Examination of Witness (Questions 936-939)
TUESDAY 8 APRIL 2003
MR CLIVE
SOLEY MP
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for coming before us, it is greatly appreciated.
Michael Fabricant
936. Ten or 11 years ago I was a new, virginal
member of Parliament, and I remember serving on what was a sort
of select committee, which was your private members Bill to introduce
privacy legislation. From what I can remember of it, all of those
ten or 11 years ago, a whole series of people came to us and gave
evidence about how their lives had been destroyed, I think, one
might correctly say, by some media. Has anything changed in the
last ten or 11 years? In your view has the situation improved?
(Mr Soley) It has. Let me say, you can
now get the book or the film, which is lodged in the House of
Commons Library. You are right, you served on it. I have a correction,
it was not a privacy Bill, it was a Bill on the freedom of the
responsibility of the press, we deliberately left out privacy
because of the conflict with press freedom and greater uncertainty
about it. The core question you ask, has anything changed? Yes,
it has. It is marginally better, but it is still nowhere near
good enough. In my mind the core of the problem is the failure
of the Press Complaints Commission as an effective regulatory
body.
937. Why do you think there is this failure?
Is it because of their inability to impose strong sanctions against
the media and/or is it because they are made up not only of lay
people but also the press themselves? What is the genesis of their
weakness?
(Mr Soley) It is a number of things: First of all,
it is set up by the press for the press, I think it starts from
the wrong position. It is not just a funding issue, the funding
of the Press Complaints Commission, which is by the press, I think
one could live with that if, as you indicate, there was a greater
balance between lay members and editors. You may remember from
the hearings 11 years ago that at that stage there was a majority
of members of the press on the Press Complaints Commission itself,
and they defended that hotly. It was yet another example of dragging
teeth out painfully over many years before they accepted that
it should not be a majority. It is still six out of 14 at the
moment. There are 16 Commission members and seven are editors.
There is one vacancy at the moment. On top of that, as I think
was pointed out to your Committee during the evidence session
from the PCC, the whole of the code is drawn up by the code committee
and every member of that committee is a member of the press. If
you go down the road of creating a structure that is so dominated
by the press you immediately put it in in terms of the interests
of the press rather than of the reading public or the complainant.
The key problem is the philosophy of the PCC, it is basically
a philosophy for negotiating between a complainant and the editor,
not adjudicating on complaints. The editors are always in a stronger
position, partly because of the knowledge, frankly. The other
big failure of the PCC is the failure to address the needs of
the reading public, in other words it does not see itself as having
a consumer protection role. It is interesting if you look at their
latest publication you will see—I am sure you are familiar
with this, this is the Annual Review 2002—on page 10 there
is a heading "Caring for the Customer". The customer
turns out to be the complainant. There is no concept of the people
who read the newspapers as having any right whatsoever. There
is a whole range of issues of that type where, frankly, however
you look at it the PCC is a body set up for the press by the press
and it is there to protect the interests of the press.
938. That is quite an indictment. Do you say
that the PCC should be reformed by changing its make-up, by changing
its charter, by changing its role or do you say that the PCC should
be scraped altogether and be replaced with something else? If
so, what else?
(Mr Soley) I think one of the other people you took
evidence from was Professor Bryant, who started off in the opposite
position to me at the time, saying that we should not go down
the road of having a Privacy Act or a statutory press complaints
body. I started off in that position, however I think both of
us have moved towards each other. I would rather have a self-regulatory
body if it is possible. I have to say the evidence over all of
the years, really since the Second World War, as I indicate in
the paper I put to you, has been of abuse by the press, followed
by an outcry over a period of time, followed by retraction by
the press and retrenchment and another set of views. I dearly
want to make it work. I do get the feeling that in recent years—and
you asked me what has changed over the last ten or 11 years—I
think there is a greater awareness by the press that they are
on the defensive. One of the reasons I mentioned in there the
recommendation about Ofcom having an additional duty was to try
and keep the pressure up over a period of time so that it did
not keep slipping off the agenda, which is what it was prone to
do.
939. Earlier on this afternoon we were talking
about the fact that there is going to be a legislative framework,
whether we like it or not, through the adoption of the Human Rights
Act. Would you prefer to see that legislation framed in law or
would you prefer to see an evolution through case law?
(Mr Soley) I think I would rather give case law time
to work. If you ask me what I would now like to see in the short
run, ie the next few years, I would like to see human rights legislation
drawn up by case law and I would like to see the Press Complaints
Commission radically reform itself into a more effective self-regulating
body.
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