Media Bill

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register and, in confessional spirit perhaps, remind noble Lords that I was the founding chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation. I strongly support the Bill in principle and am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, who is an indefatigable campaigner for press freedom. Like him, I welcome the fact that my party is, somewhat belatedly perhaps, acting on its repeated manifesto commitment to abolish Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013.

We hear a lot from critics of the press about how the newspapers can and should be accountable to politicians and Parliament. But let us not forget the vital role that a free press plays in holding us—Parliament and the politicians—to account, too, in its unique position as what my old schoolfriend Sir Brian Leveson termed a critical witness to events. A free press is vital to our nation. As fake news continues to spread across the e-media, our traditional publishers and publications continue to play that so-important role in holding power to account, exposing all forms of hypocrisy and improper behaviour.

In the 10 years since I departed from IPSO, the ever- diminishing piles of newspapers in newsagents’ shops silently testify to the continuing decline and influence of the printed press, the local and regional press in particular. After a period of frenzied and desperate consolidation, that has all but vanished across vast tracts of our nation. In this age of rampant fake news, the consequential loss of accountability should alarm us all.

I vividly recall the debates we had at the time of the Leveson report, before and after I took over the reins of the old Press Complaints Commission. There was general agreement that the PCC was a complaints handler and not a regulator, and that it urgently needed to be replaced by something more powerful. I engaged fully with Lord Justice Leveson and his inquiry. When he published his final report in November 2012, Sir Brian restated his desire for

“the industry to work together to find a mechanism for independent self-regulation that would work for them and would work for the public”.

Having read the report from cover to cover, I expressed my hope that it would be implemented in full. In almost all respects, the Leveson report has been implemented.

The attempt to find a solution that was fully acceptable to all broke down principally on the question of how, or indeed if, a new regulatory structure should be validated. When we first discussed this legislation, various voices, including my own and that of my noble friend Lord Black, warned that the major newspaper publishers would not and could not be coerced into anything that smacked of statutory regulation. Our warnings may have been unwelcome—indeed, I think it is the only time I have been heckled in this House—but they were founded in truth.

For the Prime Minister of the day—now the Foreign Secretary, my noble friend Lord Cameron—and the press media, using a statutory body for that purpose was a bridge too far. The use of a royal charter at least limited the legislative basis required to underpin the new system, but Section 40 was deemed a necessity, supposedly providing both an enticing carrot and a persuasive stick.

Noble Lords have received a number of lobbying messages from the taxpayer-funded Press Recognition Panel, which has recognised the organisation Impress, which mainly regulates micropublishers, but to which IPSO has never applied for recognition. The tone of these messages was strikingly partisan and almost polemical in places. The thrust of the argument is that IPSO has failed because of the relatively low number of complaints it has upheld. I confess that I have not kept in touch with every detailed aspect of IPSO’s operation since I departed 10 years ago; I rely on my noble friend Lord Faulks for that, as he is the present chair. However, I do know that progress should be measured not by complaints upheld, but by behaviour improved.

When asked about the relationship between politicians and the press, the late and much-lamented former leader of the Liberal Democrats, that fine and witty man Charles Kennedy, responded ruefully but with a characteristic twinkle in his eye: “Dogs and lamp-posts, dogs and lamp-posts”. He did not enlighten us on which was the dog and which the lamp-post, but we must surely work that out for ourselves. Personally, I think the casting swaps over not infrequently.

Section 40 has never been activated. Had it been, it would have been ineffective at best and, far more likely, counterproductive at worst, with unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences that would have necessarily impinged on press freedom, while doing nothing for the individual citizen. I wish it could have been dealt with earlier. Let us crack on with removing this unnecessary and potentially damaging measure once and for all.