It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who has told harrowing tales from her constituency.
There is agreement across the House that the Press Complaints Commission has failed and that there has to be something better. The dispute is not about whether things should carry on as they are, but about how things should change. Many Members have referred to the failure of the self-regulatory model for the press, but I question that. I do not think that we have a self-regulatory model. The PCC is not a regulator. Lord Leveson addresses that point in the summary of his findings:
“The fundamental problem is that the PCC, despite having held itself out as a regulator, and thereby raising expectations, is not actually a regulator at all. In reality it is a complaints handling body.”
That means that there is still an opportunity to look seriously at what real independent self-regulation would mean. The industry has a window of opportunity to do that and to present it to the House in a credible way.
There is no requirement that all newspapers, even national newspapers, are members of the PCC; it does not have the power to fine people for breaches of its code; and, crucially, as other Members have said, it has no powers of investigation. I believe that that is at the heart of the series of crises that have affected the newspaper industry for far too long. We saw that particularly strongly in the investigation by the Investigation Commissioner, Operation Motorman, which looked at the practices of the press in illegally accessing personal and confidential information, including through phone hacking. That information was published in 2006, with an update report in 2007. It suggested that 305 journalists, from a variety of national newspapers, had been in receipt of information that had been obtained illegally. Nothing was done about that.