My Lords, the amendment would provide for the Prime Minister to commission an independent inquiry into the operation of the police complaints system in respect of relationships between the police and media. It also states that the inquiry
may start only once the Secretary of State is satisfied that it would not prejudice any relevant ongoing legal cases.
The objective of the proposed new clause set out in the amendment is to seek to hold the Government to their promise to the victims of press intrusion to hold a second stage of the Leveson inquiry to look at the culture of relations between the police and the press. In November 2012, the then Conservative Prime Minister reminded the victims of press intrusion that when he set up the Leveson inquiry he had also said there would be a second part to investigate wrongdoing in the press and the police, and that his Government remained committed to the inquiry as it was then established. He then went on to say:
“It is right that it should go ahead, and that is fully our intention”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/11/12; col. 458.]
However, real doubts about the Government’s willingness to honour that promise have arisen. Ministers have subsequently used language that suggests it is no longer a question of when the inquiry will go ahead, but rather of whether it will go ahead.
Police-press relations is a significant area still to be addressed. We have yet to start to make changes to properly put right, once and for all, the kind of wrongs that have now come to light, for example, following the Hillsborough tragedy. Briefings by the police in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy had a profound adverse impact, not just on the families who had lost loved ones, but on thousands who had been at the match and returned home in a state of some trauma, only to read a few days later that the police were blaming them for the deaths of their friends and family. It surely cannot be right that a police force is able, unattributably or otherwise, to brief damning and unproven information to a newspaper. The extent and reasons for such practices, both previously and more recently, must be investigated independently and openly and those practices brought to an end.
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We need a stronger and more transparent process and culture for press relations under which false impressions cannot be put out with the intention of setting a narrative about a particular incident. As we know only too well, families who are seeking justice often find it difficult to overturn the false version of events, as proved to be the case for the Hillsborough families. The cover-up of what happened at Hillsborough was delivered on the record, off the record and even to 10 Downing Street, where the head of press at the time briefed that a “tanked-up mob” caused the disaster.
Hillsborough is not the only injustice where there has been inappropriate contact between the police and the press. The media were manipulated in the case of the Shrewsbury 24, to which the Minister referred when responding to the last group of amendments. Part 1 of the Leveson inquiry found unhealthy links between senior Met police officers and newspaper executives—links which led to resignations.
It is not only the high-profile cases that are a cause of concern. There is also an issue, on occasion, of the nature of relationships between the police and the press at a more local level, where sometimes prior
information appears to have been provided about a particular person to be arrested or a particular search carried out.
Our police do a first-class job on our behalf. As I have said on previous occasions, we all owe them a debt of gratitude for what they do in often very difficult and trying circumstances. However, episodes such as the events surrounding the Hillsborough tragedy do the police no favours. The police themselves would be further strengthened in their public standing, not weakened, by the second-stage inquiry previously promised by the then Prime Minister.
We are seeking a very clear statement from the Government today that the promise given by the then Prime Minister to the victims of press intrusion—including to the victims of the biggest example of inappropriate police briefing of newspapers—that there will be a Leveson second-stage inquiry into the culture of relations between the police and the press will be honoured and any doubt removed that a second-stage inquiry will proceed at the appropriate moment. I beg to move.