I will leave it to others to explain why they are adopting their position, but I do take issue with some of the assertions that have been made by some Government Members, who say that the current system is an improvement on what we had before. As I pointed out earlier, the IPSO system received over 14,000 complaints in 2021, but only 88 of them, or 0.6%, were upheld—less than 1%. I challenge anyone to say that it is a satisfactory situation to have so few complaints upheld.
I met a mother, Mandy Garner, for the first time yesterday. Her daughter was killed in a hit-and-run. In the 24 hours after Mandy was given the news and tried to relay it to her family, the Daily Mail went down to the scene of the crime and managed to purchase CCTV footage from a nearby shop that showed the accident taking place. The Daily Mail did not actually show the moment of impact in the media, but within that 24 hours, it posted that recording for people to watch under a clickbait headline.
That happened in 2020, 10 years after Hacked Off started its campaign. Mandy described her experience in an article:
“the Daily Mail published the CCTV footage of my daughter’s last moments the morning after her death with a lurid clickbait headline—just as we were trying to explain to our other children what had happened. I complained that it was an intrusion into grief and therefore in breach of IPSO’s code on this. I thought it was an open and closed case. Clearly, it was a breach. If it wasn’t, what actually would constitute a breach?”
Months of to-ing and fro-ing with the Daily Mail followed, while Mandy was mourning her daughter. She went on:
“Eventually…IPSO ruled that it was not a breach of their code. One of the reasons given was that you couldn’t make out my daughter’s face because the footage was ‘grainy’”.
There was nothing about how the footage would impact on the people who knew what had happened and knew who was involved, or about the family’s concern that the brothers and sisters of the young woman who had died would see the footage. If that is a satisfactory complaint system, I fail to understand what people think we were seeking to achieve when we went through all of Leveson and supported setting up the royal commission.
4.15 pm
These issues continue to occur. The Calcutt report described the Press Complaints Commission, which IPSO was set up to replace, as having been
“set up by the industry, financed by the industry, dominated by the industry, and operating a code of practice devised by the industry and which is over-favourable to the industry”.
If that description of the Press Complaints Commission is not what we see now, I don’t know what is. For people to assert that we are in a better place under IPSO is completely false and wrong. Further to that, the Government want to repeal section 40 in its entirety, but high-profile cases are coming down the road that will attract a great deal of public attention, and they will focus attention back on this area of press complaints and having an independent complaints system. They will call into question the decision of this House to repeal section 40.
I feel that the Government are in the wrong place on this issue, which is why I support amendment 2, tabled by the right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice). We cannot close the door on this matter; the debate on it is not finished yet. There is much more to come, and it would be wrong of this House to shut the door on an independent press complaints commission in the way that a repeal of section 40 does.