PARLIAMENTARY REPORT
UNITED KINGDOM
Prime Minister Rt Hon. David Cameron, MP, (left) and Deputy Prime Min- ister Rt Hon. Nick Clegg, MP.
abuses of some in the press and he acknowledged “the vast majority of decent, law-abiding journalists, who want to get back to doing their job”.
Puttnam – into the Defamation Bill to provide for statutory regulation of the press. Amendments had also been inserted into the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill. On the afternoon of 18 March, amendments to the Crime and Courts Bill providing for statutory regulation were due to be debated.
Opening the emergency debate, the Prime Minister, Rt Hon. David Cameron, MP, (Con), told the House: “My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and I have today reached cross-party agreement on a royal charter that will help deliver a new system of independent and robust press regulation in our country. As Lord Justice Leveson recommended, we need a system of tough, independent self-regulation that will deliver for victims and meet the principles set out in his report. This system will ensure
Rt Hon. Edward Milliband, MP
up-front apologies, million-pound fines, a self-regulatory body with independence of appointments and funding, a robust standards code, an arbitration service that is free for victims and a speedy complaint-handling mechanism.” The Prime Minister set out the terms of the agreement. He reminded the House that Lord Leveson had recommended that the press should establish a new regulatory body but that there should be a further body to oversee it. Lord Leveson had proposed that OfCom should be given powers in statute to fulfil that secondary role. The Prime Minster said that he had always had concerns about this proposal. Instead, this “recognition body” would be established by Royal Charter. Two changes would be made in legislation – first to establish “a system of exemplary costs and damages” that would only apply to newspapers that did not participate in the regulatory scheme. Secondly, the Royal Charter itself would only be able to be altered by a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament. The Prime Minister argued that this did not amount to statutory regulation of the press and that it was important that the principle of a free press was maintained. The required amendments would be made to the Crime and Courts Bill and the three parties had agreed to remove the other amendments
142 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue Two from the others Bills. Supporting the motion, the
Leader of the Opposition, Rt. Hon Edward Milliband, MP, (Lab), said: “First…the new regulator will be independent of the press. Secondly, it is a regulator with teeth, with the powers to direct apologies and corrections of equal prominence. That matters because we know the history: a front-page story that turns someone’s life upside down, followed by an apology buried in the small print on page 36. Thirdly, this system will endure, because of the statutory underpinning being considered in another place today, which will protect the system from being tampered with
Speaking for the Liberal Democrats, the Deputy Prime Minister, Rt Hon. Nick Clegg, MP, also welcomed the deal. Like the Leader of the Opposition he set out the three aims that he believed the Charter achieved: “First, they must deliver the model of independent self- regulation set out by Lord Justice Leveson; secondly, they must command the widest possible cross-party support, which Lord Justice Leveson also said was critical, and thirdly, they must strike the right balance between protecting the great tradition of a free press in this country and also protecting innocent people from unwarranted intimidation and bullying by powerful interests in our media. Let us not forget that the hacking scandal was caused by some of our biggest newspapers, but it was still a minority of newspapers and certainly not the local and regional press, which must not pay the price for a problem they did not create.”
Ms Caroline Lucas, MP
by Ministers or watered down.” He told the House that the
agreement which had been reached was a victory for the victims of phone hacking who had campaigned against the
Some Members, like Ms Caroline Lucas, MP, (Green), expressed some concern that the proposal did not address specific issues – in her case “the endemic sexism that is sadly very present in the British press today”. Others, like Hon. Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP, (Con), saw the introduction of the Charter as introducing “the risk of increasing state power over our media, leading not immediately to direct censorship but to self-censorship, which we are already seeing with the being press reluctant to criticize the great and the good”. However, the overwhelming majority of those who spoke in the debate welcomed the agreement and the first of the amendment to the Crime and Courts Bill was later passed by 530 votes to 13.
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