Examination of Witness (Questions 957-959)
Wednesday 21 May 2003
SIR CHRISTOPHER
MEYER KCMG
Chairman: We welcome Sir Christopher
Meyer to his first appearance before the Committee. I am going
to call on Chris Bryant to start the questioning.
Q957 Mr Bryant: Hello, Sir Christopher.
It is very good to have you along. It was nice to meet you last
year in Washington, when you had the Select Committee to visit
you.
Sir Christopher Meyer: May I say
that it was a pleasure to have you there as well.
Q958 Mr Bryant: However, you have
said a few things in public since you have been appointed, and
I wonder if I can take you up on one of them. You identified some
heresies that you believe people might be thinking of imposing
upon the PCC and on regulation of the media. One that you mention
is "any measure that would turn the PCC into a directive
body, initiating complaints at random, intervening in issues which
are nothing to do with the Code, or establishing any superior
service for the rich and famous." I am sure we would all
agree that we would not want to see any service that was special
for the rich and famous, but we have heard from quite a lot of
people who are concerned that you never take up third-party complaints,
and you do not initiate any areas of interest where there might
be a serious public interest in seeing how you see the lie of
the land.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Obviously,
when I was preparing for this job I became aware of the criticism
that the PCC was not sufficiently proactive. That is a word I
hear a very great deal of. I obviously looked into the record,
and I thought that actually, this was an unfair charge, the issue
being not should the PCC be proactive, because I think it is proactive,
and I will mention one or two points of detail in a moment; the
issue really is whether it should be more proactive than it is
at the moment. In the very brief time I have been Chairman—I
have only been doing it for six and a half weeks—one suggestion
put to me was that the PCC should "roam across" the
entire territory of British newspapers, looking for, for example,
examples of inaccuracy or whatever. This seemed to me an entirely
unrealistic notion. We have an establishment of 13 at the moment,
which includes me. We would have to set up a vast, Orwellian organisation,
which would look at every newspaper in the land and try to see
whether there was something wrong in a story. That may not be
what you have been saying, but it is what some others have been
saying. I was pleased to see that the PCC has taken action of
its own initiative without the benefit of being kick-started by
a complainant. I notice that under my predecessors notes were
sent to editors at the time of the Dunblane shooting, at the time
of the Paddington rail disaster, at the time of the Amy Gehring
case, when there was an issue of payments to witnesses, and I
can see a very strong case for doing things similarly in the future.
Q959 Mr Bryant: Can I just take you
up on that? That is the first time we have heard about any of
these, and I presume that none of these instances that you are
raising are in the public domain.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I have
to say to you, Mr Bryant, that I culled that information from
the submission which my predecessors put to your Committee in
February or March.
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