Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I listened with interest to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and his comments about the rich and famous being able to take cases to court. This is what worries me about the lack of no-win no-fee. I am not concerned about the rich and famous, I am concerned about ordinary men and women, who maybe only once in their life have been defamed by a newspaper. At the Leveson inquiry one former editor said, ““If it sounds good or if it sounds like the truth, just lob it in””—just to lob it in for a woman or a man who is living a quiet life is very cruel and hard. For those of us who have approached newspapers and said, ““What you have said about me is wrong””, their first reaction is, ““If you don’t like it, write a letter and we will print it in the readers’ column””. How insulting is that, that I or anyone else should then make a contribution to a newspaper—which is usually a nasty newspaper that you would not even have in your home—by putting a letter into their column? That is even the line that they take with the Press Complaints Commission. Everyone knows that when anyone takes up a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission, they are not even looking for money, they are looking for some redress, and that is the first course of action that they take. Years ago, perhaps in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, it used to be the case that if a newspaper printed something that was wrong about you, it was a matter between you and the newspaper. This is not the case nowadays, because when a newspaper prints an allegation, there is a press preview on Sky News or the BBC, where they get some talking heads to chew over what has been said about you that day. That means that even when you are deeply embarrassed about what has gone out, and you have not even had a chance to redress the balance, within hours of that newspaper being published hundreds of thousands of viewers are able to get a look at that newspaper because they are invited to do so by another press organisation. I note the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has made about local newspapers. When is it that people take offence at a local newspaper? There is maybe the odd individual. But a local newspaper says to itself, ““We do not have the resources to involve ourselves in a law suit, so we had better be careful before we go to print””. My local newspaper is the Springburn Evening Times. While there have obviously been people who have taken exception to what it has had to say, I have never known anyone to take it to court, because as an organisation it is careful about what it does.