Phone Hacking

Simon Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

What has happened here is a massive firestorm of allegations that have got worse and worse. On both sides of the House, all of us started from the proposition that we had to keep separate the investigations that were taking place and the inquiry into BSkyB. I believe that we are now getting it right, and if the right hon. Gentleman has played a role by pushing and asking questions, I pay tribute to him. He, too, was a Culture Secretary, and knows about these issues. Just as I say to him, “Well done for pushing,” I suspect that he should also be saying to himself, “Why did we miss this for so long?”

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I thank the Prime Minister for his decisive announcement and for the work that he and the Deputy Prime Minister have done to ensure that the concerns that my colleagues have been expressing for 17 years, and the calls for an inquiry that we have been making for two years, have at last been accepted.

Will the inquiry look into the Information Commissioner’s reports of 2006, and why his confirmation that 31 media titles and 305 journalists were involved in illegal activities in relation to personal information were not the subject of implementation of recommendations by the Labour party in government, whose leadership continued, even as late as last December, to accuse my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary of being too critical of Murdoch?

[The Prime Minister]

To be fair to my right hon. Friend, the issue of the Information Commissioner’s reports—particularly the two reports he mentions—really is a rebuke not just to the previous Government but to the then Opposition. We too should have made more of those reports, which included some very important detail about what was going wrong in data handling, data theft and the rest of it. We must ensure that the inquiry asks the question, “Why were they ignored, and what are we going to do about it now?”