Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Byrne

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman may be assured by the process that he has been offered by the Secretary of State this afternoon, but the Opposition are not. We want Lord Leveson to be given the right to finish the job and do the work that he was commissioned to do by the last Prime Minister.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for being so generous in giving way. I want to follow up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare). What I do not understand about the Labour new clauses is what he and those in his party who want phase 2 of Leveson, if we want to call it that, think they will learn that they have not learned and could not learn from the court cases and all the evidence that is already in the open. Is there not enough evidence for us to make the necessary changes, without going through the interminable process of opening it up? Is there some specific area of the criminal law he does not understand that Lord Leveson may be able to explain to him?

[Liam Byrne]

What I want to learn is the truth. I want to learn the truth about police-press collusion and I want to know how we improve our press regulation in the future, so that we have not just a free press but a clean press.

Let me make some progress. The Secretary of State offered us a second line of argument that has now collapsed. I am not quite sure of the exact words he used when he came to the House, but most of us walked away thinking that Lord Leveson was pretty content that the whole thing was going to be shuttered. The House can therefore imagine our surprise when Sir Brian Leveson said that he “fundamentally disagreed” with the Government’s decision to end part two of the inquiry. When Lord Leveson said that he wanted the terms to be revised, he meant that he wanted them to be expanded, not cancelled all together. The Secretary of State says that malpractice is in the past and that there is nothing more to see, officials are busy, inquiries are expensive and so we must move on. He intimated that Lord Leveson agreed with him when that was not in fact the case.

A third line of attack from the Secretary of State was that the review looked to the past and ignored the challenges for the press in the future. That was a legitimate challenge and if he studies carefully the words of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson), he will see that there is a new ambition to get into some of the challenges around fake news that were looked at by Brian Leveson. That was not enough to satisfy the Secretary of State, however. In a letter to Conservative Members—I did not receive a copy—he offered some more objections, each one of which we can knock down.

The Secretary of State, in his letter to his colleagues, says that the first half of Leveson was “full and broad” when in fact it was partial and incomplete. He says that newspaper margins are under pressure, as if economic hardship is now some sort of defence against the full glare of justice. He says that the effect of the proposals will be “chilling”, when he knows that our fine broadcasters in this country operate under far more rigorous regulation than newspapers and that does not stop them pursuing the most extraordinarily brilliant investigations. He says that Sir Joe Pilling has “cleared” the IPSO scheme, but Joe Pilling was appointed by IPSO and IPSO itself says it does not comply with Leveson. He says that IPSO now has a low-cost arbitration scheme, but as the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) pointed out, MailOnline, Newsquest and Archant are all outside it, so it is not a universal scheme in the way the Secretary of State has tried to present it to the House this afternoon.

The final line of argument is that officials are very busy and inquiries are very expensive, and we should therefore just walk on by. I just do not think that that is good enough.