Crime and Courts Bill [Lords]

Simon Hughes Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Just before I call the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), I will just point out that there are four Members seeking to contribute. The Secretary of State will want briefly to wind up on the new clause, and the knife falls at 10.21 pm. I am sure all Members will wish to take account of that; it would be good to get them all in.

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

I rise to thank the Secretary of State for introducing this group of new clauses and amendments, and to support them. They are in the name not just of the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State, the Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition, but the Deputy Prime Minister. They are the additional provisions on exemplary damages and costs agreed as a result of the labours of recent days. I have paid tribute to various people, but I just want to add my tribute to my hon. Friend the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), who was more thoroughly engaged, and later into the night, than many of us throughout pretty much all of this process. He must be thanked, too.

I am relieved that agreement was reached, because otherwise it would have been my name leading on 10 amendments, new clauses and schedules, and I would have had to explain all the technical matters on exemplary damages, costs and so on, on behalf of the coalition and other parties, instead of the Secretary of State. I therefore thank those who came to the rescue and did the deal. I will make just a couple of simple points and follow your request, Mr Speaker, to make sure there will be time for the other Members who wish to speak.

As we have all done, I went back to what Lord Justice Leveson said on these matters in his report. He was clear, in paragraphs 66 to 70, about what he was seeking to do. He led into that in paragraph 57, in relation to the body he recommended. He stated that it should

“order appropriate redress while encouraging individual newspapers to embrace a more rigorous process for dealing with complaints internally…and provide a fair, quick and inexpensive arbitration service to deal with any civil law claims based upon its members’ publications.”

I agree absolutely with the deputy leader of the Labour party that an arbitration service is an indispensible part of the structure. I hear, of course, what the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) said—that that does not necessarily produce a quick, speedy or cheap outcome—but to get something by agreement, rather than full-frontal litigation, is clearly a good thing.

Paragraphs 66 and 67 read:

“The need for incentives…has led me to recommend the provision of an arbitration service… Such a system…would then make it possible to provide an incentive in relation to the costs of civil litigation. The normal rule is that the loser pays the legal costs incurred by the winner but costs recovered are never all the costs incurred”—

everyone who has been to law knows about that—

“and litigation is expensive not only for the loser but frequently for the winner as well. If, by declining to be a part of a regulatory system, a publisher has deprived a claimant of access to a quick, fair, low cost arbitration of the type I have proposed, the Civil Procedure Rules (governing civil litigation) could permit the court to deprive that publisher of its costs of litigation in privacy, defamation and other media cases, even if it had been successful.”

Lord Justice Leveson then sets out how that would happen in relation to exemplary damages, and concludes in paragraph 69:

“Such a system would also work the other way round. If an extremely wealthy claimant wished to force a newspaper publisher that was a member of the regulatory body into litigation (in the hope that the financial risk would compel settlement), it would be open to the publisher to argue that having provided a recognised low cost arbitral route, that claimant, even if successful, should be deprived of costs, simply because there was another, reasonable and cheap route to justice which could have been followed.”

Then there is an easy-to-understand set of recommendations at the back of the Lord Justice Leveson’s introduction on the process for damages.

The really good thing is that, without anybody, including the Secretary of State, pretending that the drafting is perfect for all time, those of us who were involved in the discussions have sought to strike a balance: if a publisher is part of the system, the presumption—I use the word in a non-legalistic way—will be that it will not be subject to exemplary damages, but if it is outside the system, the presumption will be that it could be subject to them. It is not quite that straightforward, but that was the general idea—and it was a good idea. It is an incentive-disincentive system, which was what everybody was working towards, so I join others in calling on the press to join up. If they do, there will be a system ready for them to make. This is not a pre-made system. The starting point is the existing code, but it will be up to the press to make the system work, and we all encourage them to do that. I am glad, then, that we have a platform from which to proceed.

I want to make three final points. First, I understand that further amendments might be necessary. The House of Lords has that opportunity, and the Liberal Democrat team is certainly willing to collaborate with Conservative colleagues, Labour colleagues and colleagues from elsewhere to ensure that we get it right, if we need to make further, more technical amendments in the Lords. We have time to do it. Secondly, I join others in thanking Hacked Off, which became the assembly of people speaking on behalf of victims. It was hard work at times, as all of us who were in the negotiations know, but it had a justified case. Its job was to remind us why we went down this road and, rightfully, to hold our feet to the fire and ensure that we did not forget why we were doing this. It is about the lives of people not in the public gaze.

Finally, we have referred to people—the McCanns, the Dowlers and others have been cited—who suddenly find themselves unexpectedly in the public eye. The other people referred to by at least one colleague are those who become part of the public commentary simply by their association with somebody who is in the public eye. That is equally unacceptable. It is the children, the mother, the elderly parent, the former wife, husband or partner, the friend or the associate—those people often get dragged in completely unwittingly. Perhaps they happened to be in a photograph or were at the house when somebody knocked on the door. We have to have a system that understands that if there is due cause for complaint about a politician, a sports celebrity or a business person, that is fine, but that does not mean that anyone has a free rein to go after all the other people who are absolutely innocent appendages to their lives, which happen to be public lives.

[Richard Drax]

Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that if a journalist goes to someone’s door and there are other people in the house, the press should be stopped from commenting on them? If that is the case, who on earth is going to make those judgments, when so many stories we read involve other people? It is never just one person; there are always other people involved in a story.

[Simon Hughes]

I do not want to elaborate—I want to sit down and let others get in—but let me give an example. I refer my hon. Friend to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry—to the evidence he took and the commentary he made in his report. He made the case that people who are associated with others can get swept into the press’s undermining or attacks entirely unjustifiably. The example given by one of our hon. Friends was that of an elderly mother who is nothing to do with the individual concerned—she lives somewhere else, in another house—but is pursued by the press, who go after her, knock on her door, go up her drive, sit outside her house and have cameras focused on it, drilling her with questions and trying to get things out of her. We are talking about people who are totally ill-equipped and unprepared for that degree of exposure and who never asked for it. Obviously I am not seeking to stop the press if they knock on the door of my neighbour, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the deputy leader of the Labour party, at her home in my borough or at my home. That is fine, but it is not fine if they suddenly start pursuing all sorts of other people and giving them grief.

I think we now understand much better what the parameters are. We are hoping to protect the innocent who have been the victims, not to make the press have a more difficult job to do in pursuing proper inquiries into people who are properly the subject of public interest.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

There are other victims of this whole process, some of whom were revealed in the evidence to Leveson by the National Union of Journalists. They were the journalists who stood up and said, “I refuse to implement some of these strategies”—these tactics, manipulations or whatever we want to call them—and as a result lost their jobs, while others were victimised. The culture of bullying in some newsrooms was exposed in the NUJ’s evidence. That is why part of the union’s policy was to advocate a conscience clause.

I am grateful that, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) said, there is a “brush past” in schedule 2 to the charter, with the reference to Leveson’s recommendation that:

“The industry generally and a regulatory body in particular should consider requiring its members to include in the employment or service contracts with journalists a clause to the effect that no disciplinary action would be taken against a journalist as a result of a refusal to act in a manner which is contrary to the code of practice.”

That would add to the architecture of protection and lift the standards of journalism in our country. That is why I welcome the important reference in schedule 2, which my right hon. and learned Friend shared with us. I regret the fact that it is a brush past, rather than something more specific, but I understand the negotiations that had to take place. We will need to return to this issue in the coming months. As the board of recognition panel is established, the regulator then applies for recognition. Consideration of whether the regulator has taken the recommendations into account is critical. One of this House’s roles will be to explore whether full consideration has been given to the conscience clause.

When the idea of a conscience clause was introduced into the debate by Leveson, there seemed to be cross-party support for it. Certainly the Deputy Prime Minister made a statement in support and the Prime Minister said he would consider the matter. Since then, the NUJ has been invited to go off and negotiate a conscience clause with individual employers. Unfortunately, that has not been taken seriously by a number of the employers. Negotiations have not proceeded and so far a conscience clause has not been inserted into a single contract. This is therefore an important factor to be taken into account by the recognition panel, and the regulator needs to put it firmly on the agenda for the future. A conscience clause would be an additional bulwark of support in establishing the point that we should not go through this cycle again and that there is a standard of journalism that we do not expect any journalist, editor or publisher to resile from. This will be beneficial in the long run. It will not impose onerous conditions on employers or publishers, and it should be welcomed as it will ensure a level playing field and a high standard of journalism right across the profession.

I am grateful for the reference in schedule 2 to Leveson’s recommendation 47, but I believe that the House needs to pay close attention to the roll-out of the process to ensure that it is considered by the regulator and that it forms part of the considerations of the recognition panel when the regulator is appointed.