Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
TUESDAY 6 MARCH 2007
SIR CHRISTOPHER
MEYER KCMG, MR
TIM TOULMIN
AND MR
RICHARD THOMAS
Q180 Mr Hall: Is it in the Code of
Practice?
Sir Christopher Meyer: No, of
course it is not in the Code of Practice.
Q181 Mr Hall: Do you think it should
be?
Sir Christopher Meyer: No, I do
not and I will tell you why. I thought I had solved this with
the NUJ but clearly I have not from reading their submission.
On 7 February 2006 I attended a meeting of the NUJ Parliamentary
Committee, I think that is its title, Austin Mitchell is the Chairman,
John McDonnell is a member and Jeremy Dear, the General Secretary
of the NUJ, was present. True enough, they said to me, "Why
do you not have a conscience clause in the Code of Practice?"
and I said, "We have to draw a line between what is basically
an employment practice between a newspaper editor and a journalist
and what rightly belongs to our Code" and what we said—and
Tim was there as well at this meeting—was "So, we are
not going to interpose ourselves at the PCC on employment matters
and become an employment tribunal, but what we do insist on...",
and this is spreading, I hope, pretty widely around the UK, "[...]
is that all journalists including editors should have as a matter
of course written into their contracts respect for the Code of
Practice". I said that is the main campaign of the PCC in
this respect. Mr Dear, General Secretary of the NUJ, was there
saying, "That is great".
Mr Toulmin: That is correct.
Sir Christopher Meyer: We thought
we had resolved that matter with the NUJ but it has come back
again like a Jack-in-the-box.
Q182 Mr Hall: What about third party
referrals?
Sir Christopher Meyer: In principle,
we look at third party complaints with a great deal of care. We
do not rule them out absolutely. There is a feeling in the land
that we will never look at them, we might look at them. What we
are more concerned about is a first party complaint rather than
a third party complaint, so that if a third party complains about
something which has happened to somebody else, the direct subject
of the story, we would go back and check with the first party
to find out whether they wish to pursue the complaint and if the
first party says, "No, I do not want to do that", then
we will turn down the third party. I can give you an example of
this.
Q183 Mr Hall: No, I think that is
perfectly okay. Compensation?
Sir Christopher Meyer: We do not
do money. If we did money we would have lawyers, if we had lawyers
the whole blinking thing would come to a grinding halt. Every
now and again as part of a conciliation process and we resolve
a complaint the editor will make an ex gratia payment for
whatever reason, but that is not the same thing as compensation.
Q184 Mr Hall: Ombudsman?
Sir Christopher Meyer: We are
the ombudsman.
Q185 Mr Hall: You are?
Sir Christopher Meyer: We are
the ombudsman and another one of the reforms that we introduced—
Q186 Mr Hall: Part of the make-up
of the Press Complaints Commission is that you have got editors
on the board itself so that is taking self-regulation right until
the end if you are not independent, is it not?
Sir Christopher Meyer: Mr Hall,
I am not quite sure where to start.
Q187 Mr Hall: Well, you have not
got a lot of time.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Very quickly,
on the matter of independence, yes, we have editors on the board
of commissioners because one of the bases of our operation is
that the buck stops with the editor and it is right that editors
drawn from all over the land, not just national newspapers, should
be there to provide their viewpoint when we come to discuss matters.
A key thing, the moral heart of this, is that they are in the
minority and the majority of the board of commissioners comprises
publicly appointed lay commissioners who have no connection whatsoever
with the newspaper industry, plus the fact that the permanent
staff at the PCC, a dozen of us give or take, have never been
employed in journalism and I do not want anybody to be working
on our staff who is any way previously beholden to the newspaper
industry. That is why we are independent.
Q188 Chairman: Can I move on to the
number of complaints that you receive and what happens to them.
It has been suggested that the fact that the number of complaints
upheld has steadily fallen is a mark of your success. On the other
hand, the number of complaints that you receive has been rising
steadily and the vast majority are resolved without any formal
adjudication. You will have heard the comments from witnesses
earlier that whilst it may be obviously in the interests of the
complainant to resolve a complaint, there is a wider public interest
that the PCC should lay down markers, they should publish adjudications,
they should produce case law which other newspapers can then see
and be guided by in future and that is simply not happening now.
Sir Christopher Meyer: It is happening,
Chairman, and I beg to differ, if you allow me to do so. On the
matter of setting down standards publicly and very visibly, all
our adjudications are published on our website. The website has
a full compendium of all adjudications made and people can refer
to that very easily.
Q189 Chairman: The adjudications
have fallen to a trickle.
Sir Christopher Meyer: May I go
through my critical path as quickly as I can. Again, as a result
of changes introduced in 2003 we now have a booklet called The
Editor's Handbook.
Mr Toulmin: The Code book.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Sorry,
the Code book, which effectively in summary form brings together
the jurisprudence around each clause of the Code so that journalists,
but not only journalists, can see how we have implemented the
Code over the last 16 years. I would like Tim to speak on the
point about the arithmetic of this. There is one very important
point, there is almost a direct arithmetic correlation between
the decline in the number of adjudications and the rise in the
number of resolved complaints. I would simply point out to you
that in 2006, last year, we resolved, to the complainants' satisfaction,
more complaints than we had ever done in our entire history.
Mr Toulmin: May I say a point
or two about the charge that we adjudicate too few complaints.
It ignores two things, firstly the subject matter of the complaint
and, secondly, what the complainant actually wants. I did not
hear in that criticism of the PCC anything about the complainant's
wishes. A lot of the time what they want is very quick, discreet
resolutions, sometimes in the paper, prominent apologies and so
on. They do not want to pursue it to full adjudication. Secondly,
some of the types of things we are dealing with, the subject matter
is not sufficiently grave to merit a whole adjudication, it is
more suited to the type of internal resolution that you were hearing
about earlier. There is a third point which is that every press
council or press complaints commission in the world which starts
out and then gets to the maturity that we are has exactly the
same experience. There are a lot of adjudications in the early
years setting the boundaries, then they become less necessary
as the culture changes within the industry and also editors make
increasingly good offers. If the offer that the editor makes to
the PCC is inadequate we will proceed and adjudicate and uphold
the complaint. In virtually every adjudication we make which criticises
the editor it has involved at some stage an offer made by the
editor, we do not simply accept everything to be resolved just
because some form of offer is made.
Q190 Chairman: You say that you have
set boundaries as a result of experience, in actual fact the number
of complaints has been steadily rising so it is not the case that
those boundaries cause the newspapers now to know what is acceptable
and what is not, the difference is that you are not adjudicating,
you are resolving. Those resolutions are actually all breaches
of the Code, are they not?
Mr Toulmin: They may well be,
yes, they probably are breaches of the Code, but in any system
of conciliation you do get editors going the extra mile and actually
sorting out something to the satisfaction of the complainant where
it may not necessarily be a breach of the Code if it has ended
up being considered around the table with the full board. That
is one of the other advantages of having a system of conciliation
where there is not a winner-takes-all outcome and you can bring
two parties together.
Q191 Chairman: Are you concerned
that there appears to be a creeping privacy law coming in through
the courts operating the Human Rights Act and the European Convention?
Certainly one of the explanations which has been given for this
is the fact that the courts have felt that they have to intervene
more and more because the Press Complaints Commission has not
been establishing a clear body of its own rulings.
Mr Toulmin: I think that is extremely
unfair and Chris will no doubt expand on that. The volume of privacy
cases that we deal with is enormous compared with the courts.
The range of what we do on privacy is much greater than what the
courts consider, it runs right through from early stage inquiries
through to publication, decent remedies for people that does not
invite the type of scrutiny that the courts would inevitably bring.
As to concerns, it is no secret that there are people within the
industry who are concerned about the power vested in a very small
number of judges to prevent information from coming out. If you
look at the totality of what is going on in privacy complaints
and resolution, the overwhelming majority of things are still
going on through the PCC despite the fact that the Human Rights
Act has now been around for quite a large number of years.
Sir Christopher Meyer: I think
the only thing I would add to that is that if you look at recent
privacy decisions, they are often interpretations of the law of
confidence or confidentiality, I never quite know which term is
right. If you are sitting in the editor's chair, and I sometimes
try and put myself in that position, and you look at the totality
of these decisions in the last two or three years, I think one
of the things that does strike you is their incoherence, it is
very hard to link them all together and have a clear sense of
what they are trying to say, whereas I think if you look at the
hundreds of privacy decision rulings that we make every year—we
did several hundred last year—there is a clear corpus of
"jurisprudence". Whatever may be going on in the legal
world, there may be genuine cause for concern here, there is a
role for the law and there is a role for us and we should not
see it as a zero sum game.
Q192 Chairman: Would you accept that
certainly recent rulings by a small number of judges do mean that
the role of the law seems to be getting bigger and bigger and
it is beginning to intrude on to your area?
Sir Christopher Meyer: It may
do and one should not be complacent about this. Some of these
cases to which you refer are, at the moment, subject to appeal
so we do not know what is going to pop out at the other end. I
think there are intrinsic advantages on the privacy front to encourage
people to come to us which they are in increasing numbers. It
goes back to something I heard when you were interrogating witnesses
previously. One of the great advantages of coming to us if you
are a complainant is, unlike in the courts, you are not turned
over in public time after time after time so that the original
sin, if you like, is not endlessly compounded by adversarial public
conflict between the prosecuting attorney and the defending attorney.
As long as we can do that and it is free and you do not need a
lawyer, I believe people will keep on coming to us in very big
numbers.
Q193 Rosemary McKenna: Can you tell
us a bit more about the work that you do to proactively prevent
publication? Can you prevent publication? If someone comes to
you to say, "Look, this is going to be published, I do not
think it is in the public interest", can you do anything
to help in those areas?
Sir Christopher Meyer: Tim will
develop this. What I would say is that one of the lessons that
we drew, and you were there, from the last hearing of this Committee
in early 2003 was that although it was always a bum rap that we
were just reacting and did not act proactively, nonetheless, one
of the lessons that we drew from the previous hearing four years
ago was that we needed to do more proactively and I think we really
have done that. A lot of the work involves, for example, at times
of great tragedy like 7/7, before anybody gets harassed by a journalist
making sure that we are using the Cabinet Office as a disseminating
unit, going to hospitals, going to centres for victim support,
making sure that they are liberally supplied with the literature
and the instructions on how to complain and how to deal with harassment.
We do this time and time again to anticipate events where indeed
vulnerable people may feel themselves under threat. We have the
ability through the so-called desist order to stop harassment.
You have had an extensive discussion about Kate Middleton and
one of the things that we did immediately after her birthday scrum
was to make sure that the desist notice went around all the newspapers
and I think there was direct cause and effect there. Most of the
time we do this for people who lay no claim to celebrity at all,
I think we had about 30 which we did last year. We issue guidance
notes, we are on the road all the time evangelising, teaching
and explaining what it is we do. The other thing we do is we almost
go to the seed corn if you like, go to universities and colleges,
and hold seminars that teach how the system works, so we are out
there.
Q194 Rosemary McKenna: You will be
surprised to know, therefore, that I did a trawl of members of
both the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Opposition and very
many of them, including Government Ministers, had no idea that
they could come to you prior to a story being published, which
I think is certainly an area of concern for me and which we can
deal with. If that is the case, are you having fewer cases brought
to you because people do not know and do you need to do more?
Mr Toulmin: It is important to
say that I think the PCC has no powers of prior restraint, we
cannot simply order a newspaper not to run something just because
somebody phones us up but to answer your question, do things change,
are they altered, do stories or pictures not appear after the
PCC's intervention, I think it is fair to say that does happen,
and that is the editor taking a decision under the Code not to
proceed. We are available 24 hours a day, we give advice both
to people who phone directly to us who may be in the papers about
how they can talk to editors and journalists and also we have
calls from editors themselves saying, "Give us some advice
here, what are the boundaries likely to be?" Things either
get changed or do not appear as a result of that sometimes. We
are equally concerned to hear if people are genuinely encountering
problems that they do not know how to get hold of us. Christopher
and I met a couple in Liverpool at our open day last year where
they had clearly encountered press harassment and I think we were
upset to hear that they had not known about us because we would
have been able to deal with it in an instant. Clearly, there is
more to do there.
Q195 Mr Evans: I want to finish up
on the Goodman case if I can. In light of everything that has
gone on, are you yourselves happy that the practices that were
utilised there are not widespread?
Sir Christopher Meyer: One can
never know but what one can do is introduce better procedures,
tighter guidelines, higher standards, and that is the purpose
of the investigation which we are now actually in the middle of.
I suppose after Goodman and Mulcaire were sent to jail and Coulson
resigned we could have sat back and said, "Well, the law
has taken its course, that is it", but we initiated an investigation
and it is going to have three stages. First of all, with the new
editor of the News of the World, which Mr Hinton referred
to, we are in part trying to establish what went wrong, what are
the lessons to be learned and what is now in the light of all
that best practice. When we are finished our dialogue with Mr
Myler we will then, if you like, use that as a platform to address
the entire industry of the United Kingdom—the newspaper
and magazine industry of the United Kingdom—to establish
what is their practice, what have they got in place to ensure
that none of their journalists do the same thing. When we finish
that, we will draw some conclusions, discuss them on the board
of commissioners, we will then publish a report which will set
out our findings, make our recommendations. I cannot quite see
the shape of it at the moment but we will probably embrace a set
of guidelines drawing from this case to try to ensure that it
will not happen again. If I could abolish sin I would but I cannot,
so I cannot put my hand on my heart and say it is not happening
anywhere, I pray to God it is not happening anywhere. They should
learn their lessons from this.
Q196 Mr Evans: You heard perhaps
what I said earlier on about the Chris Tarrant case as well. The
manager for Chris Tarrant gave a submission about the way that
the family were being harassed following revelations of Chris
Tarrant's private life and he says how remarkably effective the
PCC were in ensuring that the family were left alone.
Sir Christopher Meyer: Good.
Q197 Mr Evans: Have there been instances
whereby people have approached you because of harassment where
you think that it has not really worked, that even with your guidance
still people are being harassed?
Mr Toulmin: In theory, editors
could say when we pass on one of these desist messages we should
try to make ourselves available as well to give advice on the
back of them. In theory, they could say there is a public interest
under the Code for carrying on, there is an urgent need to get
answers from this person. In practice that has never arisen. When
we have forwarded these messages and talked to editors about their
journalists and photographers being there there has not been the
case of people continuing. No formal complaint of harassment has
then had to materialise. Of course, there may be circumstances
where it is necessary for journalists in the public interest to
remain asking questions.
Q198 Mr Evans: Kate Middleton has
been mentioned time and time again this morning and clearly the
"paparazzi scrum" that occurred outside her house on
her birthday. Whereas you have clear influence over what happens
with journalists and photographers within this country, you have
none from outside of this area other than if newspapers domestically
decide not to buy photographs or stories because they feel that
somebody has breached the Code. Do you want to comment on that,
Sir Christopher?
Sir Christopher Meyer: It is an
issue. I think one of the things that we observed with the Kate
Middleton case was having sent round the desist order and shut
off the demand, if you like, for pictures from the domestic industry,
this seemed to have a calming effect on everybody else as well.
We know that there are paparazzi out there who are supplying the
Spanish market, or the Russian market, or the American market,
and we do not have the powers to stop that; I am not quite sure
who has the powers to stop that. There is no doubt at all, and
I noticed this in early incarnations in my life, that foreign
journalists and photographers do tend to feed off what is of interest
to the domestic industry. If British newspapers and magazines
say, "We are not going to buy these pictures anymore, we
are not going to do this", it does tend to shut down a lot
of other people. It is not foolproof, it is not failsafe, but
it does help.
Q199 Rosemary McKenna: After the
scrum all went away there are still photographs being published
of the young woman in question out with friends and I think that
is such an intrusion on a young person's life.
Sir Christopher Meyer: This is
another one of the areas where we have the most animated debate
in the PCC on what is legitimate, what is not, what is a public
space, what are the expectations of privacy? It was clear as a
bell to me, although we never had a formal discussion in the board
of commissioners, that making it almost impossible for Kate Middleton
to get out of her flat, get into her car and drive safely out
of a difficult parking space, there is no justifiable public interest
for making that hard for her. Going to a very public nightclub
where you know the paps are there in their packs and waiting outside
and you know what you are going into, it is the place where celebs
go to be photographed, that is a different order of things. What
I want to say is that when you issue a desist order you are not
saying "no photographs ever anywhere", you cannot say
that.
|
