There will be Members who feel that section 40 should be implemented immediately and others who feel that it should never be implemented, and certainly persistent questions have been asked—including by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which I chair, last week when the Secretary of State gave evidence to us—about when this will happen and when a decision will be made. The Secretary of State has now set out a clear timetable that says there will be a consultation, at the end of which a decision will be made.
The one clear question that must be answered from that consultation is, if the Government are minded, in response to the responses they receive to the consultation, not to implement section 40, what will be done instead. As I said when the Secretary of State made her statement earlier today, the current status quo is not acceptable; we do not yet have a robust system of arbitration and redress for the press.
That is the spirit of what section 40 is about. People may debate its wording and the consequences of it, but at its heart was one simple idea: that innocent victims—people who have never courted the media and never wanted to be personalities who have, through no fault
of their own, got caught up in a major press story and had their lives trashed by it—should have some mechanism for redress that does not involve the expense of going through the courts, which is beyond the means of ordinary people. That is the spirit of section 40.
IPSO could go further in its pilot and reduce the cost of access to arbitration. It could also do as Sir Joseph Pilling suggested in his review of IPSO, by establishing proper guidelines for newspapers on the redress available when they have been ruled against or found against. No such guidelines currently exist. The industry could do a lot to make IPSO better. The outcome of the consultation and the review cannot be to maintain the status quo. We have to make a decision, and we have to ensure that however it is delivered, fair redress and arbitration are available for victims of the press.
3.45 pm