Media Bill

Debate between George Eustice and Peter Bottomley

Report stage
Tuesday 30th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point, but I am seeking to reach a compromise. His argument is for keeping section 40 in its entirety, so that those who do not have financial means and who face a publisher who refuses to act within any kind of reputable regulator would have some redress in the courts. Of course, in section 40 there was only a weighted presumption in favour of a particular approach to costs. It was never a hard and fast rule.

My right hon. Friend makes a strong case, but I am seeking to form a compromise with the House and with those on the Government Front Bench, and if it is their intention to do what the press want, they can accept my amendment and still look the press in the eye and say, “We gave you everything you wanted, which is the removal of the stick.” Maybe they hope they will get some positive coverage as a result of doing this favour; I suspect they will end up being disappointed by that between now and the general election. Nevertheless, I am trying to make a compromise with them. I hope that the Government will look seriously at this.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend help the House by saying whether he has had any communication with The Guardian or Private Eye on this proposal?

[George Eustice]

I had multiple conversations with lots of publishers when the original Leveson architecture was put together, particularly around the royal charter. I know that Private Eye has always objected to joining anything at all, and it would be completely unaffected by the proposal. It is not a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, and it was never a member of the Press Complaints Commission. It has always remained entirely aloof, and there is nothing in the proposal that affects its position. Nor would anything in the proposal affect, say, The Spectator, which also has a view that it would not join a recognised regulator.

As I said, small publishers that want to do genuine investigative journalism and that do not have people with deep pockets standing behind them could benefit from the proposal by signing up to a recognised regulator. Many of them are already members of Impress, which is the recognised regulator at the moment, but others may form different regulators or encourage IPSO to join and seek recognition, so that they can benefit from that cost protection.

Sewage Pollution

Debate between George Eustice and Peter Bottomley

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

We now come to the Father of the House, Sir Peter Bottomley.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

Those of us who have been around for a long time do not believe that nationalised industries would allow the necessary level of investment to be continued. Can I ask the Secretary of State whether the companies, the regulator and the Environment Agency knew the scale of the discharges?

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend raises an important issue, and it was only when this Government required increased monitoring that we discovered the scale of the problem. The reality is that this has been a problem for some time, but successive Governments down the decades have not had the right monitoring in place to recognise it. As soon as we recognised this, the Environment Agency started to bring record numbers of prosecutions against companies that appear to have been breaching their permit requirements. We are not sure whether that was an error that those companies were making, and that they did not realise they were making some of those discharges, or whether it was deliberate. There is a moot point about why the Environment Agency did not detect this earlier, and that is now the subject of an investigation by the Office for Environmental Protection, which was set up under our Environment Act 2021.