My Lords, Amendments 159 and 160 are in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hollins and Lady Newlove. First, I apologise for the fact that this is the first time I have spoken on the Bill. That was not the plan: illness intervened. Anyway, I am all better now, thanks.
The purport of the amendments is simple. Content posted on social media by newspapers benefits, under the Bill as it stands, from exemption from any regulatory action by the platforms. Nowhere does the Bill set up a system for the public to complain about such pieces. Newspapers can have any complaints system they want and still benefit from the exemption. Under our amendments, the exemption would apply only to newspapers that have a system for public complaints that meets proper standards—at the very least, the complaints code must be independently set up and not under the control of newspapers, their editors or any puppet regulators they may set up.
Noble Lords will have noticed that the amendments do not say that the system must measure up to the standards required by the Press Recognition Panel and monitored by a body approved by that panel; at the moment, only Impress would qualify. We have omitted that particular way of making sure that the complaints system works not because it would not be perfectly good—it would—but because the very mention of PRP/Impress is a red rag to a bull to those who control the press, so we kept the red rag in our pockets. This, of course, says more about those who control the press than about the admirable PRP/Impress set-up, which has, within its limited practical scope, been doing a very fine job.
What the amendments do mean, however, is that newspapers cannot any more hide behind their fig leaf IPSO, the so-called Independent Press Standards Organisation. I know that some Members of your Lordships’ House are IPSO fans who fought for it tooth and nail; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is its chair. I pay tribute to that organisation: the political skills it has deployed in its attempts to give itself credibility have amazed even me, somebody who has been around politics for nearly 50 years. Two former Northern Ireland officials have been hired to produce whitewash reports on it: appointed by IPSO, terms of reference from IPSO and paid for by IPSO. They did their duty. Only last week—perhaps it knew the Bill was coming up in your Lordships’ House—it actually upheld a complaint: that against Jeremy Clarkson for abusing Meghan. That was an event as rare as bumping into a dodo on the streets one night: only three in 1,000 complaints are upheld by IPSO.
A more objective academic view of IPSO than mine was provided by the Media Standards Trust, a study by the academics Martin Moore and Gordon Ramsay published in 2019. It found that IPSO fell short on 25 of 38 Leveson recommendations. I am sorry—we have not heard the word “Leveson” for a while, and I am not sure we are still allowed to utter it, but I will. IPSO has never in its history established a single standards investigation. It has never fined a publisher. It and its editors set the code to suit themselves.
Ever intrepid, I once tried complaining about a case—a slam dunk case, if I may ask the House to take my word for it—against the Express about its use of
something it wrongly described as a poll. It was an intriguing experience. IPSO followed the procedural rules minutely and scrupulously, if slowly. The Express obfuscated. Eventually, IPSO produced a ruling that was so bizarre and incomprehensible that I hesitate to describe it to the House and, of course, turned down my complaint. That experience is very typical. Some 1,500 people give up on their complaints every year, despairing of fighting their way through IPSO and the newspapers’ attritional system. The average complaint takes about six months to resolve.
These amendments, partly for the reasons I have already mentioned, do not attempt to specify what body can rule. It could be a body approved by the PRP or one adhering to another kosher code. What should be clear, however, is that the regulator should not be a pussycat regulator controlled by the press, as IPSO is. It should be a genuinely independent regulator with a genuinely independent code to enforce.
“You’re against free speech, Lipsey; you want state regulation”. But there is no inhibition on free speech in our amendments. They merely provide a way of hearing complaints after pieces have been printed, and the state need have nothing to do with it. Incidentally, I find great curiosity in the way in which this state regulation bogey is played about with in this debate. In fact, Ofcom is already a state regulator of many of the things that would be covered by our amendments. Nevertheless, the cry of “state regulation” is obviously red blood that the proponents of total freedom want.
I too want freedom. I spent a third of my working life as a journalist. I was deputy editor of two national newspapers and Bagehot of the Economist. I believe in press freedom to my very core. If I thought for a moment that these amendments in any way threatened press freedom, I would not be proposing them tonight, but I am perfectly certain that they would not. Instead, they would put some inhibition on newspapers planning to abuse often innocent people on their websites; not stopping them saying it but subjecting them to complaints if they do so, which would be independently adjudicated.
I, my co-signatories and my noble friends on the Front Bench are aware that a media Bill is coming up this Session, next Session or sometime sooner or later— I hope sooner, obviously. That will explicitly end the incentives for newspapers to join an independent regulatory system, such as PRP/Impress, by repealing Section 40 of the Act that gives them the incentives to do so. When we last debated these matters, my noble friend Lord Knight on the Front Bench argued that this Bill was not the right way to tackle the complaints problem, and that it could be done under the media Bill. I am pleased to say that my party, the Labour Party, has specifically pledged that it will not repeal Section 40 in any media Bill introduced if and when it takes power. I respect my noble friend Lord Knight’s argument so, for the avoidance of doubt, we shall not seek the opinion of the House on this amendment. But let the press be in no doubt: Parliament remains on the case—sometimes more intently, sometimes less intently; once agreed on the royal charter, but that has gone down the river; but always ready to act if the newspapers defeat the rights of the public to complain.
We will not finish the job tonight, nor with this Bill, but examples of egregious press behaviour continue to mount up. I know that some of them are in the past, and we were all following the recent High Court case, but they still appear to be around. The question will not go away. The Government continue to attempt to curry favour with the press—the Prime Minister even went to a Rupert Murdoch party rather than attend a climate conference—but, at the end of the day, the power of the press is declining. The force of those who argue for a better complaints system multiplies. Sooner or later, something will have to be done.
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