I thank your Lordships very much. It goes into a procedure, called whatever everybody shouted a minute ago, and the fate of this clause, along with the rest of the Bill, will depend on what arises from that procedure.
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I have no insider information whatever on what view my party will take in those negotiations. However, it would be quite bizarre if it permitted this clause to
go through unamended. First, it never belonged in this Bill in the first place. It may be that government lawyers ingeniously found ways of claiming that it could be put into this Bill, but it did not belong here. It was on a quite different subject from the rest of the Bill, and it is a great pity that the procedures will now allow it. I hope my party will oppose it rather than let it through.
Secondly, although I cannot say that my party’s line on these matters has been a completely straight line all the way through, in any case it has never come out strongly in support of this thing, so why it could conceivably think of letting it slip through via this procedure without it even having completed its parliamentary stages is quite beyond me.
Therefore, we may have seen the end of this attempt to repeal Section 40, and it will be for the next Government, rightly so, to decide how we are to go forward on press regulation. Of course, it may be the same Government; do I see faces of optimism, and nodding on the Benches opposite? I do not think I do. However, the Minister is loyal to his Government and nods still.
There is another reason why we should oppose this. It is so transparently clear that putting this repeal into the Bill is nothing to do with its merits but all to do with the Government trying to get the support of the press for the election that is now coming—I spoke on that at length at Second Reading. If the Government had a good reason for doing this, you would expect them to have said so. However, the only definitive statement of their position I can find is from the impact assessment on the Bill:
“it was envisaged that news publishers would become members of PRP-approved regulators. However, the vast majority of publishers have not joined a PRP-backed regulator. There now exists a strengthened, independent, self-regulatory system for the press. The government recognises there has been a raising of standards across industry and commencement of s.40 is no longer necessary to improve regulation of publishers”.
That is very thin. Not one word of evidence is given for any of the propositions about the improved performance of the press. It is true that hacking has probably passed its peak, but that is because people have been fined large amounts of money by the courts protecting privacy, not because of anything the Government have done. That is the only reason we get less hacking today than we used to.
At least that proposition makes more sense than the Government’s other argument in the impact assessment, namely that as most publishers have not joined PRP, the section is not needed. That is the exact opposite of the truth. It is needed precisely because most publishers have not joined the PRP and because, without this section remaining on the statute book, the public—so the Government say—can rely on the PRP to be replaced by IPSO. Therefore, if this clause goes through, the public must mostly look to IPSO for redress.
When I say “public”, I do not mean Harry and his friends. They have got the cash. I mean ordinary persons whom the press has harassed and libelled to an extraordinary extent. If I had infinite time, I would go through the long list provided by the PRP in its superb publication on IPSOs performance. It lists individual case after individual case where a member
of the public has been left powerless in the face of this gigantic machine designed to approve everything that the press does. I am sorry—the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, will have a chance to talk later—but IPSO is an appalling regulator, a mockery, the substitution of a house-trained regulator for a real regulator.
The PRP’s document deserves close reading. How the press and IPSO treat those who complain is a catalogue of shame. I will not ask everybody to read this long document, because a short one has been made available by the Hacked Off campaign which lists IPSO’s shortcomings more briefly. IPSO does not possess regulatory powers. It is controlled by newspaper executives and not by anyone impartial. It uses a standards code written by newspaper editors. It has never fined a newspaper. It has never launched a standards investigation into a newspaper. It takes five to six months to process the complaints that it receives and upholds precisely 0.3% of them—that is three in 1,000. That is what we have in IPSO.
If the stand part amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, falls later, that deformed body will be the sole protection that those whom the press persecutes can fall back on. Rather, they could go for a legal action on privacy or libel but, unfortunately, that leads to complete inequality of armaments. The complainant does not have the cash; the newspapers do have the cash. Prince Harry can go to court; Joe Soap cannot. The status quo which the Bill preserves is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
I conclude with one observation. There is nothing personal in this; I am a great admirer of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, and if we must have a Tory chairing IPSO, I cannot think of anybody who would be better. However, if we go back to Leveson, one of the great fears was that going down this line would create a politicians’ pansy press, because IPSO will invariably back what the press wants it to back.
What is IPSO? One thing we can say is that the noble Lord who chairs it, as is true of previous noble Lords who have chaired it, was a Conservative politician in this House. There are only some things wrong with that; there is not a lot wrong with it, because the noble Lord is perfectly entitled to be. However, it is clear as a bell that it is quite wrong that anybody who is or has in recent years been an active politician should be given the job of regulating the press; I am sure that not many people would take it on that basis. We now have a body whose job is to regulate the press chaired by a man who until recently was a Conservative politician. As I said, it is nothing personal, because there were previous examples, but the ref is wearing the shirt of the team that he is supposed to be officiating over. That alone should move the House to back the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and others.