Public Confidence in the Media and Police

David Winnick Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I think the terms of reference are pretty clear. The point about cross-media ownership is not about conduct; it is about not just market power, but power of voice. What you are trying to do with cross-media ownership is, if one organisation has a very powerful television station, a number of newspapers, and perhaps some radio stations and some internet sites, how do you agglomerate that and try to measure its power? I can bore for Britain on this subject because I used to work for ITV, in competition with BSkyB and the BBC. It is a very difficult thing to do, but that does not mean we should not try. On the terms of reference, that is what the cross-media ownership part is about, but clearly it is looking at media regulation more broadly, specifically of the printed press, but it can go further.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister give way?

[Ms Buck]

Will the Prime Minister give way?

[The Prime Minister]

I am going to make some progress, and then I will give way a couple more times before I close.

So, Mr Speaker, the question is, given the difficulties I have mentioned, how do we maximise the chance of making a clean break with the past. I want to set out some very clear lessons. First, we have got to try to proceed on a cross-party basis; otherwise, we will have each party trooping off to media organisations and promising the lowest common denominator. If I say “independent regulation”, there is a danger someone else will say “self-regulation”, and so on. We could end up constantly competing with each other in a kind of regulatory arbitrage over who can be the softest and most appealing to newspapers, television stations and their owners. I do not think we should pretend this is simply about tabloids or even simply about newspapers. I am a huge supporter of the BBC and the licence fee, but, frankly, I think there did come a time in recent years when the income of the BBC was so outstripping that of independent television that there was a danger of BBC News becoming rather dominant. So, there are dangers right across the piece here.

The offer to work together with all parties on this agenda is indeed a genuine one.

[Mr Winnick]

However critical I may be of the press, and however biased in many ways, I am totally opposed to any form of gagging, and that, I am sure, is the view of most of my right hon. and hon. Friends. However, does the Prime Minister accept that self-regulation has been totally inadequate from day one? It has been a total farce, so if we are to have self-regulation, which I hope will continue, it must be far more effective than it has been.

[The Prime Minister]

I do agree with the hon. Gentleman that the current system of self-regulation has failed, not least because it did not properly respond to all these warnings. That is why I choose to talk about independent regulation. I do not want to see statutory regulation—the heavy hand of the state. We have got to try to find a way to make sure that the press are regulated in a way that is independent from them, but not by the state and the Government. I think it is doable.