A stark warning on press regulation

At the Society of Editors conference this week the chairman of the independent press regulator, IPSO, warned editors to be “very wary indeed” of anything that looks like an attempt to corral them into submission. By Raymond Snoddy.

There is no shortage of things to worry about – Brexit, Trump, the Third Runway at Heathrow, Hinkley Point, HS2, grammar schools, inflation, IS…

But we all have to mentally multi-task these days and manage to cope with second level, though important, issues that have been bubbling away for months far from the gaze of all but the policy wonks, hackacademics and media lawyers.

Press regulation is one of those issues. I know, but please stay. An important point has been reached in what appears interminable discussions – and something really negative for the state of the press and its independence could be imposed, almost by default.

Life is far too short to go through all the twists and turns of everything that has happened since the 1,000 pages of Leveson were published.

So in case you’re too busy searching through family history to see which continuing EU countries you can manage to get a passport for, a few nuggets and highlights.

You may recall there is a statutory body, the Press Recognition Panel, funded, in the circumstances quite lavishly, by public money whose sole task is to, hmm, recognise would-be regulators under a Royal Charter.

Three years after the creation of the Royal Charter there is the small problem that, at least for now, the PRP has no-one to regulate despite considerable expenditure.

This poses acute problems of credibility after nearly two years and costs of around £2 million, although we can take all the Gilbert and Sullivan jokes as read. It also poses financial problems as the Panel rather plaintively admitted in its annual report published last week.
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“It was anticipated by the framing of the Charter that the PRP would become self-funding through fees charged to regulators. Since publishers have not moved towards recognition, it is unclear how the funding framework can follow the expected path.”

Unclear indeed. So PRP is nearly skint and will remain skint unless more public funds are forthcoming to pay for the intellectual equivalent of breaking stones.

There is hope though. There is a would-be press regulator which definitely wants recognition, Impress, largely funded by that champion of a free press Max Mosley, with some help from the Joseph Rowntree Trust.

Impress could have already been recognised except that PRP decided to extend a period of consultation to ensure that Impress met the post-Leveson criteria for a system of independent self-regulation under the Charter.

The PRP may have decided to tread warily in the face of widespread opposition from publishers, though not the National Union of Journalists.

The publisher of the Daily Mail warned the Panel that proposals to force newspapers into the Government-backed scheme would be in breech of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This, of course, is rather amusing because the increasingly xenophobic Daily Mail is an opponent of the said convention – but needs must.

All that changes on Tuesday when the PRP has promised a decision.

As sure as eggs are eggs, Impress and its 25 micro-publishers, which have no money at all to pay for regulatory fees, will be granted recognition. They will find a way of justifying their decision, but the bottom line – very much the bottom line – is that to do otherwise would be to admit formally that this wretched body has absolutely no point whatsoever.

If that was all that was involved, then we could get with talking about Brexit, Trump etc.

Unfortunately it is not so. The PRP has already appealed to the Government to implement Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. This would penalise publishers who have not signed up to a recognised regulator, so that they would have to pay their opponents’ costs in libel and privacy cases even if the complainant lost.

You can be sure that the PRP will call for such a thing again next week in the hope that they can herd at least some publishers towards signing up for a recognised regulator to avoid what, in effect, would be penal damages.

This will not happen but there is a grave danger that the government of Theresa May will decide to implement such a thing, which can be done by statutory instrument without any need for debate. So far the Government line has been to hold Section 40 in reserve to see how IPSO, the independent regulator – supported by most publishers – works out. It is far from clear whether that line will now continue to hold.

As publishers point out, apart from the emergency provisions of wartime, this would be the first time since the end of the Licensing Act in 1695 that the British state has attempted to dictate to the press.

At the Society of Editors conference in Carlisle this week Sir Alan Moses, chairman of IPSO, warned editors to be “very wary, very wary indeed” of anything that looks like an attempt to corral them into submission.

Wary that a press regulator should be recognised by a body paid for by the state and of Section 40 that would mean the press having to pay the costs of someone proven to be a liar in court.

“Regulation of the press will never work if it is compulsory – of course with that freedom comes the risk and dangers of abuse, but those dangers must be balanced against what I believe to be the far greater danger of a country and of regions without an independent untamed regional and national press,” Sir Alan said in an after-dinner speech.

What of IPSO itself? It appears to be doing a decent job, unafraid to tackle powerful editors when it has decided they have transgressed. MPs want more blood, of course. Where are the £1 million fines, they howl?

Sir Joseph Pilling, former Northern Ireland permanent secretary, found, in an external review, that IPSO was an effective regulator and also found no evidence that IPSO decision-making was improperly influenced by the industry.

He did call for some improvements such as the right of appeal on matters of substance rather than just process and longer-term funding for the Regulatory Funding Company which finances IPSO with levies on publications.

In the Trump-like logic of the day Sir Joseph will naturally be seen as part of the overall conspiracy.