My Lords, I want to take a moment to respond to some points made by noble Lords who do not support my amendment. I suggest that they protest too much. Some noble Lords have suggested that the necessary test is too high, but I stress that the amendment simply requires an intention to publish, not a requirement to publish. I also understand that in 1998 the noble Lord, Lord Lester, argued that the provision “undertaken with a view” was too speculative. He did not support it at that time, so it is surprising that he opposes my amendment today.
My advice from eminent lawyers is that these amendments do not in any way breach human rights law. Instead, they reinstate an equal balance between freedom of speech and personal privacy. Nor is there any reason why, for example, this amendment would require footage from Hillsborough to be destroyed. It would stop newspapers hanging on to data illegally for any unspecified period. That is just one of the good things this amendment would do. The amendments would not allow debate on necessity from the subject of a planned story. The subject would not know about it, and many journalists have commended the importance of these amendments.
I have thought about these amendments. I think there has been some wilful misrepresentation of the role of the press recognition panel. None of the amendments in this or the later group would favour Impress over any other recognised independent regulator. The noble Lord, Lord Black, implied in Committee that he believed that IPSO would meet the Leveson criteria if it applied to the press recognition panel for approval. It could move towards recognition, so to say that this is about trying to favour Impress is nonsense.
I remind the House that my family was subject to data fishing trips with no genuine public interest. Has the media changed its behaviour? I suggest not and I give a couple of quick examples. IPSO is not the game changer that has been suggested. It is still not a very
clean game. I remind noble Lords of a couple of front page code breaches followed by tiny footnotes for a correction with no equivalent prominence.
“1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis”.
“Queen backs Brexit”. These reflect some of the most important topics being debated in the country today, yet they are not corrected adequately. Or the Mirror front page:
“Ebola terror as passenger dies at Gatwick”.
In fact, nobody had Ebola, there was no terror because nobody knew about it and it was not at Gatwick. The Mirror printed a tiny apology and IPSO did nothing about it. Or the lady who lost a huge amount of weight and agreed to a feature in a local magazine which described her successful weight loss. She said she had had to shower before she lost weight because she could not fit in the bath. The Daily Star picked up the story:
“Too fat to wash! Grubby gran who weighed 27 stone didn’t bath for 20 years”.
This was not true, was not the story and IPSO did nothing.
I have listened to the Government’s arguments. All that Amendment 50A does is to raise the bar for processing data to be “necessary” for an intended future publication. I am an academic myself. I argue that the ethical standard of the processing of personal data being necessary is a standard that is already in place in our universities. These are Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations. He considered that the Data Protection Act was not in balance. I think that it is right that the public’s privacy rights and publishers’ free expression rights are properly balanced to protect the best of both. We will not make progress in achieving this balance by some of the hyperbole we have seen in the press and in the House today about these amendments. We will make progress by listening to all sides, considering the arguments and coming to a reasoned conclusion. That is what Sir Brian Leveson was appointed to do.
I have heard the suggestion of noble Lords that it is not the right moment to vote on this amendment and that there is going to be an opportunity to debate these issues further in the new year, by which time, perhaps, we will have the result of the consultation that was begun as an urgent 10-week consultation a year ago, on the day that a previous amendment in a similar vein was to be voted on in the other place. We have still not got the report from that consultation. I think I want to wait to see what is going to emerge from the consultation and I hope that it will be forthcoming before we reach Third Reading.