Leveson Inquiry

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady makes an important point, and I am sure it will be covered in cross-party negotiations. I will just make the point again about the concerns expressed to me about the potential reforms to the Data Protection Act. If we were to try to treat journalists exactly the same as everybody else for the purposes of data protection, I think newspapers, programmes such as “Panorama” and others would make very strong representations about what that could mean for investigative journalism. That shows why we must think carefully about some of these recommendations; otherwise we could get something badly wrong.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

The Prime Minister extended the inquiry’s terms of reference in response to the Home Affairs Committee’s concern that the Crown Prosecution Service had got the law wrong on phone hacking. Does the Prime Minister recognise that there are lessons for the CPS even in part 1 of the report, since while it exonerates the Director of Public Prosecutions, it criticises David Perry QC for failing to reacquaint himself with the relevant facts in law before advising him?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. From what I have seen in the report, Lord Justice Leveson is relatively complimentary about the work of the CPS and the decisions it took, but some of its workings do bear careful study.