UK Parliament / Open data

Data Protection Bill [Lords]

I was coming to some of the points that the hon. Gentleman mentions, but the issue is that if Leveson 2 had gone ahead, it would have been narrowly and tightly about the relationship between the media and the police.

I absolutely welcome Leveson 1: it did a job that needed to be done by shining a light into the dark corners of some media practices and, importantly, giving redress to people who had been wronged by the media—there were too many of those. There are people who feel that it did not go far enough, and some still feel that they did not get their confirmed right of reply, but the fact is that Leveson 1 has happened, and it happened some little time ago.

Leveson 2 would have had the fairly narrow remit of the relationship between the police and the media. The argument I was coming to was that since Leveson 2 was mooted, so much has changed in the regulation of the press, as we have already been discussing. The new regulatory regime is now under way—I might come to some of its drawbacks in a moment—and, furthermore, the practices of the police have changed a lot.

Leveson shined a light on the problems. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) that the relationship between some officers and some journalists was shown by Leveson 1 to be absolutely inappropriate. I do not believe that we need a costly, lengthy, long-drawn-out second phase of the Leveson process, which probably would not do the job we would be hoping of it anyway.

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

637 cc93-4 

Session

2017-19

Chamber / Committee

House of Commons chamber
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