Leveson Inquiry

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend mentions three of her local papers. Given the nature of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, anybody making a complaint will see the costs assigned to the newspaper and not to the complainant if that newspaper is not a member of a royal charter-approved regulator. That means anybody making any complaint would effectively be able to stop a journalist pursuing a story, as was set out eloquently by Alastair Campbell.

The situation has changed since 2011; nobody then imagined that a self-regulator, IPSO, would come to the fore. It now covers 95% of national newspapers, has a low-cost arbitration system and can require corrections to be put in place. IPSO is not perfect, and I hope it makes further progress, but nobody imagined that it would be there at all. We have a better system than was in place, and it allows for redress and for local newspapers to thrive as much as possible.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statements because I believe that although newspapers often make the life of an elite intolerable, they make complacency impossible. I worry about local newspapers, and I welcome what he said about section 40, because we used to have three newspapers and we now have one, the Harlow Star. We also have the good newspaper internet site “Your Harlow”. What other measures will he put in place to strengthen local newspapers?

[Matt Hancock]

This is an important question and we are working hard on what we can do, through this review of the sustainability of the press, with which I hope my right hon. Friend, the Harlow Star and “Your Harlow” will engage, to ensure that we have not just support from the big organisations—whether that is the BBC or some of the big internet giants—but commercial models that work effectively to deliver news, locally and nationally.