My Lords, I persist in seeing this Bill from the point of view of the little man. Others tend to see it more from the point of view of web operators—I refer not only to my noble friend who has just spoken. One has constantly to bear in mind the hardest case. Unless we get it right for the hardest case—that is, a person of few means but a reputation that he or she cherishes who is grotesquely, viciously, maliciously and intentionally libelled—and unless there is some protection in this measure against the web spreading it at rapid rate across the world, we will not have done our job properly.
I strongly support Amendment 26, although I wonder whether my noble friend thinks that the lay person would find the clause easier to understand if it said “unlawfully defamatory” rather than “defamatory and unlawful”. However, that is a small point.
On Amendment 27, I was most grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, for what he said about the cost problems of a Norwich Phamarcal application. It is a great tribute to his fair-mindedness that he made that point. I tried to make it when responding to the Minister, who dismissed my earlier amendments. We have had a case in my office just recently in which there were four separate applications to the High Court to get at the identity of the defamer. Each time, it has led on to another anonymous name, and another and another. I think that the client has now given up, but the costs are in excess of £12,000. We cannot allow that state of affairs to persist, but I must move on, as that relates to other amendments.
The only point that I will make on Amendment 27 is that I have a certain anxiety about paragraph (f), which says that the regulations,
“may make provision for a procedure whereby a complainant can obtain from the court a declaration that his notice of complaint under subsection (3)(b) has met the requirements of this subsection”.
That is couched in discretionary terms—the regulations “may”. If the Government take this up in the regulations, it must remain discretionary. To force every person to lodge a notice of complaint through a High Court procedure—albeit before a master and albeit, as my noble friend Lord Marks suggests, a special procedure—would in my view simply be impractical for the vast majority of individuals. They will not get near it. It is terribly easy for us lawyers to forget how formidable and forbidding it can be—