18.03.13
Press regulation deal reached
A deal has been reached on press regulation, Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman has said. It comes after talks overnight between the three main parties at Westminster, and full details are expected to be published later today.
Prime Minister David Cameron was likely to face a Commons defeat today as at least 20 of his MPs backed an alliance of Liberal Democrats and Labour seeking to give statutory underpinning to the Leveson proposals. The vote will no longer go ahead today.
The parties agree that there should be a new press regulator, overseen by a board governed by a Royal Charter signed by the Queen.
But Cameron does not think this should be done via legislation, and there was significant argument over how much power the board should give the regulator and whether the industry could veto the appointment of a regulator they regard as hostile to their interests.
The Labour/Lib Dem alliance version of the charter is closer to the original recommendations of Lord Justice Leveson, following his inquiry into press ethics following the phone hacking scandal.
The other parties have agreed to a model under which the regulatory system is written into a Royal Charter, which cannot be tampered with by ministers, avoiding the need for it to be written into statute law, which opponents say would be too great a political intrusion into press freedom.
A senior Labour source told reporters: “After five-and-a-half hours of talks in Ed Miliband's office which ended at 2.30am, we are confident we have the basis of an agreement around our Royal Charter entrenched in statute.”
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