Royal Charter on Press Conduct

Debate between Simon Hughes and Paul Farrelly

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

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

This whole debate began because the public felt that some of the press, not all of the press, were far too close to some politicians, not all politicians, and particularly to politicians in government. It began because the public felt that some of the press, not all of the press, were far too close to some police, not all police, in a way that was very corrupting. It also started because people were worried that some of the press would become all-powerful, leaving no pluralism among those looking after news and current affairs, which is a guarantee of real freedom and understanding.

In many years since the war, Parliament and Governments have perfectly properly and reasonably commissioned inquiries into the press. When the most recent scandals broke and the Prime Minister took his brave decision to announce that an inquiry would be carried out by Lord Justice Leveson, with the agreement of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, it seemed to me that Parliament and the parties all agreed that such matters should be reconsidered as things had gone badly wrong. There was consensus; I have never known such strong consensus in this House as there was at the moment when Parliament said that we had to put our house in order.

I commend Lord Justice Leveson and those who worked with him on his inquiry, to which the three party leaders, I and many others gave evidence. Lord Justice Leveson came up with an extremely balanced report and its credibility is strongest because it is so well balanced. It did not come up with a draconian new regime to deal with the press, but understood the desirability of, the need for and the absolute imperative for a free press in this country while saying that we needed systems in place.

We had a bit of a debate in this place and in the media about what the structures should be and Lord Justice Leveson spent a large part of his time and conclusions on that subject. He was clear about two things, however. He was clear that there should be an independent self-regulatory system, and that that should be underpinned by statute. He made that explicitly clear and today, in a clever but appropriate way, we have ensured that there is a charter at one remove from legislation through which we can guarantee the new system and that is locked in by a legislative safeguard. I commend those who thought of the idea and I think it gets the balance right. There is underpinning in legislation, but the key document is a charter agreed by this Parliament and by all the parties in this place.

[Paul Farrelly]

Another advantage of today’s agreement is that the Defamation Bill, on which we have worked so hard, will be free to proceed. The amendments made by Lord Puttnam will be dropped, but another important amendment to the Bill raises the bar on the ability of corporations to use the chilling effect of libel law on legitimate investigative journalism and wholly helps the press. Will the right hon. Gentleman commit to supporting the retention of that provision when the Bill returns to the House of Commons?

[Simon Hughes]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is a journalist by training, for his work on the subject. One of the good things about today is that we liberate the Defamation Bill and enable it to become the law of the land. We have a very out-of-date defamation law. It has fallen into disrepute and one of the things that we will have done—I was going to mention it—is make sure that we do not clog up other legislation on which both Houses have worked very hard, and prevent it from becoming law—the Crime and Courts Bill, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill and the Defamation Bill. I hope we can now go on to get the legislation as right as is humanly possible in the remaining weeks of this Session.

There is a suggestion that some parts of our society should be outwith any legal construct. I do not think that has ever been accepted in this country, and when we have not seen adequate self-regulation, Parliament has intervened. We have done it in recent years in respect of doctors, solicitors and ourselves. We have taken complete self-regulation away from this place because we did not think we were doing the job properly, and The Daily Telegraph and others showed that we were not doing our job properly. I commend them for what they did.

We have always followed the adage of the old judge, “Be you ever so high, the law is above you”, and that applies to the press too. We have never had a press free from the laws of the land, but—returning to the intervention from the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly)—the libel law, the defamation law, was not available to most of the public. It was available to the rich and famous, and very difficult for ordinary people to pursue. Yes, there is criminal law governing the press, and phone hacking was illegal under criminal law. That did not deal with all the complaints and all the problems that had arisen.

I, like others here, am one of the victims of those illegalities, but I do not think any of us here think that the problem was that we were getting it in the neck or that celebrities were getting it in the neck. We felt moved to act because people who were entirely out of the public eye suddenly found themselves entirely in the public eye, vilified, abused, misrepresented, traduced or publicly humiliated. It is people in the estates in Bermondsey and in the constituencies of all of us whom we are seeking to support, not because they do not need a free press—they do—but because on occasions the press had abused them without adequate remedy.

Defamation Bill

Debate between Simon Hughes and Paul Farrelly

Wednesday 12th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Farrelly]

I entirely agree. I do not propose a return to the bad old regime, but I hope that the Government will give some thought to the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South and the hon. and learned Member for Harborough. The situation is unbalanced now and we need to address that.

So often, if people do not sue, our media do not take them seriously. That simply increases the licence to libel. I know people who defend responsible journalism and investigative journalists who have had to take that course of action because newspapers with an agenda have been out to get them; if they did not threaten or take legal action, the situation would never change. I believe the culture of our media needs to be borne in mind, as we will be reminded when Lord Leveson reports next month.

[Simon Hughes]

I welcome back to our debates the former Solicitor-General, whom I thank for his work in that office. It was much appreciated and I wish him well in considering things from a non-Government and non-Law-Officer perspective.

I declare an interest that means that I will not vote on the new clause if it is pressed to a Division. I am the recent recipient of a conditional fee agreement in the well publicised series of actions against News International. Even though, like all my colleagues here, I am on a parliamentary salary of more than £60,000 a year, had I not been offered a conditional fee agreement the prospect of taking News International to court subject to the risks that, in theory, followed from that might well have dissuaded me from doing it. If those risks might have dissuaded me and anyone on a salary similar to mine, how much more would they have dissuaded people earning a lower salary, much less experienced than I in such matters—not a lawyer—and not used to dealing with the media? We have to be realistic about the relevance of the issue and be aware of the need to continue the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Farrelly]

I am fully aware of the provenance of the new clause and of the sterling work done by the Libel Reform Campaign, and I am very sympathetic to what the right hon. Gentleman is trying to achieve, but I want to ask him a question. Let us suppose that an innocent mistake is made, which may not be apparent to the newspaper. When a complainant writes to the newspaper saying “I want an apology”, the newspaper gives the standard response, “We stand by our story: it is true and in the public interest.” I fear that in those circumstances there will be no defence for responsible journalism, because under the new clause it falls away.

[Simon Hughes]

I accept that, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s work, which has been gleaned from his experience in his previous life as a journalist.

What we are trying to do between us is ensure that if we are to replace the common-law defence with a statutory defence, we not only deal with the general proposition that if something is in the public interest, that should be a defence, but find ways of giving the public a remedy—which they do not currently have, short of going to law—and ratchet up the probability that a public interest defence will be unsuccessful if the defendant has been malicious.

As the hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out, the definition of “malice” in the new clause is not my own handiwork. Others have been working carefully to craft what they consider to be the right second-tier definition. The aim is to establish two tiers of consideration: there should be a general public interest defence, but the situation should be deemed to have gone beyond that when a publisher has flown in the face of the facts or the evidence. That would not apply to the example given by the hon. Gentleman, because if a newspaper could honestly argue that the statement that it had published was ignorant and innocent and that there had been every reason for believing that it was true, it would obviously have a much more complicated public interest defence case to argue. In the absence of my new clause, it would then have to rely on something like the clause that is currently in the Bill.

Let me make just two more substantive points. I am keen for us to end up with legislation that will give people a way out of the legal process when that is possible. Who knows what the Leveson inquiry will produce? I sense that one of its main recommendations will concern how we should deal with the public’s desire for inaccuracies to be corrected. I gave evidence before Lord Justice Leveson, as did others, and that was a major subject of debate. We may have to legislate if Lord Justice Leveson proposes legislation, and I hope that that would happen in the Session that will begin next May. It is therefore possible that we will return to this issue.

There is a debate about when the Leveson report will be ready, but if it appears as early as October, it may give us time to incorporate any proposals in this Bill. If it does not produce its recommendations until December, which now looks more likely, I sense we will have to come up with further legislation specifically to deal with the Leveson recommendations. Although we may not come up with a perfect solution in this Bill, however, both Government and Opposition parties have said they want to try to get this issue sorted now and get a better definition of public interest defence.

I want the House to agree to a measure that adds to the current clause 4, with a new defence available to publishers who are prepared to correct the record or publish a right-to-reply response promptly and prominently, thereby avoiding the use of lawyers. That answers the need in the internet age for a much speedier response—otherwise many readers are unlikely to see both the original content and the later clarification. It offers newspapers and other publishers a way of being responsible after the publication of the initial story, too, because they can be shown to have corrected what they have published. It will also serve not to permit the repetition of a defamatory allegation that has been promptly or prominently corrected or clarified. It would, therefore, take disputes out of the courts, thus saving people money, and it would speed up justice and make it more publicly accessible. It would not apply if the author were motivated by malice in its widest definition, which includes political or personal ill will or vendetta, rather than just the old honest opinion defence. The information must also be understandable to the public.

The Reynolds defence no longer works. Everybody accepts that we must move on from that common-law position for all sorts of reasons. We are in the age of the citizen-journalist, and we need to adapt the rules to accommodate that. We need something that will work for conventional newspaper groups and new media organisations. The Reynolds defence has outlived its time. It will no longer be sufficient to have a checklist of tests in every court case. Perhaps we ought to debate again whether to have early strike-out clauses in order to get other kinds of cases out of the courts, too. We need a measure that sorts out at the beginning of proceedings, rather than the end, whether there is a public interest component.