Video Recordings Bill (Allocation of Time)

With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall reply to the debate—and what a pleasure it has been. What a bijou gathering of wisdom and experience this is. Two Select Committee Chairmen, the venerable battler from Bath and my old friend from Wantage have all, in their different ways, made valuable, insightful and often entertaining contributions. Would that it were always thus. We have already congratulated the British Board of Film Classification on the job that it does, by which we meant the job of classifying films, but I think I ought also to congratulate it on the job that it does in lobbying Members of Parliament and providing briefing for these debates. Rarely can the entire participating body in a debate have been so thoroughly and extensively briefed by a single organisation. I visited the BBFC's offices fairly recently and heard its arguments about one or two aspects that we may not see in exactly the same way, but I think we are in accord on most of the issues that Members, in their different ways, have discussed today: that is, the central issues. Let me deal with a few of them, hopefully not leaving out too much but also not using up too much time. The hon. Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey) could not quite resist making the anti-European point that the 1984 Act was clearly a single market liberalisation measure leading up to the Single European Act of 1985—that crowning, triumphant, extraordinary piece of Thatcherite European legislation that is the rock on which the European single market is founded, and the basis on which it continues to exist and derive so much prosperity for our countries and our Union. He mentioned several times—and other Members mentioned it as well—that the Cabinet Office had been looking into the issues. I cannot give him any more detail of who in the Cabinet Office has been doing what, but I can tell him that the need to ensure that the omission was an isolated incident and will never happen again is being taken very seriously. I agree with the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster), who praised the zeal and efficiency of the DCMS officials who finally discovered the omission and set us on the road to where we have arrived today. If we are not keen—as I am not—to get into the business of allocating blame for causing the problem in the first place, I am sure we can all unite in wholehearted praise for the people who identified it and are helping us to solve it. The issue of appeals and past convictions is a difficult one. It is not as simple as some Members seem to think. None of the questions involved have been tested in court. To date, the courts have dealt with no attempts to set aside past prosecutions. Successful prosecutions issued before the failure to refer the 1984 Act to the Commission were dealt with through due process, and as such they still stand. The courts are very reluctant to set aside convictions made years ago when the offence was proved and the defendant found guilty under an Act of Parliament passed by the House, only the enforceability of which has been invalidated by a technicality. The Act remains an Act of Parliament. It remains in force. Only the ability of the authorities to enforce is affected by the failure to notify under the technical standards directive. We think that claims for compensation are very unlikely to succeed. There is no automatic right to compensation, and any legal right to it in these circumstances would be unprecedented. I understand the prism through which Members have viewed the issue. The hon. Member for Wantage claimed that I had been given bad advice. He described the move from the current boxed physical product world to the online world, and said that he was minded to give me better advice on that than I was currently receiving.