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Mr. Boateng: It depends on how long he goes on.
Mr. Wilshire: If the hon. Gentleman is not in a good mood, I might go on even longer, and he will have even more to explain. If he is tempted to tell the House that he has absolutely no intention of acting instantaneously, he will take away the only reason that he has for opposing the new clause.
Mr. Viggers: I remind my hon. Friend that the Government have so far not lost a Division, and all that is required is that the Home Secretary snap his fingers, and the terracotta warriors will wander through the Lobbies and the Bill will be passed.
Mr. Wilshire: I am incredibly tempted by that course of action, but I have been trying to be helpful and friendly and not too aggressive to Labour Members, so I shall resist that temptation, although I agree with my hon. Friend.
All I am saying to Ministers is that if they have no intention of acting instantaneously, the new clause will in no way mess up their Bill. If they intend to take a decent amount of time to make proposals, consult, listen and seek our approval, no harm whatsoever will come from accepting the new clause. Knowing the Minister of State to be a kind, reasonable man who wants to be generous on a Thursday afternoon, I am sure that he will support the new clause.
Mr. Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale):
I shall be brief because I know that the Minister is anxious to respond to the many excellent points made by Conservative Members during the debate.
I entirely accept the points made by those who have said that they do not question the Government's motivations. I am sure that the Government did not get
up in the morning thinking, "How can we penalise the media?" They are genuinely motivated by a wish to protect children, as are Conservative Members, but we happen to think that the Government are not going about that in a terribly effective way.
Some in the media do, perhaps, question the motivations of a Home Office that, it will be remembered, not too long ago sought an injunction to prevent the publication of a report that turned out to have been leaked by the Home Office. None the less, I shall pass over that point.
I shall concentrate my remarks on comments made to me by Mr. Mike Glover, the editor of the Westmorland Gazette in my constituency. It is a fine newspaper, which is very well dug in with its local community but which none the less has serious concerns about these issues. Mr. Glover's first point is that the problem with any such legislation, whether or not it comes into effect after the Government have made welcome concessions, is that if we prevent the press from publishing accurate information, we do not stop inaccurate information circulating elsewhere. There will still be gossip and people will retail versions of stories in pubs, on street corners and over their neighbour's fence. If we do not publish the accurate information, we may end up damaging children and causing them more difficulty than if we had allowed the press to report the facts straightforwardly and immediately.
Mr. Glover's second point is that the Westmorland Gazette is a fine newspaper and very successful in its area, but it does not have the largest circulation and it is not the best-known publication in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Boateng:
The hon. Gentleman is doing his best to change that.
Mr. Collins:
I am, as the Minister says, doing my best. It follows that that newspaper, like many other regional and local weekly newspapers, does not have at its disposal a large and well-financed legal department that is able to offer the editor a great deal of well-researched legal advice on these very difficult decisions. The restrictions could therefore be particularly onerous for local and regional newspapers--national newspapers probably have large legal departments and do not run the risk of editors being caught out.
I might add that since the debate has so far concentrated on the print media, it is worth noting that we are dealing with measures that will also relate to the broadcast media. A station such as Border Television--the smallest ITV station--in my constituency does not have a large legal department. The pressures on editors that we have described are even more acute for television stations because the time between a story breaking and the time when the broadcast media would expect to put it out could, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) said, be a matter of mere minutes. How can stations make accurate decisions on such matters so swiftly?
Mr. Glover's third and final point, which is important, is that the Home Office proposals, which would be aided by new clause 3, would break into the important co-operative relationship between local police forces and
local newspapers. A senior police officer, from outside the immediate area covered by a local journalist or a local newspaper, might go to court to seek an injunction to provide a ban, thus souring relationships that had been built up over many years between a local beat journalist and local beat police officers.
If co-operation between the local media and the local police is broken down, the police may run the risk of losing one of their very important assets in the fight against crime. The Government should use the opportunity granted them under new clause 3 for further reflection to think about that, because some local police officers in my constituency do not think that it is necessarily a terribly good idea to put them in an adversarial relationship with their local media.
I now come to my final point, which I do not believe has been made in the debate. In the age of the internet and the ever greater dissemination of information, successive Governments have found that many of their attempts to impose restrictions on the free flow of information are probably doomed to failure. That problem, encountered by the previous Government, is increasing.
When I said that if accurate information was suppressed, inaccurate information would be circulated by other means, I also said that at the moment such information was probably spread by people talking to each another over the garden fence. In future years, increasingly, even local stories will be posted on the internet. One will never, realistically, be able to stop that.
Between 10 and 20 years ago, the "Spycatcher" case showed that it was impossible to stop information being published outside the geographical jurisdiction of a court or a nation. If the Bill passes unamended by newclause 3, there is a risk that such information could be posted on the internet. Even if it is posted simply between Kendal and Ambleside in my constituency, it could go via a server in the United States, be bounced around Australia and then return to the United Kingdom. Legislation of the type that the Bill represents must take account of these things.
My concern is that if one prevents the publication of accurate stories by the practitioners of professional, researched journalism, a bulge of inaccurate information will erupt elsewhere, which may in time come to be more damaging to children and young people than the accurate stories would have been. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity granted them in new clause 3 to think further about these matters.
Mr. Boateng:
This has been a good debate, in which we have given this subject the considered and careful reflection that it deserves. To that extent, it mirrors our debates on this and other subjects in Committee.
The new clause provides for the Secretary of State to give notice of his intentions to make an order to activate the provisions of clause 44 in relation to child victims and witnesses; to publish his reasons for reaching his decision so to do; and to consult the media in whichever way he chooses. It then requires the Secretary of State to wait a further six months before making the order even if, in the interim, Parliament has debated the issue in both Houses and has agreed to the order being made.
That is rather unusual. It is an odd and, in our view, unnecessary way of proceeding. I well understand the spirit in which the hon. Member for Ryedale
(Mr. Greenway) moved the new clause, but we need to get real. It has been suggested by the hon. Members for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) and for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) in their careful and considered interventions--later I shall discuss in more detail the arguments made by the hon. Member for Gosport--that the Secretary of State for the Home Department might wake up one morning and, on a whim, bring these provisions into force. That, from two parliamentarians who, with the greatest respect, have been around a bit, demonstrates an ignorance--I believe, a wilful ignorance to enable them to make what they regarded as a good debating point--of the way in which the House works.
Mr. Wilshire:
Will the Minister give way?
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