Cycling

Debate between Peter Bottomley and Julian Huppert

Monday 2nd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

I will take one more intervention from a Government Member and one more from an Opposition Member, and then I will make some progress.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who I think now has the distinction of being fashionable. I am glad that page 15 of the report refers to the bridge over the railway tracks in Cambridge, which I funded and was delighted to be part of opening. On the issue of risk, does my hon. Friend agree that comparisons of risk per distance travelled are ludicrous when comparing walking, cycling, driving and flying? We ought to have risk per hour exposed, which would give people a far greater sense of the relative safety of cycling.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I thank him for his support for Cambridge cycling. Statistics can say all sorts of things. The most dangerous form of travel per trip is a space shuttle, and the safest per passenger mile is also the space shuttle. That shows the extremes.

Defamation Bill

Debate between Peter Bottomley and Julian Huppert

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I want to make two points that were not those I intended to make originally. My third point is that I disagree with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) almost completely about this, so I will not put those arguments.

Tesco Lotus in Thailand sued a journalist for £1.9 million—perhaps it was dollars or something, but it was quite a lot—because it wanted an apology, and it eventually got an agreement to have a clarification of the words on an inside page. It later sued a former MP, a business journalist, in the same way.

Corporations such as Tesco, whether in joint venture overseas or in this country, should not be able to choose to sue an individual journalist; it simply should not happen. They have plenty of power, plenty of weight, plenty of thick skin and an umbrella, and they should not be able to do it.

I would have stopped corporations suing for libel at all.

I believe strongly that public functions should fall under the Derbyshire principle, irrespective of whether we want private businesses doing public jobs. Earlier I gave the example of a security guard at a pop festival. I regard security as a public function even if it is privately hired, and such people should not be able to sue for libel. The court should not issue the writ; it should not be allowed.

Let me make a point on behalf of Colin Channon, the editor of my local newspaper, the Worthing Herald, who says that were he to report that a group of unauthorised campers was in the constituency and he were then sued, he would have to pay £3,000 for initial advice before he got to a panel. We are in danger of our local newspapers being threatened.

As for people conspiring to say that the police would not confirm whether someone had been arrested, the idea that someone could sue for a libel that claimed they had been arrested but which had not been confirmed, even though true, makes the issue even worse. I am unhappy with most of this but I am particularly unhappy that the Government have not yet found a way of having new clause 2, in effect, there for all of us.

[Dr Huppert]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), with whom I have had many promising discussions on the issue. I am delighted that the Bill is back in the Commons. There was a period when, due to the actions of the Labour peer Lord Puttnam, there was a risk. I am glad that that risk did not eventualise and that it turned out not to be a problem.

This Bill will make a significant change to the costs of libel and to free speech and it will reduce libel tourism. I am particularly pleased about clause 6, which provides specific protection for peer-reviewed academic and scientific publications. That is something that I value greatly and I am delighted that we will be able to make those protections, because we have heard of too many cases of learned journals being silenced.

The issue remains, however, of corporations and non-natural persons. As I argued earlier, they are different. They do not have feelings. They are categorically separate and there should be different rules for what happens when they wish to bring libel actions. Significantly, we have heard that they can abuse power, as in the cases of Peter Wilmshurst and Simon Singh. I was going to talk more about them, but a number of speeches have covered them.

There is, largely, cross-party agreement, with the notable exception of the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier).