I am very pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), not least because it allows me to dispense with the first part of my speech, which will please the whole House. He has made exactly the right points in relation to what is known as the immigration exemption. It makes unnecessarily contentious a technically complex and, as Members on both sides of the House have said, necessary Bill. It makes EU citizens second-class citizens and allows the Home Office to collect and store data in a way that undermines other protections in the Bill, which means that it is something that we should not support. I hope that the Government will reconsider it.
I will spend what time I have dealing with the other matter of contention, which a number of Members on both sides of the House have raised: the amendments made in the other place. There are two. One is a requirement on the Government to proceed with a Leveson 2 public inquiry, and the other would effectively bring in, for the purposes of data protection offences, section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which introduces costs. It would ensure that individuals affected by data protection offences—one could read across into defamation and other matters—committed by national newspapers had affordable access to justice in any action against those newspapers. That is the essence of it.
The second part of the Leveson inquiry was promised to the victims of press abuse by all party leaders in the clearest possible way, and it is difficult to see what has significantly changed since that time. Despite that, and perhaps even more surprisingly, despite the wishes and
views of Sir Brian Leveson himself, the Government announced in an arbitrary and rather casual manner in the statement last week their intention to cancel part 2. If we do not have Leveson part 2, we will not know the extent of corruption across newspaper groups, the extent of corrupt relationships with the Metropolitan Police Service, and the extent of illegality and cover-up at newspaper titles.
We need to proceed with Leveson part 2 because we owe that duty to the Hillsborough families, to the families of Milly Dowler and of Madeleine McCann, to Christopher Jefferies and to others who deserve to know the truth about what happened to them. That would have been an uncontroversial thing to say even two or three years ago, but it appears to have been forgotten. The innumerable meetings that now take place between senior members of the Government and senior people in the press—and the paucity of such meetings with the victims—speak for themselves. We have not got to the bottom of the hacking and data scandals at the News of the World, the Mirror Group titles and other newspapers. This issue does not affect only the newspapers of the right or of the left; it affects newspapers across the spectrum.
The fact that Sir Brian is firmly in favour of finishing the inquiry with extended terms of reference—we know this now, although I do not think that anyone who heard the statement last Thursday believed it to be the case at the time—really sets a precedent. I wonder when it has previously happened that the views of an inquiry chairman have been disregarded and overturned in this manner, part-way through an inquiry. If this were a scandal in any other industry, the press would be firmly behind finishing the inquiry. Public confidence in the press, and in us, will suffer if inquiries into press misconduct are abandoned, effectively at the instigation of those who run the media in this country. As I said in an intervention, if we can do this with one inquiry, we can do it with another.
The Government have quite rightly set up inquiries into the Grenfell Tower disaster and the contaminated blood scandal—two extraordinary scandals affecting millions of people across this country and our major institutions. What is to prevent the Government from stepping in at any time and saying, “We’re not happy with the direction. We believe that this inquiry is now irrelevant. We won’t continue it anymore”? This weakens faith in our constitution.
I turn to the amendments made in the other place regarding section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. I have heard comments that are just plain wrong, particularly from Government Members. It may just be coincidence that many of them began their remarks by saying that they were former journalists, but they then misrepresented what is intended by—and, indeed, the actuality of—section 40 and the amendments made in the other place. In any event, their comments were miscast.
Cost shifting is often a part of the cost regime in our courts. It is done to increase either access to or the administration of justice. It is done not punitively, but to encourage, and to ensure that justice functions effectively in everyone’s interests. In this case, it works by giving newspapers the option of signing up to an independent regulator that offers compulsory arbitration, or meeting the court costs of reasonable claims made against them.
This ensures that members of the public affected by press illegality can either bring a claim under low-cost arbitration or have costs protection in court. Arbitration is cheaper and quicker for both sides.
Newspapers also benefit from cost shifting, because they enjoy costs protection if they are in an independent regulator offering arbitration and a claimant rejects the arbitration service on offer. That is the key point. This is not there to punish newspapers but to protect impecunious claimants. It will also protect small, genuinely independent newspapers and small publishers. One hears that the whole local newspaper industry is against it, but 80% of that industry is owned by the big conglomerates, which have exactly the same interests—financial—as the major national newspaper chains.
The purpose of cost shifting is to enable an individual who—in the way suffered by the Dowler family, Christopher Jefferies, and those in the other cases that we are all aware of—has been horrifically maligned and harassed by newspapers to go to court, to get justice, and, in this case, to go to arbitration without the risk of losing their house and savings, or of simply being unable to get into court at all.
That risk was partly resolved—not deliberately; it came about through the way in which the law developed —by no win, no fee agreements, which meant that somebody who had been defamed or had their privacy threatened in this way could go to a lawyer and ask them to take their case. The lawyer would say, “Let’s see if it’s a good case or not”, and if it was a good case, they would agree to take it on a no win, no fee basis. That protected the litigant both from their own costs and from the costs of the other side if they lost. It was no longer the case that if someone took the Daily Mail or The Sun to court, they risked everything because the newspaper group had been able to build up costs on the other side to discourage, in effect, even the most meritorious litigation.
With the passing of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, that option went, and it is far, far more difficult to get any type of no win, no fee assistance, so we are not at that status quo; we have moved several steps backwards, and if section 40 and the amendments tabled in the other place are not passed, litigants will once again be at risk in this way. Low-cost arbitration and the need to incentivise media groups to join that service—not, as the IPSO scheme would, allowing them to pick and choose—is essential to that. It is a low-cost way of doing it, but it works just as much for the press as for the individual litigant.
Apart from the fact that a promise was made to the victims of press abuse, and the fact that this provides cost protection to newspapers and ensures that small and local newspaper groups are protected from powerful and wealthy litigants, cost shifting encourages the use of arbitration, which is quicker and cheaper for all sides and is increasingly a feature of all parts of our legal system. This poses no threat to the local press.
The alternative is IPSO. I was incredulous to hear IPSO described as a move on from the Press Complaints Commission. It is the same people running the same racket, with the same failure to address the issue. The hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin)—I do not often find myself on the same side of the argument as him—got it exactly right. This is a sham, and if we support it, we are going along with the sham.
This is not about punishing and silencing the press, as though they are the weak vessel—it is about protecting the people to whom all parties and almost every Member who was in this House at the time made a promise: the victims of egregious press harassment who suffered terrible campaigns against them. We forget that at our peril. The Government have simply waited until they think that time has moved on and the heat has gone out of this. Well, I hope that the heat has not gone out of it. I hope that the public and sufficient numbers of Members on both sides of the House will remember the duty that we owe to those victims. These are modest amendments from the other place. The idea that this is in any way tying the hands of the press is pure hyperbole. We need to incorporate the amendments, and we need to fulfil Leveson 2, because otherwise we are failing terribly the victims of press harassment.
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