Investigatory Powers Bill

Richard Drax Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I want to focus on several aspects of Lords amendment 15. First, I want to focus on what it is designed to do, in which I think it is fundamentally wrong-headed. It provides for an increase in the penalty that will be applied to newspapers where an accusation of phone hacking is made in a case that is brought against them. That is difficult, because in the ordinary course of events, a newspaper will want to protect its sources. A newspaper that tried to protect its source for a story would not be able to prove the negative that phone hacking had not been involved, even when it had not been.

The immediate risk will be that newspapers will be reluctant to print investigative stories because they will be unable to avoid the double penalty of extra costs, even in the event that their story was true. The particular outrage of amendment 15 is that the press could report a story accurately, fairly and honestly but still find that, if they were taken to court by an aggressive litigant, they would have to pay the litigant’s costs. That is an absolute charter for the very rich to bully the press into not publishing stories about them. It will not help the poorest in society, who will not be able to afford the initial fees to get a case going, but anybody with any funds will be able to use it as an opportunity to bully the press into not printing anything disagreeable about them.

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, as always. Does he agree that the regional press, which does not have the necessary resources, will be particularly vulnerable to such claims by the people he has described?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The regional press and local newspapers will simply not be able to print stories that are critical of almost anybody. Perhaps MPs do not want any critical stories to be printed about them. We would be able to bully the local papers in our constituencies by saying, “We will bring a court action against you, and, by the way, we think that you might have been hacking our telephone,” and they would risk double costs. That is absolutely ruinous to a free press at a local and national level, because such costs run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Even the biggest newspaper groups find that level of cost very difficult to absorb. The amendment will therefore get rid of the free press. Our press will be afraid to go after the rich and the powerful. It will be afraid to go after leading politicians whose friends can lend them the money to start a case off. It will be a supine press.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

I am honoured to be called to speak in the debate, and I rise to talk about Lords amendment 15. I understand that I have two and half minutes to speak, to allow my other colleague time to speak. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) has pointed out, it is extraordinary that we are talking about the press when the Bill is actually about the security of our country. Lords amendment 15 is clearly in the wrong Bill. In the six years that I have had the privilege of representing South Dorset, I have noticed that the decisions made in this place are often knee-jerk decisions made to satisfy a public reaction that has nowadays often been fed by Facebook or Twitter, to which too many of us react too quickly.

I suspect that, over a period of time, many sensible people in this place—the majority of people here are sensible—have come to think that we cannot use the state to interfere with the freedom of the press in this country. It is mainly Opposition Members who are making this point, and I remind them again that phone hacking is already illegal. It is a criminal offence and people who commit that offence go to jail. I worked in the press for 17 years, including at national level, in radio and for local newspapers. Never once in that time was I influenced by a producer or asked to concoct a story in any way other than honestly and accurately. That includes my nine years working with the BBC. My point is that the offences that so many Members are almost ranting about are being committed by a tiny minority of the press, and that punishing everyone—as the House is thinking of doing—would be totally and utterly wrong.

[Matt Warman]

This short, impassioned debate about the freedom of the press has surely proved that a 90-minute debate on a Lords amendment shoehorned into a Bill about national security cannot be the right place to make a decision as important as this one. This Bill is supposed to regulate hacking, yet the Lords are seeking to hack the Bill by putting in something completely irrelevant to the vital matters of national security that it covers. As the previous Prime Minister and the present one have said, this is one of the most important—if not the most important—pieces of legislation in this Parliament. Were I to dare criticise either of them, I would contend that the freedom of the press is even more important than some aspects of the Bill. It is absurd for anyone seriously to suggest that we can deal with this matter in 90 minutes.

I have a great deal of sympathy with the view of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) that the chilling effect of the proposals in section 40 would have a hugely negative impact across not only the national media but the regional and local media. Over hundreds of years, we have seen the good that a vibrant, boisterous and scabrous press can do, as other Members have said, and we need to preserve that. We do not need to damn it in a 90-minute debate. I hope that Members of all parties can see that this is not the right place to take such a momentous decision.