Royal Charter on Press Conduct

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

No, of course not. I think it was Thomas Hughes, who wrote “Tom Brown’s School Days”, who said that simply passing a law will not make everybody obey the law and that making theft illegal did not prevent everybody from being a thief.

I was in the High Court this morning to hear yet more revelations about how a phone belonging to a Member of this House was stolen from her car in 2010 and then, only late last year, its private details accessed by The Sun. Personally, I do not think that the editor of that newspaper should still be in his job. It is incredible that an organisation that had said that it was cleaning out the Augean stables was still, in September and October of last year—long after the Milly Dowler revelations came out—behaving in this extraordinary way.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I totally endorse everything that my hon. Friend has said about Soham. That is exactly the experience that we had in Bridgend. The difference between Soham and Bridgend is that the Press Complaints Commission did come to our rescue. I will always be grateful to it for that. The PCC standards were changed and it made a difference in Bridgend. The PCC was toothless in many ways, but that was because the regulations under which it was set up made it toothless. Where it could act, it did.

[Chris Bryant]

I hate to say it again, but I rather agree with the Prime Minister. The PCC was toothless because it was not independent. It was not independent from the press in any shape or form. The code committee consisted substantially of editors, many of whom adjudicated on whether they had broken their own code. When they had broken their own code and it had been decided by the rest of the committee that they had done so, they stayed on the committee. They had an extraordinary way of marking their own homework, giving themselves an A and, when their colleagues said that it should have been a B, deciding that it should have been an A-plus.

Not only was the PCC not independent; it was held in contempt. Throughout the revelations on phone hacking by the News of the World, the PCC decided not to investigate. That was partly because it did not have the power to investigate, but I believe that it also chose not to investigate. It always took the line of the News of the World. It hung out the line about one rogue reporter for everybody else to bite on for longer than even the News of the World. In the end, the chairwoman of the PCC had to pay damages to a journalist because she had completely and utterly got the story wrong.