Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Pannick Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I repeat my declaration of interest as a barrister acting in privacy cases including, I should mention in relation to this group, acting for the NMA in its unsuccessful attempt to challenge the recognition of Impress, a case which continues.

I shall speak first to Amendment 53. It seeks to remove paragraph 24(3) of the schedule which recognises,

“the special importance of the public interest in freedom of expression and information”.

I am surprised that the noble Baroness is seeking to remove that provision because it has been the law of this country for centuries. Because it has been the law of this country for centuries, a provision to almost identical effect appears in the Human Rights Act 1998 at Section 12(4). It is also the approach taken by the European Court of Human Rights in relation to Article 10. The idea that our law should no longer recognise the special public interest in freedom of expression is therefore a surprising one and would lead this country’s law into conflict with our international obligations under Article 10.

I shall speak also to Amendments 59 and 64 and express my agreement with what has just been said by the noble Lord, Lord Black. If enacted, these amendments would deprive journalists throughout the national and local media of all the exemptions under the Bill unless their employers choose to register with a regulator approved under the royal charter. The question for noble Lords is: why should a journalist on the Financial Times, or indeed on the Borehamwood Times, lose exemptions under this legislation and be hindered from doing his or her job effectively because the newspaper by which they are employed decides that it sincerely does not wish to be regulated by a royal charter regulator?

The fact of the matter, which is quite clear, is that Amendments 59 and 64 seek to use this Bill for what is a wholly extraneous purpose, seeking to compel newspaper groups into submitting to regulation under the royal charter or, as the noble Lord, Lord Black, put it, bullying newspapers in that respect. This Bill is simply not an appropriate vehicle for such an exercise.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I have listened to the debate for several hours and I am growing increasingly worried about one or two things. In a sense I am going to act as a devil’s advocate. I believe passionately in a free and inquisitive press. For many years, I was one of its number both in the written and the spoken word. I believe that the press is absolutely vital to holding us all to account. But I have begun to feel that, in castrating Leveson’s work to such an extent, the public are going to lose confidence in public inquiries. Let us hope that that does not happen with Grenfell, although the residents of that tower, who live two roads away from me, are already beginning to think so.

Last year I attended a meeting in a committee room where Gerry McCann, PC Jacqui Hames and Hugh Grant spoke of their quite awful experiences. It is important that we remember the victims and recite these woes. I have not heard any expression of acceptance on this side of the House, or concern about some of these matters. I would go with noble Lords much more about not loosening things if I heard some kind of admittance that there are problems.

[Lord Pannick]

The answer to the noble Lord was given by the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, in the previous debate. The fact is that many of these individuals have justifiably brought civil claims against the newspaper groups concerned. They have recovered and are continuing to recover very large sums in damages, and no doubt rightly so. The News of the World closed down because of its conduct and individuals went to prison in circumstances where they broke the criminal law. That is the answer. No one is suggesting that terrible things were not done, but there are existing legal remedies and they have been applied.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, who obviously knows a great deal about the matter—more than I do. I still think that we should question the ability for this to happen in the future. Surely the whole point of the Leveson inquiry was to tighten things up so that this would not happen so much. When I listen to people talking about what happened to them and how they felt that they had very little recourse—although they took civil action and some of them won—I accept that newspapers shut down, but my goodness, perhaps they should have done. These things are right.

In listening to the debate, I was very impressed by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord McNally. It is not that I do not believe in the press—believe me, I think that the press does a wonderful job, by and large—but even those of us who are involved in doing wonderful jobs do so because we can look at ourselves and say, “We got this wrong”. That is what I have not heard enough of. My noble friend Lady Hollins is having a rather tricky time; she is up against some big guns.

What do the future victims have if they do not have recourse to law—if they believe that Leveson was the answer and we gradually remove most of his recommendations, which is what we seem to be doing? Perhaps noble Lords are right; perhaps in law we should be getting rid of them, but I am worried that the public will begin to think, “What are these inquiries? Why does the status quo always remain exactly the same?”. That is why I wanted to speak up for my noble friend Lady Hollins. We must think a bit more about people whose lives are sometimes ruined just by innuendo. As we have heard, they might get a tiny apology at the bottom of the page, but the damage is done—and it can be terrible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I did not intend to speak on these amendments, although we support them from these Benches, but I have to take issue with what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said—I think, quoting the noble Lord, Lord Black, from the previous debate—about how we do not need any of this stuff because people can sue the newspapers and achieve redress through those means.

When I was a commander in the Metropolitan Police Service, I was subjected to a kiss and tell story on the front page and eight inside pages of a tabloid newspaper. The story was a mixture of lies and intimate details of my private life and my relationship with somebody I loved and lived with for three and a half years. We broke up in acrimonious circumstances and subsequently he was paid £100,000 by the tabloid newspaper to tell these lies and intimate details of my private life. Thankfully, a group of solicitors and barristers agreed to a conditional fee agreement to pursue the newspaper. However, half way through the preliminaries leading up to the court case, it became apparent that I was unable to secure insurance against losing. Therefore, I was faced with a situation where if I pulled out of the action I would have to pay both sides’ costs—the newspaper’s costs and my own side’s costs because the conditional fee agreement would happen only if the case went to court and I lost—and could have lost my home.

The point is that there are many ordinary people, less high-profile than even I was at that time, who cannot get conditional fee agreements. They do not have the means to sue newspapers. Certainly, I would not recommend anybody going through the stress that I was put through by that newspaper and its lawyers, who tried every trick in the book to try to get us to fold before the court case happened. As it happens, two weeks before the case was due to be heard, they agreed to settle, although they claimed that it was not on the grounds of a breach of privacy but because everything that had been printed in the newspaper was untrue.

For noble Lords to say that there are sufficient safeguards at the moment for ordinary people to take the newspapers to court is, in my respectful submission, completely untrue.

[Lord Pannick]

I am very sorry to hear about the noble Lord’s personal experience and of course I accept everything he says. But will he accept that hundreds of people have brought legal proceedings against national newspaper groups for their wrongful, unlawful action in accessing personal data—for example, by listening to their mobile telephone calls—and publishing articles in consequence of that, and they have recovered very substantial damages, and rightly so, against those newspapers?

[Lord Paddick]

I completely accept what the noble Lord says but there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of other ordinary people who have not been able to claim redress for the wrongs that have been meted out to them by the press.