Crime and Courts Bill [Lords]

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

My hon. Friend pre-empts something that I will cover in more detail later. I will not only deal with the cost regime, but explain that to comply with Leveson the new self-regulatory regime will include free arbitration, so giving those individuals the access to justice that he rightly says they should have.

New clause 27A establishes a second presumption—that a relevant publisher that chooses to stay outside the regulator would generally have costs awarded against it in proceedings for media tort, whether or not the claim is successful. In other words, a defendant publisher that does not join the regulator should always pay the claimant’s costs, unless the issue could not have been resolved at arbitration if the publisher had been a member of a regulator, or unless it were just and equitable for the defendant publisher not to pay those costs. These provisions deal with defendants and the costs they should or should not pay to claimants. The issue of claimants and the costs they might have to pay to defendants is also important and is addressed in subsection (5).

Lord Justice Leveson endorsed Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendation that qualified one-way cost shifting should be introduced for defamation and privacy cases. QOCS is a form of cost protection. The Government accepted that recommendation, and we have asked the Civil Justice Council, chaired by the Master of the Rolls, to make recommendations by the end of this month on appropriate cost protection measures to be introduced for defamation and privacy cases. The Government then expect to introduce a cost protection regime through the civil procedure rules.

Let us be clear: the new provisions on the awarding of costs, coupled with the provisions I have set out on exemplary damages, provide a powerful incentive to join the regulator and for disputes to be resolved through arbitration that meets the standards set out in the royal charter. Those defined as a “relevant publisher” for the purposes of the new legislation will, if they choose to sit outside the regulator, be exposed to the full force of the new exemplary damages and costs provisions. We want to ensure that the new provisions act as a powerful incentive—as I am sure you can hear me say, Mr Deputy Speaker—but we do not want to draw in too broad a range of publishers.

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

Is it not the case that the incentives are so powerful—with the exemplary damages and the requirement to pay the other side’s costs, even if their claim may be very poor —that, in essence, we are almost forcing the press into joining the new regulator and being subject to the regulation framework determined by Ministers through the Privy Council?

[Maria Miller]

I gently remind my hon. Friend that the criteria used in reaching judgments will not be determined by Ministers, as he will know from the earlier debate. The reason we are establishing a royal charter is exactly so that all this is put very much at arm’s length from Ministers. I suggest to him that every publisher has a choice it can weigh up. Publishers can come inside the self-regulatory process and get the support of the regime for exemplary damages and costs, or they can choose to stay outside. That was absolutely the essence of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendation not to have compulsion, and that is why the Prime Minister and I were so against taking a statutory approach—because we did not feel the press would want to take part in such a regime, which would be a fundamental weakness in the system.

[Mark Reckless]

But is it not the case that Ministers, albeit with senior members of the Opposition, have agreed the royal charter on Privy Council terms—in some ways that is worse than statutory regulation, because MPs have had no opportunity to debate it on behalf of our constituents—and that in many cases the only choice the media face will be whether to join or be bankrupted?

[Maria Miller]

I would say to my hon. Friend that when I have heard people talk about the approach they want the Government to take, they say that they want regulation of the press to be very much at arm’s length from politicians. What we are talking about is a self-regulatory body for the press, set up by the press. The royal charter is a verification panel that will ensure that the press is doing what it should do. It will not be under the eyes of Ministers; it will be independent. However, I urge him to look at the detail of the charter so that he does not take just my word for it, but sees it written down in black and white.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I most certainly am not saying that it is a complete waste of time. I am saying that we should not seduce ourselves into thinking that it will do more than it can. It will be a far better system, all being well, than the PCC. It will have real teeth. It will have the ability to discipline respondent newspapers that are within the scheme by awarding costs and penalties of one sort or another.

The cases in which the new system will award a penalty of £1 million will be so rare as to be unthinkable. I imagine that it will deal with cases rather similar to those that are dealt with under the provisions of the Defamation Act 1996 on summary decisions, for which there is a limit of £10,000. I suspect that many of the cases that at the moment go to the High Court under those provisions will, if people are sensible, go into the new scheme. It will look at low-level damages, low-level punitive sanctions and cases that do not involve lots of complicated factual and legal issues.

Just because the new system will not look at many cases and just because the cases will not be hugely complicated does not mean that we should not do it; we should. We need access to some form of arbitration system for the people who have been bullied and disturbed by tabloid newspapers sticking their lenses through people’s letterboxes and so on. However, I urge the House not to think that we have suddenly waved a magic wand and that all future disputes will be resolved between victims or individual claimants and large media organisations through a cheap and speedy system; they will not. We ought to be a little cautious about that.

[Mark Reckless]

I have been enjoying my hon. and learned Friend’s speech for the past 20 minutes and I believe that the House benefits greatly from his exposition of these concepts. However, I am still unclear whether he supports or opposes what is proposed.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I do apologise if I did not make myself clear. I will try to do so again, but perhaps rather more speedily. I support what is in the measures. It is easy to understand that point, I suspect.

[Mark Reckless]

indicated assent.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The second point is that, although I support the measures, I suspect that they will be of limited availability and limited use. However, that they will not solve every problem does not mean that we should not deploy them to solve some problems. As I said a moment ago, the sorts of problems that I think they will be used to solve are those that are currently dealt with summarily under the Defamation Act 1996 with a damages limit of £10,000. There is no suggestion of a damages limit here, but I think that it is in that area of dispute that the system will work. It will be broadly in disputes over meaning, unfairness or beastly behaviour by a newspaper that it will work.

The new system will also bring into the exemplary damages regime, to go back to my first set of arguments, causes of action for which punitive damages cannot currently be received under common law, such as breach of confidence and misuse of private information.

There is a lot to be said in favour of what is proposed. I just urge Members not to get excessively excited about what we are achieving. There will come a time when we have to look at the guts of the regulatory system, including at who is to be on the panels that decide the cases and so on. There is therefore a lot more work for the Minister for Government Policy and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to do, with co-operation, I hope, from the Opposition parties and our coalition partners.

I am probably going to the church by way of the moon, but I really do think that much of what has been said today is commendable, but that much of it is too overexcited. Yes, we should celebrate the consensus, but let us not be misled by it.

--- Later in debate ---

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

The Home Secretary introduced her remarks by referring to how the Bill had been enhanced by parliamentary scrutiny. I have no doubt that the Public Bill Committee did good work, but as a description of the 20 minutes we have had in today’s debate to consider all the remaining non-Leveson clauses, “enhanced by parliamentary scrutiny” is probably not the appropriate one.

I welcome what I see as the core of this Bill: the creation of the National Crime Agency. The shadow Home Secretary cavils in respect of how it is not going to be greatly different from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, but surely the key difference is that the NCA will be able to task police forces with carrying out necessary policing activities in the national interest. SOCA has not had that power and has been reliant on persuasion to get co-operation from local forces, and the creation of the NCA is the other side of the coin of the election of police and crime commissioners. We are making local and democratic what properly should be local and democratic while ensuring the necessary central control over national policing, which we have not really had in this country previously.

I very much regret the attachment to this Bill of what I consider to be, in all prospects, a press law. An organisation, Hacked Off, seems to have taken over both the Liberal Democrat and the Labour party positions on this issue. In response to an apparent allegation that the Labour party was the political wing of Hacked Off, the deputy leader of the Labour party did not deny it; she merely gave great congratulations to Hacked Off on what it had achieved. I am concerned that what it has achieved is eliding two different groups: the genuine victims of the press, such as the Dowler family, and a group of celebrities who would like to engage with the press on their own terms. I fear that what is coming out of today’s proceedings will benefit that latter group at least as much as the former. Some older Members of the House may recall the days of the industrial relations court in the early 1970s. When trade unions did not co-operate with that body, it failed in its objectives. That could, and I hope will, also happen to the royal charter, with its statutory underpinning that we are pushing through today.

The problem with the royal charter is that in many ways it is worse than a statute, because we cannot actually scrutinise it; it is just Ministers and senior people in the Opposition meeting behind closed doors to cook up these instructions to the press, and next to no scrutiny is provided in this House. For instance, article 11.7 of the royal charter states that the board

“shall have the right to request further reasonable sums from the Exchequer. In response to such a request, the Exchequer shall grant such sums to the Recognition Panel as it considers necessary”.

It could be argued that that was a disbursement of public funds without scrutiny from this House.

Another area of concern to me in the charter can be found in paragraph 11 of schedule 3, which states:

“The Board should have the power (but not necessarily the duty)”—

whatever that means—

“to hear complaints…from a third party seeking to ensure accuracy of published information.”

The schedule goes on to say:

“Although remedies are essentially about correcting the record for individuals, the power to direct a correction and an apology must apply equally in relation to…matters of fact where there is no single identifiable individual who has been affected.”

Instead of the interplay of ideas between different journalists and individuals competing to have their material published and heard in the public sphere, a regulator will determine the meaning of truth—a Ministry of Truth, as it were.

People will have to submit to this process, and if they do not there will be exemplary damages or they will have to pay the costs of anyone who wants to take up a case against them, however ill-founded it might be. We are not going to the right place with this royal charter; it is not where we should be heading.

It is also extraordinarily unclear how the charter will apply in the blogosphere and to the web. The definition of relevant publisher almost suggests that one particular blog, that of Guido Fawkes, has been singled out to try to ensure that it is caught by the terms of the charter. Let us consider the statutory underpinning. Public bodies are exempted under paragraph 6 of new schedule 5, and apparently a public body

“means a person or body whose functions are of a public nature.”

I hope that my blog will be exempt and I will not have to answer to the Home Secretary for any transgressions I make within that sphere. The final issue in considering the charter is where it will go next. We are setting it up without any idea of its final destination.

One thing we failed to consider in today’s debate was the excellent new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). The Home Secretary referred to the respect in which she holds my hon. Friend, but judging by the letter she issued earlier today he would have caused the release on bail and the non-deportation of 4,000 people a year. We were not told that his advice has been signed off by three eminent QCs, whereas the record of the Home Secretary’s officials and, in particular, her lawyers in this area is, to put it mildly, less than stellar.

We heard yet again from the Home Secretary about the supposed binding rule 39 injunctions when, as the Abu Hamza case showed, they are merely indications to the Government of the European Court’s view according to its rules of what might be in the interests of justice. They are not binding on the Court and it is the Home Secretary who decides that these people will not be deported. It is as if she has not even read the second leg of article 8, under which she is able to interfere in the operation of the right to a private life in the interests of national security, public safety and the prevention of crime. What else could be covered by a rule saying, “You cannot consider this”, when a crime has been so serious that the foreign national has been imprisoned for more than a year? Those people should be sent back and if we had agreed to the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton, they would be sent back. Because we ran out of time, and because the Home Secretary is not prepared to take on his far better ideas, the situation will, unfortunately, continue.