The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the right reverend Prelate and to contribute to the debate on this excellent report. I was also glad to listen to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Pack, the author of 101 Ways to Win an Election, which sadly was published after I had finished fighting elections—that is perhaps 100 more than I ever discovered. I will come back to that point in a minute.

I want to talk about how the media merger regime is to be amended to reflect the substantial changes in how the public access news, which is very well illustrated both in this report and in Ofcom’s report published last year. With colleagues on a cross-party basis—this did in fact include the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in the past—we have for several years argued that the public interest test for media mergers was out of date and needed to be updated. It was therefore very welcome that, in response to Ofcom’s 2021 review, the Government published last November a consultation proposing that the media merger rules should be updated.

A key proposal in the Government’s consultation is to change the definition of “newspapers” in Section 58 of the Enterprise Act to read:

“a publication which … consists of or includes news-related material which is subject to editorial control”.

“Published” would include online publication and “news-related material” would mean

“news or information about current affairs, and … opinion about … news or current affairs”.

Being “subject to editorial control” is defined as being

“if the publisher has editorial or equivalent responsibility for … its content (which may include commissioning it), … how it is presented, and … the decision to first publish it”.

The DCMS consultation states that

“online news aggregators (for example, Apple News or Google News) will not be treated as newspapers”

as they

“do not have ‘editorial control.’ In particular, they are not responsible for the commissioning of the news that they republish nor the decision to first publish the news”.

The committee had only a few days to consider this, but in paragraph 101 it recommended that

“the Government works with Ofcom to set out plans and timelines for capturing online news intermediaries within the scope of the media ownership rules”.

That was clearly justified by reference to the evidence it received. For example, it reported that Apple News top stories were

“chosen by human editorial teams based in each global region where the service was offered”.

That is a clear example of editorial control over news and, indeed, the algorithms driving news content online. We know that four in 10 adults who use online sources for news report using these news aggregators.

In response to the report, the Government said:

“Capturing news intermediaries, including social media platforms such as Facebook or X … could bring … a very large number of enterprises”


into the scope of the media merger regime.

At a very helpful meeting that we had with Minister Peacock at the department in December, a group of colleagues and I explained that focusing only on news aggregators that have editorial control functions, as compared with those that simply offer user-generated or moderated content, would narrow the scope of that test dramatically. News aggregators such as Google News or Apple News play an increasingly important role: they attract higher trust rating than other online sources, enable users to access the news of the day from a range of sources, and regularly decide what is the most significant news of the day.

Agenda setting, as I know very well from running past national election campaigns—as the noble Lord, Lord Pack, will recall—is no doubt one, or perhaps many, of his 101 reasons why you win an election, because you control the agenda of the election. Determining the agenda of the day is a significant news matter. In future, news aggregators will increasingly be making that crucial decision: what are the top stories today? I argue that the control of such enterprises should be brought in the scope of the public interest test on media mergers, and I hope the Minister can tell us that the Government will be willing to reconsider that when she updates us on the media merger regime.