regulation of the press was not being recommended. Rather, Leveson was recommending a system that was about self-organised, voluntary regulation, to which news publications would be encouraged to subscribe voluntarily. He recommended statute to do two quite simple things. One was to establish the right incentives to join such a body, and that is the protection afforded through exemplary fines and costs; I am delighted that those will be debated later today. The second was simply to establish an independent public body that would judge a regulator—not every week, every month or every year, but every two to three years—on whether it was working effectively and meeting a certain set of criteria.

This may appear a rather ancient device to achieve what we want, but it is undoubtedly the case that a body established by royal charter is an independent public body that can perform the task equally well. There is one important advantage of establishing the body in this way, and that is that the press are more comfortable with it. Before people say, “Well, we should not be doing what the press want,” it is important to realise that in Lord Justice Leveson’s own plan he said that this would be a voluntary system. If we want publications to join something voluntarily and to seek recognition under a system, there will be a benefit in their being comfortable with it—provided, of course, that we get the detail right.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) picked up on some detailed points that I would like to touch on. He said that all the crimes committed related to defamation and breaches of privacy, so that the measures before us will do nothing to address those problems. That is not right, because what we have before us establishes an arbitral arm, which is a new thing, and it will provide affordable or even free adjudication on issues where there is a cause of action that previously only millionaires or celebrities could afford to take up through the courts.

My right hon. Friend also seemed to suggest that it was a bad thing for newspapers to make corrections and put right errors, but in all the difficult negotiations we have had the press did not raise this as a problem; indeed, it is what the PCC already does. There is nothing new about this. The criteria in the charter explicitly say that pre-publication advice is simply that—just advice, with no obligation on anyone to take it. A regulator will not have the explicit power to prevent anyone from publishing anything.

The £1 million fines are reserved for very serious and systematic breaches of the code, after prolonged investigations have taken place. I personally believe that we will not see many people being fined £1 million. Whenever I hear people mention them, I am reminded of the Austin Powers film in which Dr Evil says that he is going to hold the world to ransom for $1 million. What we have is a backstop power if there are really serious breaches, but what we are likely to see—this is a good thing—are more prominent apologies, corrections or perhaps lead page corrections for serious breaches.