The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Pack Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pack (LD) ( Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is both an honour and a privilege to be making my maiden speech. I give sincere thanks for the warm welcome I have had from noble Lords from all sides of the House, and from the attendants, doorkeepers, clerks and other staff, including those who put on the excellent induction programme for new Peers. In addition, both the clerks and my fellow Peers on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee have been particularly kind in helping direct my interest in procedural detail in productive directions. I am grateful too to my noble friends Lady Featherstone and Lord Newby, who introduced me.

I know that, were it not for the dedicated efforts of thousands of volunteers from my party across the country to help it recover from previous setbacks, I would not have had the huge privilege and opportunity of joining this House. Many of those volunteers know me well from the email newsletters that I produce, with several million emails from me landing in inboxes each year. Stephen Bush of the Financial Times once said—and who am I to doubt him?—that I write the longest-running solo-authored political email newsletter in the UK. Whether or not he is correct, that is certainly a large part of how I became the first non-parliamentarian to be elected by members to be my party’s president—a record I have of course sullied a little since.

That long-running involvement in digital communications, and email in particular, is what also gives me a special interest in the role of email newsletters in the media landscape. As I am speaking about email newsletters, I should draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register of interests regarding the political email newsletters I write.

Credit should go to the Communications and Digital Committee for the excellent report we are considering today. As it rightly highlights, there are promising signs of the growth of email newsletters as a new form of local media. While traditional, local and even regional media has, as we know, often sadly been in decline, in recent years we have seen a wave of media innovation, with email newsletters springing up, often breaking important stories, with high-quality investigative journalism that is then even followed up by national and more traditional media.

Email has much to commend it as a method of directly conveying news to citizens who are largely insulated from the algorithmic dramas that have seen the prominence of news rise and fall on other digital platforms. Indeed, the need to avoid spam filters drives up quality, while in so many other mediums the equivalent pressures pull it down. The low starting overheads and flexibility of email make it well suited to supporting innovation in news coverage.

Email also provides an important insurance for journalists: the ability to move their audience, if necessary, from one supplier to another, rather than being locked into dependence on any one digital firm whose priorities or preferences may take a sudden or unexpected turn. I therefore hope that, as the committee, this House and the Government continue to consider our news landscape, a particular focus will be given to how best to support the growth of these new forms of local journalism, especially as the committee’s report wisely highlights the question of where revenues from public notices advertising can flow, along with related issues such as the way basic information about our court system is often available only to those who can afford expensive legal logins, rather than to this new generation of email-based local journalists and start-ups.

I hope too that, having joined your Lordships here, I will be able to contribute to the House’s work on topics such as those we are discussing today. I look forward to listening carefully to, and undoubtedly learning much from, noble Lords across the House. It is and will remain an honour and a privilege to have the chance to do so.