My Lords, I rise in support of the amendment and what I will say briefly has some relevance to my later Amendments 43 and 44, dealing with parliamentary privilege. I am very sympathetic to the idea explained by the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, that we should not wait for some future legislation as a result of the consideration of parliamentary privilege generally, but that where there is an issue that properly falls within the scope of defamation and nothing else, we should take advantage in this legislation to make the necessary amendments. I regard this as one necessary amendment for the reasons given by the Joint Committee on the draft Bill.
The Government stated in their response that this was best left to the forthcoming Green Paper and draft parliamentary privilege Bill. The Green Paper concluded that while some forms of correspondence between constituents were already protected by common law qualified privilege, it would be inappropriate to extend qualified privilege to all forms of correspondence as it would run the risk of potentially encouraging correspondence to MPs intended to circumvent court orders and damage the privacy or reputation of third parties. The Government expressed the view the it would better to continue to enable the courts to determine the boundaries of privilege in individual cases.
I understand that and it is an objection to a wider issue than liability and defamation procedures. It is all about breach of privacy and contempt of court. However, given that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, seeks only to provide qualified privilege in defamation proceedings and that there seems to be agreement that it is already covered by the common law in appropriate circumstances, I see no good reason in principle to oppose it. I note that the Libel Reform Campaign supports it. It suggested adding “Private” at the start of the amendment to distinguish between letters and e-mail and social media.