Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a Telegraph contributor and as the director of the Free Speech Union, which defends freedom of the press among other freedoms.

First, I thank the Secretary of State for bringing forward these regulations. I was one of around 50 Peers to write to her pointing to the shortcomings of the first set of regulations, which we have already heard quite a bit about, whereby it was not clear whether the 15% ceiling on the percentage of shares in a British newspaper a foreign state could own applied to those states both individually and collectively or just individually, leaving open the possibility that a number of foreign states could each take a 15% stake and collectively end up with a controlling stake.

In our letter, we urged the Secretary of State to bring forward a second set of regulations making it clear that the ceiling applied to foreign states individually and collectively, so I am grateful that the Secretary of State has done so, although a good deal of the credit for the closure of this loophole should go to my noble friend Lady Stowell.

The Telegraph group has now been in a state of “protracted uncertainty”—those are the Secretary of State’s words—for nearly two years. In that period, senior executives and senior members of the editorial staff have been unable to make strategic decisions, which they need to do given the profound upheaval in the newspaper business caused by AI. It is vital that the group is sold to a reputable owner as quickly as possible so that it can adapt to the rapidly changing business environment and attract the investment it urgently needs to grow.

In order to end the prolonged period of uncertainty, I share my noble friend Lady Stowell’s hope that the bid by the Daily Mail and General Trust is successful. As I understand it, the Secretary of State has given DMGT until Monday week to submit a bid and she is then at liberty to approve the sale, provided no flags are raised by the Competition and Markets Authority or Ofcom. Alternatively, she can refer the bid to the CMA. Should that prove necessary, I urge her to impress upon the regulator how important it is to complete its scrutiny process as quickly as possible and make a decision about whether to approve or reject the bid.

Should DMGT’s bid be rejected and it becomes necessary to invite other bidders to submit offers, it would be highly improper if RedBird IMI is still the entity holding the gavel, as it were. The reason it is selling the Telegraph group is because the United Arab Emirates owns a controlling stake in the company. If it is a breach of the regulations for a company that is controlled by a foreign state to own a British newspaper, how can it be appropriate for a company controlled by a foreign state to decide who to sell a British newspaper to?

I am not alone in being prepared to overlook this anomaly in the current circumstances, given the need for an expedited sale. But should DMGT’s bid prove unsuccessful, or if it fails to materialise, the course of action the Secretary of State must take is clear. I share my noble friend Lady Stowell’s disappointment that the Secretary of State did not set out what she would do in the event of DMGT’s bid not materialising, or it being rejected, in her Written Ministerial Statement at the beginning of last week.

To my mind, the Secretary of State’s course of conduct is clear. She must immediately refer RedBird IMI’s ownership of the Telegraph group to the CMA. The CMA will, I imagine, quickly declare that the arrangements fall foul of the foreign state influence regulations, as it must, and it should then use its powers to order the independent directors of the Telegraph group to hold an auction with no floor price in which the bidders are transparent about the origin of the money they have raised for the acquisition.

Those last two points are crucial. Should RedBird IMI retain its grip on the gavel, not only would that be improper but it will be reluctant to accept bids of less than £500 million, given that is how much it paid. In the light of the tumult unleashed in the newspaper business by AI in the past two years, not to mention higher interest rates, economic tariffs and a soft ad market, few if any bidders, with the possible exception of DMGT, will be willing to meet that price. To insist on a reserve price of £500 million might very well condemn the Telegraph to remain in limbo for the foreseeable future, with disastrous consequences. Should the bidders not be transparent about the financing of the deal, there is a risk the new owners will also fall foul of the regulations and we will be back here again. Rinse, wash, repeat—meanwhile, a great British newspaper shrinks and shrinks until it becomes invisible.

In short, if the DMGT bid is viable, the Secretary of State must use her powers to ensure the deal is completed as quickly as possible. If it is not, she needs to move equally quickly to a transparent auction process overseen by the company’s independent directors. To govern is to decide, and the Secretary of State must start making some decisions.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

I do not want to detain your Lordships’ House, and the speeches already made by several noble Lords are very much to the point. I should declare an interest as a long-serving employee of the Daily Telegraph. In that capacity, I draw the attention of the Minister to what it is like for a newspaper not to know who is owning it for such a very long time.

It seems to me that the greatest power of bureaucracy is delay, which increases the power of bureaucracy with every moment; that is its appalling leverage on everything else. But business, and particularly journalism, has the opposite desire. It needs to get on, and the word “journalism”, of course, comes from the French word for day. It happens every day, and every day lost is a disaster for us. In certain respects, we have been losing day after day—we have lost roughly half the length of the Second World War not knowing who is really going to own us.

I make no distinction really here between Governments of either party because both, it seems to me, were guilty of a similar failure. I draw the Minister’s attention to the fact that there is a strong contrast between the quasi-judicial role that DCMS quite rightly operates, which is necessary in these cases, and all the manoeuvring and use of time and delay to try to satisfy—as the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Young, have pointed out—the needs of a foreign state that the British Government seem to be overzealously courting.

This is a very bad piece of politics—not party politics—and it puts us all in play. If we were to write the history of this, we would have to see that it fell to the journalists of the Daily Telegraph twice to start making a noise before anything could prevent very bad things happening. That seems to be nothing to do with the quasi-judicial process. I hope that the very sharp deadline of 15 December is tacit acknowledgement by the Government of the damage done by delay and that therefore something more drastic is being done now.

In another place, the Justice Secretary, when trying to do something about jury trials, has made the point that justice delayed is justice denied. We at the Telegraph have had justice delayed for a very long time and therefore denied. The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and other noble Lords have been clear that it has to be acknowledged that a process of this sort should never go on again and that there is a big lesson here. If, for whatever reason, the Daily Mail bid fails or gets called into question, there has to be an open, swift and fair process.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an important and useful debate, and I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to it. I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, for her engagement over many months with DCMS. I think we have a better position as a result of her engagement and persistence on this matter, and I know that the Secretary of State is also grateful for the time she has taken to help us refine this, frustrating as it must have been for the noble Baroness at times.

This regime is about safeguarding a specific industry that has a unique, essential role in the health of our democracy. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, made it really clear that this is important for democracy, and I think that is beyond doubt in your Lordships’ House. I need to put on the record that I do not recognise the scenario outlined by the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Moore of Etchingham, of the genesis of these SIs, but I hope all noble Lords feel that we have listened to and addressed concerns raised in your Lordships’ House and have got to a better place as a result.

I will address the points made by noble Lords during the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, raised concerns about the 5% exception’s potential for misuse. I stress that this is a narrow exception, applying in limited circumstances. It intends to remove any potential chilling effect by providing that a state-owned investor, or SOI, from one country or territory may ignore smaller holdings that are in effect too small to confer influence in their own right in quoted companies by SOIs from other countries that are not visible to them.

A hypothetical example of the limited circumstances in which the carve-out is in our view necessary to avoid a chilling effect is that if a state-owned investor wanted to invest 15% in a publicly listed newspaper owner they would have to be sure that no other state-owned investors from any other states or territories already held shares in the same newspaper owner. Without the carve-out, they could potentially not be sure that their 15% investment would comply with the limit.