The Independent Press Standards Organisation, the newspaper industry’s own set of plans for independent self-regulation, will be given a chance to work without the new royal charter, the culture secretary Maria Miller has said.
Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Miller said that the royal charter, which was drafted by the three main political parties with lobby group Hacked Off and approved by the Queen last week, could allow Ipso to function.
More controversially, if the new independent regulator was set up properly, it could even make the new royal charter redundant Miller said. However, the minister confirmed she would encourage newspapers to let their regulator be governed by the royal charter as motivation to keep statutory regulation at bay.
“The body they’re setting up is for them to set up,” Miller said. “Self-regulation has to be determined by the industry […] the only role of the government in this was to oversee the traffic of the royal charter being put in place, which is a set of principles that will guide that.”
The body that brings together UK news and magazine publishers, The Industry Implementation Group, published the final set of plans for the establishment Ipso last week after a series of consultations across the industry, involving lawyers and senior editorial representatives covering hundreds of publications.
The final plans, which the group says the vast majority of publishers have indicated they are committed, are contained in a series of legal documents, totalling over 80 pages, which will be published on a dedicated website, www.ipso.co.uk.
The documents include the contract which will bind publishers to Ipso and give the regulator “tough powers of investigation”, “enforcement and sanction” and the “regulations under which IPSO will operate, investigate complaints and undertake standards investigations.”
