Leveson Inquiry

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

When Sir David Calcutt produced his second report in 1992, he was damning in his criticism of the lack of serious progress made by the Press Complaints Commission in the previous two years. We in Parliament as well as the press are now reaping the whirlwind of that collective failure. In the intervening years, the Conservatives and then Labour failed to grasp the nettle of press standards. As Lord Justice Leveson makes clear, standards have fallen, not risen, in many, although by no means all, sections of the press. What the McCanns, the Dowler parents, J. K. Rowling and thousands of others have been subjected to should never happen in a society that prides itself on its freedoms, for all these victims have been deprived of the most basic rights of family life and justice to which we are all entitled.

I say to the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) and the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) that it is not the case that the problems we are dealing with are simply breaches of the criminal law which have not been investigated. Sir Brian Leveson states in his report:

“There have been too many times when, chasing the story, parts of the press have acted as if its own code, which it wrote, simply did not exist.”

The Prime Minister established the Leveson inquiry at the behest of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition because he knew there had to be major changes to end the intrusion and abuse the PCC and the many previous attempts at self-regulation had failed to end. If the Prime Minister deserves credit for setting up Leveson—and indeed he does—he has, I am afraid, undermined that by his extraordinary and impetuous decision to rubbish, within 24 hours of receipt of the report, Leveson’s key recommendation that there must be some statutory underpinning of a much-enhanced system of independent self-regulation.

I am sure that the Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for Maldon, has looked in detail at the fourth volume of the Leveson report, so he will have seen that what is proposed there by way of statutory underpinning includes providing incentives, such as in respect of costs, for the members of the press board—membership of which would be entirely voluntary.

Instead of a serious study of the Leveson report, the British press have produced some of the most extravagant comment I have witnessed from them. That includes Mr Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun, who claimed that Members of Parliament would risk

“looking like Putin or Beijing”

if we had a new press law.

We are all against any semblance of state control of the press. Sir Brian Leveson could not have been more emphatic about that. He says, in terms, that his proposed press board

“should not have the power to prevent publication of any material”

by the press. Instead he proposes a light-touch regulation system.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Mr Kavanagh might have had in mind the proposal on page 1780 of the report, which Sir Brian Leveson considers laudable and admirable:

“Interference with the activities of the media shall be lawful only insofar as it is for a legitimate purpose and is necessary in a democratic society, having full regard to the importance of media freedom in a democracy”.

One could imagine that being said in the Congress of China or Russia.

[Mr Straw]

I hope the hon. Lady makes better points than that if she is called to make a speech in this debate.

Turning to the objections that have been expressed about a light-touch regulatory system, I endorse the remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman). First, there is the objection the Prime Minister uttered, which is that

“for the first time, we would have crossed the Rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land.”—[Official Report, 29 November 2012; Vol. 554, c. 449.]

As I pointed out to the House last Thursday, and as my right hon. and learned Friend pointed out again today, the Prime Minister’s claim is simply incorrect. The Press Complaints Commission came to me when I was Home Secretary to ask for protection to be written into the Human Rights Act 1998, particularly in respect of the apparent ease with which it felt complainants could otherwise get interlocutory injunctions to stop publication of material, for example, where it was likely to intrude into the privacy of individuals. I listened to the PCC and there were negotiations, the result of which is to be found in section 12 of the 1998 Act, subsection (4) of which says that when the courts are deciding whether or not to grant an ex parte injunction, they take into account, among other things, “any relevant privacy code”—the PCC code. In other words, it was the press themselves who wanted statutory force—legal force—to be behind their code, because they wanted protection. That was the crossing of the Rubicon, not anything in Leveson.

The second issue concerns the Irish Defamation Act 2009, to which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham made such important reference. The Prime Minister said that we should look at that Act, because it

“runs to many, many pages, setting out many, many powers of the Irish Press Council.”

He added:

“It is worth Members of the House studying the Irish situation”—[Official Report, 29 November 2012; Vol. 554, c. 456.]

I have taken the Prime Minister’s advice, but it is a great pity that he failed to study that Act rather more closely. As my right hon. and learned Friend pointed out, although it runs to 35 pages, the provisions relating to the Press Council consist of one section—section 44—one schedule, which is two and a half pages long, and linking provisions such as those linking back to section 27, which provides a public interest defence for media firms that have signed up to the Press Council and have adhered to its code. I hope that the Secretary of State, or whichever Minister responds to the debate, will answer the question that has been put time and again from the Labour Benches and, to a degree, from her own: if the Irish Defamation Act is good enough for the Irish press, and has worked for them and for the British media with titles in Ireland, why would such a short set of provisions not be good enough for this House and the British press?

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[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

May I begin by declaring an interest as a practising member of the defamation and media law Bar? I speak here, however, as a Member of the House and not as a barrister representing any particular client, claimant or defendant. The fact that I am currently acting for a well-known claimant whose reputation has been grievously damaged in the recent past has no bearing on what I want to say—

[Dr Thérèse Coffey]

By TV.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

As it happens, I have over the past 35—[Interruption.] Does my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) wish to intervene?

[Dr Coffey]

Yes. I would just like to point out that in the case of the person for whom my hon. and learned Friend is rightly working, it was television making references to that allegation, not the press.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I think I might be permitted to know a little more about that case than my hon. Friend does. As it happens, I have over the past 35 years or so—[Interruption.] Would she stop mumbling?

Over the past 35 years or so, I have acted for and advised both claimants and defendants in more or less equal measure. Unsurprisingly, many of the defendants were newspaper publishers, editors and journalists and their broadcast media equivalents.

The House and the public as a whole owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lord Justice Leveson. His report is long but comprehensive. It is thorough and analytical. It contains opinion and recommendations, but they are based on fact, founded on the evidence he heard and read. Neither he nor his report can be described as “bonkers” and the report does not resort to hyperbole, make hysterical criticisms of the media or demand state control of the press. It is, in my view, a fair and balanced report that has exposed and tackled some difficult, if not entirely novel, questions.

I say that the questions were not entirely novel, because in this House in January 1960, a Mr Leslie Hale, who was then the Member for Oldham West, moved to repeal the Justices of the Peace Act 1361, among whose provisions was one to outlaw eavesdropping. A predecessor of mine as Solicitor-General, Mr Peter Rawlinson, then the Member for Epsom, said:

“Translated into ordinary terms, the Bill which the hon. Member seeks to introduce, dressed up like a radical bird of paradise, is nothing less than a modest charter for peeping Toms and eavesdroppers…It is also a charter for other strange people who pester law-abiding citizens and persons of that kind.”

He went on to say:

“The modern use of the Bill is mainly to prevent the ordinary citizen from being pestered by those unbalanced eccentrics who, with an imagined grudge, patrol the outskirts of houses, terrifying families by constant use of the telephone, or by those people who are unbalanced and usually malevolent but who do not break the law by means of assault or trespass. Therefore, there is no weapon which the law-abiding citizen has against them except the use of these powers which may be the only effective one which rests in the hands of such citizens.”—[Official Report, 26 January 1960; Vol. 616, c. 54.]

So over a period of about 600 years the issue of intrusion into the private lives of others by use of illegal listening devices, be it the human ear or electric surveillance machinery, has been current. This is one of the reasons why the inquiry by Lord Justice Leveson was initiated.

At heart, it seems to me that we are discussing the age-old problem now described as the tension between articles 8 and 10 of the European convention on human rights. Very often, people seem to remember the rights, but they do not seem to remember the exceptions to those rights. Article 8 says:

“Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”,

but it goes on to say:

“There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”,

so it is very much a qualified right, as is article 10, which provides the right to freedom of expression. It states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.”

But paragraph 2 says:

“The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”

There are the tensions between articles 8 and 10, and there also are the exceptions to those two great rights which nobody in the House or elsewhere would find in the least bit controversial.

The issue that we are confronting—my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), the Chairman of the Select Committee, drew this out, as have other Members this afternoon—is not whether we should have state regulation of the press. We are not talking about state regulation of the press in the sense that Mugabe, Putin or the Chinese politburo control the press. What we are talking about is whether the press needs to have a self-regulated body which is recognised by the state as being a competent authority to regulate the press’s activities.

The distinction is important. Much of the argument that one has seen in the press and elsewhere, and to some extent in discussions in and around the House, has been utterly off the point. It is to traduce the work of Lord Justice Leveson to suggest that he wants state control of the press. He has said on any number of occasions—I shall quote one or two examples—that the ideal that he is looking for is that

“the industry should come together to create, and adequately fund, an independent regulatory body, headed by an independent Board, that would: set standards, both by way of a code and covering governance and compliance; hear individual complaints against its members about breach of its standards and order appropriate redress; take an active role in promoting high standards, including having the power to investigate serious or systemic breaches and impose appropriate sanctions; and provide a fair, quick and inexpensive arbitration service to deal with any civil complaints about its members’ publications.”

As a member of the Bar, I would of course like people to litigate—that is how I pay my mortgage—but the short point is that if a system can be devised that has the approval of Parliament and which carries with it public approval and confidence, it seems to me that that mechanism, just as the Financial Services Authority is a body given permission by statute, could allow the press to inhabit a world of free expression, subject to articles 8 and 10, that would not interfere with its rights but would also adequately protect, by self-regulation, the rights of the victims of press intrusion and other forms of activity that are subject to the criminal or civil law. Of course many of the activities that led the Government to set up the Leveson inquiry were already against the criminal law, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) correctly spotted. It is illegal to hack, blag and interfere with other people’s telecommunications under various statutes going right back to the 1361 Act that outlawed eavesdropping.

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[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate on this important topic.

Why does the inquiry matter so much when, as Ofcom suggests, papers and magazines account for only 11% of news and current affairs consumption, and when the news cycle is such that the fact that Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant got out on Twitter much quicker than it could have got out in a newspaper? The point is that the news cycle of investigative journalism and in-depth analysis means that the press is at the forefront of holding politicians, Executives and the establishment to account, which is why such journalism deserves a special place in the media spectrum.

I agree with Lord Justice Leveson’s overriding principle that the freedom of the press should be maintained. I do not agree that we need to legislate for the Secretary of State to have such a duty, as the hon. Member for Falkirk (Eric Joyce) suggested. I agree with the self-regulation principle. I share the sympathies of hon. Members on both sides of the House who agree to some extent with the Prime Minister that we need to think very carefully about crossing that Rubicon, as he described it last week.

Sir Brian Leveson says in part K, chapter 5.47 that the threat to legislate must be credible. It has not been credible before. He suggests that that is the only reason why the proposals of Lord Black of Brentwood have progressed as far as they have. I would put it a different way. I would say that the threat of legislation has been made several times, which has led to the evolution of press self-regulation since it began in the late ’40s.

I referred earlier to a simple, three-clause Bill that refers to article 10 of the European convention on human rights but which leaves out the criteria of independence on the basis of not interfering in the operation of the media. However, Sir Brian Leveson says that Parliament must legislate for the criteria of independence. That Bill, which might have been simple at first, is already starting to grow.

Lord Justice Leveson also declines to give a definition of public interest, but the phrase is used extensively in the report. If Parliament is pressed down the statutory route, Parliament would have to consider that definition as part of the criteria for independence when setting up the body.

The report gets into the balance of ethics and privacy—it deals with balancing the public interest in the freedom of speech with the public interest in the rights of privacy. Sir Brian says that that is one of the key points, but that is an understatement. I am concerned that members of the public, including victims—including people affected by the Hillsborough disaster—believe that statutory underpinning is the answer to all previous problems. I do not think that statutory underpinning would necessarily solve the problems that people have experienced, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) said.

Sir Brian Leveson refers to extant changes in the code. One of his first recommendations for the regulatory body is that it should undertake a thorough review of the code. I tried to intervene on the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman)—she is unfortunately no longer in the Chamber. In evidence to the Leveson inquiry, she suggested that the code is fine and does not need changing. Are we adopting the entire principles and thoughts behind the Leveson inquiry, or are we, on a more careful reading—I have not got through all the report yet and have read only certain sections—beginning to see problems that we need to discuss in more detail, such as the report’s interpretation of how the press and legislation will work? Sir Brian Leveson says that the incentive to join the regime would be the existence of the tribunal route. I understand why that would be an incentive, but one wonders whether the Defamation Bill, which is currently before Parliament, could provide a route towards securing the same ends.

What if we cannot agree? What if not all the press sign up to a new body? Sir Brian refers to needing all national publishers to agree, and that if they do not, then Ofcom should become the regulator. Potentially, we have the same situation we had when Northern and Shell walked away from the Press Complaints Commission. If Northern and Shell or any other publisher walked away, the default recommendation in the Leveson report is for Ofcom to regulate the press. That would be a huge step backwards, and part of the slippery slope which many hon. Members are concerned about venturing on to.

There is an appropriate concern about access to justice. I do not agree with Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendations for excessive costs and penalty damages for publishers who do not subscribe to the code. In fact, he is trying to implement Sir Rupert Jackson’s comments on the qualified one-way costs shifting system. That is something we need to think about and more proposals need to come forward. If somebody went to the potential new body, which was not subscribed to by a particular publisher, one could imagine a situation where the regulator said, “Actually, you are absolutely right, that would have failed our tests and we will help you take on the publisher in court.” I can see something like that happening to ensure that people have access to justice.

I have other concerns. The issue relating to the Data Protection Act is a problem for people protecting their sources or for public interest use. Sir Brian Leveson suggests that the names of people should not be disclosed, or that we should not try to identify potential criminals. Frankly, if that was the case for TV, we would shut down the “Crimewatch” programme overnight. The press work with the police to flush out criminals and potential suspects, and to help get the public involved in the search on crime, and the report puts that at risk.

There have been two references to the potential extent of third-party complaints. I am concerned about one particular part of the report, which suggests that the code be amended to have a duty to ensure compliance with Government legislation on the wording of stories. Again, that strays from where we need to be.

A member of the House of Lords would apparently be able serve on the independent board, but an MP or a member of the Government would not.

[Chris Bryant]

Is it not therefore slightly odd that everybody is now saying that the PCC is independent, despite the fact that it is chaired by Lord Hunt, who takes the Conservative Whip in the House of Lords?

[Dr Coffey]

My next point is that Sir Brian insists that there will be no involvement of political parties. My concern is that that reinforces the prejudice that to have ever been involved in politics is somehow to be not interested in public service. I know I am taking a different view from a lot of other people. I am not suggesting that a serving MP or a serving Lord should be on any regulatory body, but I am concerned that politics is again being traduced in an unsatisfactory way. Thatis just an example of some of the minor things to which my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) referred—about trying to change the name of briefings and what they could be called. Frankly, that section of the report did not deserve the ink that was wasted on it.

On the problems the report will solve and the problems it will create, we have recently debated, and debated several times, the terrible incident of Hillsborough. There were two other incidents in the late ’80s that forced a change so that we moved away from the Press Council to the creation of the Press Complaints Commission. Not many people will recall that on 9 May 1989, a report from the ombudsman was printed on page 2 of The Sun. Of course, that was not enough. Today, the PCC rules would enable something of equal prominence to be printed, and the ombudsman adjudication at the time indicated that the headline should not have appeared. One concern is that we may start to give false hope to people who have been maligned by the press.

[Alun Cairns]

How does my hon. Friend reconcile the want of victims for solutions with the inconsistencies of the report, which does not extend to digital media?

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend makes a useful point about digital media. I think somebody suggested that we should begin to look at how we regulate the internet. That is a challenge, even if we think only of closing down access to sites.

Returning to the Hillsborough incident, I do not want people to get false hope that all of a sudden journalists will not produce stories that they do not like. The same could be true of the situation in Bridgend. The PCC did good work on that, and the Government at the time said, “Yes, there was some good stuff.” We should have learned a bit more.

[Damian Collins]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the biggest steps forward in monitoring what is reasonable in, say, social media have been taken by the courts, not by any regulatory process?

[Dr Coffey]

That is a fair point. Of course, we all accept that the status quo is not good enough, but there is a great nervousness about the effect of statutory underpinning and the slippery slope. It seems that statutory underpinning is what the overwhelming majority of MPs want, and I hope we will persuade people that it is not right. If the statute is introduced and in a few years’ time it is not working, the argument will be that we need more regulations or that they need tightening up. I wonder where it will stop. It seems to me that what the victims really want is a more robust law on privacy and for a code of ethics to be enforced. Perhaps that is the question that should be consuming us.

This has been a good debate, but there are not enough hours to interrogate the report in the depth that it requires.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

To accommodate more Members, the time limit is being reduced to eight minutes.