I, too, welcome the new Secretary of State, but I do not want to forget the outgoing Secretary of State, the long-lasting, right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who ensured that the Government found time for the Bill in their manifesto commitments. I am sure that all Labour Members wish him well in his new roving role. We hope that he ruffles feathers across the Government in his inimitable way.
The Bill is welcome and has much to commend it, including giving scientific and medical communities protection from abuse of our libel laws in order to stifle debate and proper investigation. When our libel laws have been used and abused in the past, it was often by large corporations. The action brought by Tesco four years ago against The Guardian was perhaps the starkest case in recent times of an inequality of arms. The main ambition of the determinant litigant was not really to settle, but expensively to bog down the newspaper and its journalists for as long as possible, as a warning to it and others in the future.
The Bill does not address corporation suing, and we have heard from the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr Garnier) about some of the anomalies regarding who can and cannot sue. I hope that those issues will be looked at afresh when the Bill proceeds to the other place.
The Bill does not include an explicit early strike-out clause to ensure that actions with no merit, that are designed to chill and intimidate at maximum cost, do not proceed. The devil is in the detail of how the courts operate. It is therefore a shame that we do not have the changes to the civil procedure rules that we need to give effect to many of the intentions of the Bill, as the Joint Committee on the draft Bill recommended.
We have discussed conditional fee agreements. As I have said throughout years of trying to bring about sensible libel reform, including via a long inquiry by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, of which I am a member, it was never intended that success fees should be abolished in their entirety. Given the behaviour of some parts of our press, there is a real problem with access to justice, and reputations are unfairly ruined. I hope their lordships and the House return to that.
As the Bill proceeds, we might have the benefit of Lord Justice Leveson’s detailed thoughts on other issues, such as on a low-cost body or tribunal to settle libel disputes quickly and more cheaply, and on how the Bill might be amended to incentivise the use of such a forum.
Finally, I should like to thank everyone who has helped to inform the debate and me, including the Libel Reform Campaign, Index on Censorship, Sense about Science and English PEN. I also thank a small group of serious, superbly professional journalists and progressive lawyers who work at the coal face and who have given me and other hon. Members invaluable comments and insights. The lawyers include Hugh Tomlinson and Heather Rogers QC, Tamsin Allen of Bindmans LLP, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, Robin Shaw of Davenport Lyons, and Michael Nathanson of Thrings, who represents booksellers. The journalists who have been helpful to me include David Leigh of The Guardian, and my former colleague on The Observer—the doyen of investigative journalism, if I might call him that—the legendary Michael Gillard Senior, who has done so much to advance the cause of responsible investigative journalism in this country over many years.
I also thank the ministerial team for the way in which the debate has been conducted, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), and the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) for all the work he put into the Bill.
I welcome the assurances that the new team have given on their open mind. I hope their lordships seize on that assurance, because the test of the Bill is whether the abuses that hon. Members have highlighted can happen again. If they can, we need to return to the nitty-gritty and ensure that they cannot.
6.27 pm