Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Peter Heaton-Jones Excerpts

Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

I start by declaring an interest, in that before I became embroiled in the world of politics, I was a journalist for 20 years, although not in the print media—I had the perfect face for radio, so it was the wireless that beckoned. As a former journalist, I take a close interest in two of the matters before us this evening, and I refer to two of the amendments that were made in the other place. I am a bit perturbed as to why we would be dealing with those two specific issues in a data protection Bill, because this Bill seems to be being used somewhat as a Christmas tree, on which all sorts of things can hang, and I am not sure that that is appropriate.

I am sure, however, that the Secretary of State was right to say in his statement last Thursday that the Government will not be accepting those two amendments. I refer, of course, to that on the implementation of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which I shall come on to in a moment, and the amendment providing that we should proceed with Leveson 2. I was glad that he announced on Thursday that we would not be going ahead with that, because it is absolutely the right decision, for a number of reasons, not least because the manifesto on which we were elected nine months ago said that we would not be going ahead with it.

Putting politics aside for a little while, let me say that there are a number of reasons why it is it not necessary to go ahead with that. The main one is that the environment has changed dramatically since the first Leveson inquiry. It has changed dramatically since I was last working as a journalist, which was way back in 2006, but even since 2012 and Leveson 1, the landscape has changed dramatically.

[Chris Bryant]

That is neither here nor there, because the whole point of the Leveson inquiry was to establish what happened. Hundreds of individuals have had to go through the civil courts to try to establish what happened in their individual case. Many of them now know more than the country does about what happened at that time, but they are unable to say so because they have had to sign confidentiality agreements. The truth of the matter is that we still have never got to the bottom of what level of collusion there was between the Metropolitan police and the News of the World, and many newspapers have simply lied.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I was coming to some of the points that the hon. Gentleman mentions, but the issue is that if Leveson 2 had gone ahead, it would have been narrowly and tightly about the relationship between the media and the police.

I absolutely welcome Leveson 1: it did a job that needed to be done by shining a light into the dark corners of some media practices and, importantly, giving redress to people who had been wronged by the media—there were too many of those. There are people who feel that it did not go far enough, and some still feel that they did not get their confirmed right of reply, but the fact is that Leveson 1 has happened, and it happened some little time ago.

Leveson 2 would have had the fairly narrow remit of the relationship between the police and the media. The argument I was coming to was that since Leveson 2 was mooted, so much has changed in the regulation of the press, as we have already been discussing. The new regulatory regime is now under way—I might come to some of its drawbacks in a moment—and, furthermore, the practices of the police have changed a lot.

Leveson shined a light on the problems. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) that the relationship between some officers and some journalists was shown by Leveson 1 to be absolutely inappropriate. I do not believe that we need a costly, lengthy, long-drawn-out second phase of the Leveson process, which probably would not do the job we would be hoping of it anyway.

[Chris Bryant]

The point is that the investigation is sort of happening now through the civil courts, except that it is individual members of the public who have to fork out £350,000 or £450,000 in legal fees to get to the truth. In Leveson 1, Brian Leveson was expressly not able to look at anything for which there might have been any criminal charges. The fact that the Daily Mirror has now admitted—in the civil courts, but not to Leveson—that it did engage in phone hacking is one of the matters that still has not come to the public.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

However, Leveson 2 would not necessarily put any of that right.

[Chris Bryant]

Yes it would!

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

Well, we do not know that. The difficulty is that a lengthy, costly process that in the end might not even achieve what was hoped for is not the answer. The answer, as the Secretary of State rightly said in his statement on Thursday, is to ensure that we shine a light through proper regulation on the practices that have done wrong to a number of people in the country.

I accept the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin). We should absolutely focus on the rights of people in this country—people who cannot afford the voice to stand up for themselves—but Leveson 2 was never going to solve that issue. It was going to be a long-winded inquiry that would not have got there, and the Secretary of State made that point convincingly on Thursday.

[Christine Jardine]

Does the hon. Gentleman not agree with me, a fellow former journalist, that one of the things that has most undermined the reputation of the media in this country in general has been the behaviour of our newspapers, which have seemed to the public to be beyond regulation? Self-regulation has failed and undermined the image of the media. The Press Complaints Commission failed, as the Press Council did. We had an opportunity to put that right, but it has been lost.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

The hon. Lady is right that the Press Complaints Commission did fail, which is why it is rightly no longer there and we now have a new framework. While we are talking in general about regulation, I should say that I have some sympathy with the question marks raised over the regulation of my former employer, the BBC. We got that wrong for many years. There was the bizarre situation in which the BBC board—later, the BBC Trust—was acting as both poacher and gamekeeper, marking its own homework. The Government have rightly sought to put that right and we have moved a long way towards doing so.

I do not believe that the answer to the wrongs that still exist in the regulatory regime for newspapers lies in the amendments that have come our way from the other end of the Palace of Westminster. I do not believe that they would do the job that, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire rightly said, the people outside this place want us to do: to make sure that they have a fair right of reply when something wrong is done to them by newspapers.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is being characteristically courteous in giving way to so many Members. Can he point to another area of public policy in which as many suspicions have been aroused, but that has been improved by our collectively deciding to just move on and leave things in the dark?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

No one is suggesting just moving on and leaving things in the dark. That is not at all what the Government intend to do. If we look carefully at the words the Secretary of State used on Thursday, we see that there is no question of our moving on and saying, “There’s nothing to see here.” We are saying that the mechanism suggested in the amendments from the other place is not the right way to proceed. I agree with the position taken by the Secretary of State.

[Liam Byrne]

With the greatest of respect, regulations are forward looking, but the inquiry that we are seeking goes into past malpractice for the simple reason that we would like justice to be done.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I do not believe that the inquiry that the other place seeks, through its amendment, to impose on the Bill would do the job that the right hon. Gentleman wants done. The position that the Secretary of State laid out on Thursday is the right way to proceed. Leveson 2 would simply not do the job that many Members on both sides of the House want it to do.

I am going to move on, as I am thinking about Mr Deputy Speaker’s strictures about timing.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

rose—

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

However, I will give way to my hon. Friend.

[Matt Warman]

For the sake of novelty, my hon. Friend is taking an intervention from the Government side.

The one point that my hon. Friend has not yet mentioned is that IPSO is a fundamentally very different regulator—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) might not like it, but low-cost mediation is a crucial feature that allows exactly the redress that he wants.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I had a lot to say about IPSO and IMPRESS along the lines that my hon. Friend has laid out, but I am aware of Mr Deputy Speaker’s strictures. I have tried to take as many interventions as I can, and page 2 of my remarks will be put down on this green Bench very shortly.

I move on to the second issue that I wanted to raise: the second amendment sent to us by the other place saying that we should commence section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. That would not be the right way to proceed, and I am grateful that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made that point so clearly on Thursday. Many local papers in North Devon have written to me on numerous occasions expressing deep concerns about the impact that section 40 would have. I mention just three: the North Devon Journal, the North Devon Gazette and the South Molton & District News, which is, incidentally, one of the few papers to have signed up to IMPRESS, the new press regulator.

Freedom of the press is absolutely essential in a democracy. Let us think carefully about what section 40 says: if a paper not under the auspices of a Press Recognition Panel regulator is sued for defamation, for instance, it has to pay the legal costs of both sides, even if it wins the case. How can that be sensible? We might argue that that is a pretty blunt instrument with the intention of coercing newspapers to sign up to one of the approved regulators, but 90% of the national press have not done so, so the blunt instrument is clearly not being effective. The biggest danger, however, is that many small, local media companies, such as those in my constituency that I have mentioned, would simply not be able to run a viable business if section 40 were enacted. Financially, the court costs would cripple them. Individuals could make vexatious claims in the knowledge that there was no chance of their ever having to pay costs, whatever the outcome. That is simply something up with which we will not put.

The local press in North Devon and many other parts of the country is still extraordinarily important. The two main papers I mentioned are still read widely today and help to maintain our sense of community. We cannot face a situation in which such papers are threatened by what could be a series of vexatious claims, encouraged by the fact that there would be no risk to the person making that claim.

[Andy Slaughter]

rose—

[Christine Jardine]

rose—

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

If hon. Members do not mind, I am coming to the end of my remarks.

In my 20 years as a journalist at the BBC, I was passionate about freedom of speech and a right of reply, because that is the desperately important foundation on which our newspaper industry is based. I am also desperately passionate about ensuring that people who are wronged in some way by the media are given an effective response mechanism. Neither amendment that has come our way from the other place would achieve that. I am grateful to hear that the Opposition will support the Bill’s Second Reading, and I hope that we will not accept those two amendments and that we will pass the Bill as it was drafted.