The campaign group Hacked Off is beginning to resemble a rebel force which doesn’t know when to stop fighting. And it is in danger of plucking defeat out of the jaws of victory with a state-imposed system of press regulation which is set to go to the Queen for approval at the next meeting of the Privy Council on 15 May. This is because there is no point in creating a perfect theoretical system of press regulation which no-one uses.
Hacked Off got a dream deal on 18 March when the three main political parties agreed to a beefed-up Royal Charter-backed system of press regulation. The dream goes that the new regulator will be completely independent of Parliament and the press, editors will be in a minority on its code committee and it will have the ability to compel placement of front-page apologies.
It is backed up by two pieces of legislation which made their way on to the statute books last week. Under the Enterprise and Regulator Reform Act the Royal Charter, once okayed by the Privy Council, cannot be changed without a two thirds majority of both houses of Parliament. Under the Crime and Courts Act, news publishers outside the state-approved regulator will be subject to exemplary damages and increased libel and privacy case legal costs (except for a large list of exempt titles including blogs which turn over less than £2m and council-run newspapers).
For Hacked Off it is the perfect solution. Perfect except for the fact that most of the newspaper and magazine industry have now said they cannot stomach it. And without the buy-in of publishers themselves a new system of self-regulation cannot work.
Publishers have rebelled because they refuse to surrender total control over the regulator. That is no longer self-regulation as envisaged by Leveson, they say, and in any case they question why they should fund and organise what is effectively a quango. The regional press is deeply concerned that the arbitration arm set out in the Charter will lead to “crippling” new libel claims being made against them. And there remains a profound principled objection to a statute-backed system of regulation being imposed on publishers by the state. Their solution is to resolutely reject the Government plan and instead offer their own Royal Charter.
The main differences between their plan and the Government one are outlined here, but in a nutshell the publishers want:
- A representative on the Recognition Panel which will licence the new regulator (and the ability to veto appointments to the board)
- An arbitration arm which is optional rather than obligatory
- No legislative underpinning but instead a system where a unanimous vote of the Recognition Panel, the regulator’s board and the various industry trade associations can agree to amend the charter.
The two sides are not so far apart that a deal cannot be done. But this will need publishers, representatives of the ‘victims’ and Parliamentarians to put down their rhetorical weapons and negotiate.
The press cannot be compelled to join a regulator which most publishers fundamentally disagree with any more than the Government can regulate any citizen’s right to express themselves as they wish (within the bounds of libel, privacy and the criminal law on contempt of court).
If the Government Royal Charter to regulate the press is signed by the Queen in two week’s time, some publishers could ignore it and create their own regulator taking a chance on exemplary damages rules which may, in any case, be unenforceable. Many more titles might opt to be part of no regulator at all leaving the victims of future press excesses and mistakes with nowhere to turn. So for the sake of the victims, Hacked Off (like the publishers) now has to take a more pragmatic approach.
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