HL Deb 15 February 1972 vol 328 cc97-113

7.20 p.m.

LORD FERRIER rose to call attention to the First and Second Reports of the Joint Committee on the Publication of Proceedings in Parliament (H.L. 26 of December 3, 1969 and H.L. 109 of May 6, 1970); and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. The Reports to which this refers can conveniently be described as the Pearce/Donovan Reports because, as your Lordships know, although the Joint Select Committee of both Houses was appointed in November, 1968, under Lord Pearce's chairmanship, he was appointed Chairman of the Press Council in 1969 and his place was taken by the noble and learned Lord, the late Lord Donovan. This is a suitable opportunity again to pay tribute to the memory of Lord Donovan and to his great contributions to the affairs of State, to Parliament, to industry, to the trade unions and to the law. I have it on good authority that he drafted these Reports himself, and just as we shall miss the wise and penetrating contributions which he would have made to our debate to-morrow—and indeed also today—so we miss his presence here now, when we debate this subject.

My noble friend Lord Selkirk has told me that he may not be able to stay, but I hope he will. At the same time I would like to say—and I know that he will agree with me—that the noble Lord, Lord Donovan, had expressed a desire to move a Motion of this sort last summer, but the pressure of business in your Lordships' House was too great and it seems to have fallen to me to carry it out at this time. Incidentally, I miss the presence of the noble Lord. Lord Shackleton, and I only hope that the lifts on the ski slopes are working all right. I miss the noble Lord because, in a speech during a debate in March 20, 1969, at column 1077 of the OFFICIAL REPORT, he said: This is a subject "— he was referring to this problem of the broadcasting of proceedings— in regard to which I think the saying 'festina lente' applies. On the other hand we do not want that to be an excuse for not keeping the whole proposition alive and order active consideration, and proceeding del berately towards the formation of ideas on the whole question of broadcasting. When I told him that I proposed to quote those words his reply was, "Fair enough".

In the penultimate paragraph of the Second Report the following words occur, and it is really on these words that I base my Motion: Some of the questions the Committee has had to consider are difficult and may prove controversial. In these circumstances it seemed to them better to await the outcome of the consideration of this Report by both Houses before the task is commenced of drafting a Bill to implement such of the Committee's recommendations as may be approved. Further, in paragraph 2 of the First Report the following words occur: Yet the immediate cause of the previous Committee's appointment was the need to resolve the uncertainty that has been expressed in several quarters as to the application of the law of defamation to broadcasts of Parliamentary proceedings.

Your Lordships are well aware of our television experiment in February, 1968, four years ago almost to the day, and it was as a result of the Reports of our Select Committee—that is the Select Committee of this House on this particular experiment—together with the extensive Reports of the House of Commons Select Committees on broadcasting their proceedings, that the Pearce/Donovan Joint Select Committee was appointed. Its Reports cover quite a variety of aspects of Parliamentary privilege and the Second Report contains (in Appendices 1 and 2) a very important memorandum by the Clerk Assistant to your Lordships' House and another by the Clerk to the House of Commons. I call to mind also the evidence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, to our Committee on televising procedures. in the course of which, as Lord Chancellor, he said that the law of privilege "needs tidying up". Although, as I have quoted, the broadcasting problem may have, as it were, sparked off this exercise, there are other facets, ranging from freedom of arrest to the privilege attaching to Ministerial correspondence. I know that this latter point is one to which my noble friend Lord Selkirk attaches great importance, as can be seen from the Minutes of Proceedings on page 24 of the Second Report.

I am, of course, particularly glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, is going to follow me—he was a member of the Committee throughout—because such matters as I have just mentioned present legal problems on which I do not propose, nor am I qualified, to speak. I also look forward to hearing the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, on another point about papers. Therefore I turn back to the problem of privilege as it affects the possibility—and it is well to remember it is still only a possibility—that Parliament may one day not only decide to have its proceedings televised on closed circuit but wish to have some sort of report presented to the people by the broadcasting media, whether by television, radio or both. When I say "some sort of report" I mean video tapes of actual proceedings.

The Committee, as I have said, referred to the need to resolve the uncertainty of the law on that subject. It is clear from the memoranda submitted by the B.B.C. and the Independent Television Authority which are set out in Appendices to both Reports, that this uncertainty is very real to them. I cannot do better than quote here paragraphs 23 and 24 of the First Report where, on page 12, we have these words: 23. Having carefully considered the whole matter, the Committee have come to the conclusion that, bearing in mind the possibility of the creation of a House of Commons Broadcasting Unit which would 'publish' under the authority of the House of Commons, legislation is desirable to amend sections 1 and 2 of the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840 as above outlined so as to confer absolute privilege in respect of such publication. When, however, the B.B.C. or I.T.V., having obtained their material from the House of Commons Broadcasting Unit, proceed to broadcast it or extracts from or abstracts of, it to the public, then the qualified privilege at present available to each authority should suffice, as it suffices at present for the Press.

And in paragraph 24 they say: The Committee's recommendation in paragraph 14 is, of course, equally applicable in the case of the House of Lords, should it set up its own broadcasting unit.

In other words, while the Committee agree that the 1840 Act requires some amendment, they are satisfied with the present position as regards the privilege of broadcasters. At the same time, as I see it, neither the B.B.C. nor the I.T.A. are satisfied, and without their being agreeable, such broadcasting—I repeat, broadcasting video tapes of actual proceedings—could not proceed.

Despite what the Press may say, the Members of another place are as well if not actually more aware of these difficulties than we are. One has only to delve into the voluminous Reports of their various Committees to appreciate this. I take the view—and I am open to correction—that this debate to-night will show that the complications are such that even if Parliament proceeds forthwith to pursue the points made in the Pearce/ Donovan Report, which we are considering, it may well be two or three years before a decision is reached and the requisite legislation placed upon the Statute Book. We see in the Press that the other place may be thinking of submitting themselves to the ordeal which was ours four years ago, although technical advances since that time will render conditions much less trying than ours were. However, this is their affair, and I am sure your Lordships will agree with me that there is no need, even if it were advisable—which it is not—for us to develop the subject.

Many of your Lordships have given this problem of broadcasting much thought and study. But, so far as I am concerned, my ideas were crystallised the Sunday before last when I read in one of the newspapers words something to this effect: the television screen has now become Sunday before last when I read in one of the newspapers words something to this effect: the television screen has now become the forum for political debate rather than Parliament. This is going too far. But, reluctantly, I believe that the position is somewhat of this order so far as the public are concerned. It may even be that our Parliamentary system of democracy is being eroded in the absence of adequate Parliamentary reports on the "box". But this is not the subject of the present debate. The subject is that first of all the law of privilege requires to be overhauled, whether television is important or not. However, many people may think it is important.

One final comment. Confident as I am that the reporting of the proceedings of Parliament by all existing media, with the exception of the B.B.C. programme, "Today in Parliament", is quite inadequate, I see no good reason why some such programme as "Today in Parliament" should not come out at a more suitable time or times of the day on the country's T.V. receivers. Such a programme would be free of the complexities of the matter of privilege to which we are addressing ourselves to-night. I go so far as to hold the view that if additional hours are to be available for television. as is now the case. then such reporting might well be made an obligation. When I studied (shall I say with some surprise?) an item in The Times Diary the other day my eyes strayed across to the opposite page to a letter from the noble Baroness, Lady White. I see her point, with which, with respect, find myself unable to agree, for I trust that never will my name carry, like some gramophone records, the letters "L.P" as a suffix, though I shall risk it if I detain your Lordships much longer. I. hope that the House will agree when this little debate concludes that it has been worthwhile. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

7.34 p.m.

LORD STOW HILL

My Lords, the House will at once agree with the last comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier. His comment was that he hoped that this debate would be regarded as useful. I am quite sure that it is a useful debate, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude for having raised this matter which, if he had not called attention to it, might possibly have tended to slip into oblivion.

In replying to his speech, and to the debate, from the Opposition Front Bench may I at the outset say to him what I know the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk, who was also a member of the Committee, would also wish to say: that we are most grateful to him for his reference to the late Lord Donovan. I am particularly grateful because I think I may claim to have been a close friend of Lord Donovan for even longer than a quarter of a century. It was extremely gratifying to hear what the noble Lord said with regard to him. Lord Donovan, besides being a great lawyer, was indeed a great public servant, and his contributions to the building up of our life really cannot he adequately measured. They were great and will be invaluable for years, decades and generations to come.

May I go to what the noble Lord called the Pearce/Donovan Report? The Committee was chaired by distinguished chairmenship because before the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donovan, chaired it the noble and learned Lord, Lord Pearce, chaired it, until, as Lord Ferrier said, he became Chairman of the Press Council. Now he is engaged on difficult and exacting duties and I am sure that we all wish him well.

Possibly it would be convenient, and of some help to the House in considering what are extremely technical and complicated Reports, if I tried to indicate in broad outline what the Committee in effect decided, and what its approach was. It found itself discharging its task against the following background. There had been experiments in the other place and experiments in this House on broadcasting. Certain conclusions had been provisionally reached in both Houses, though I do not think I need elaborate upon them for the purpose of this debate. What I should indicate is this. The possible different forms which broadcasting of proceedings of both Houses might take really fell into three categories. In 1966, a Select Committee of the other place suggested that there might he a broadcasting unit. That was conceived of as a part, in effect, of the machinery of the House. It was conceived of as being something very close to the Hansard structure, both in its manning personnel and in its terms of reference. That was the first possibility.

An alternative possibility is what I believe is described in the vernacular as the "drive-in" process. By that, the broadcasting media, the B.B.C. and the I.T.V., would bring their own apparatus into either Chamber and make their own arrangements, with the leave and permission of the two Chambers, to televise the proceedings, or, in the alternative, to record the proceedings in sound without television. The third possibility was a combination of the two. The broadcasting unit would provide a feed to the television authorities. It would prepare a continuous representation of the proceedings in each House and the broadcasting media would be enabled to make use of that continuous record by way of a feed. They would derive sustenance or perhaps I should say inspiration, from it. From that sustenance or inspiration they would compose their own selections of proceedings in the two Houses and make their own commentary and edit it as they thought appropriate.

It was against those three possibilities that the Pearce/Donovan Committee felt it ought to discharge its task. Its task as formulated was to decide what changes in the law of privilege and defamation would be necessary in the event of there being a broadcasting or television scheme applicable to either or both Houses. It was a Joint Select Committee of both Houses and its consideration applied to the possible television or sound recording scheme in either House. My Lords, there had been a Select Committee which reported on Parliamentary Privilege and the Chairman of that Committee had been my honourable and learned friend Mr. Silkin in another place. That Select Committee had gone into the question of Parliamentary Privilege in great detail and had produced a comprehensive and valuable Report. In those circumstances, the Pearce/Donovan Committee felt that clearly its terms of reference were not to be construed as requiring it again to re-examine the conclusions of what I hope I may call the Silkin Committee. So far as Parliamentary Privilege was concerned, it was, we thought, called upon only to express a view as to whether any changes in the law of defamation that it recommended required corresponding changes in the law of Parliamentary Privilege and not beyond that to examine the question of Parliamentary Privilege.

It was against that background that we went to work. I think perhaps it would be useful if I formulated the general conclusions upon which we thought we ought to proceed. They were these. We thought that the B.B.C. and the I.T.A.. and television media should be, so far as the law of defamation was concerned, on the same footing as the Press. If there were to be the broadcasting unit of which I have spoken we thought that that should be on a rather different footing. That would discharge a function which was precisely analogous to that discharged by Hansard at the moment. Your Lordships, I know, will have considered from time to time the history of Parliamentary Privilege in so far as it affects Hansard, and your Lordships may have read the interesting case of Stockdale v. Hansard which was decided in 1837 in which a Mr. Stockdale complained in the courts in a suit for libel that Hansard, which under the authority of Parliament published Reports, detailed and continuous Reports, of proceedings in Parliament, had libelled Mr. Stockdale, I think by imputing to him libellously that he had circulated a memorandum of an obscene character to the prisoners in Newgate Prison. Precisely the subject of the libel action is not particularly relevant though not altogether uninteresting. The courts allowed that claim, and that gave rise to the passing of what is known as the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840.

My Lords, the Parliamentary Papers Act contains three sections. The first section confers absolute privilege on all publications— I abbreviate deliberately—made with the authority or by the direction of Parliament. It obviously directly covered Hansard and it is accordingly because of Section 1 of the Act of 1840 that the printing in Hansard of what is said in either House is privileged. If a Member makes a defamatory statement in the course of his speech in Parliament he is protected by Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1688 which gives absolute privilege to anything said in a Parliamentary debate. Article 9 of the Bill of Rights also contains a phrase which is difficult to construe. It gives absolute privilege also to what are called "Proceedings in Parliament". There have been differences of view which we dealt with in our Second Report as to what is the meaning of "Proceedings in Parliament". I will not trouble your Lordships with that. We suggested a formula which might serve as a definition of what is meant by the expression "Proceedings in Parliament"

As I have said, Section 1 gives absolute privilege to Hansard. The conclusion we reached was that if there were a broadcasting unit, that should enjoy equal privilege but it should be a unit which would be part of the structure of Parliament in the same way as Hansard is now part of the structure of Parliament, and its function should be to produce a continuous and uninterrupted record either in the form of television or sound broadcasting of the proceedings in either House. That is that conclusion. If, however, it were decided that there should be the "drive-in" system, as I described it, then it followed in accordance with the conclusion which I earlier indicated that we reached, namely, that the two media should be put on the same footing as the Press, that in respect of their drive-in activities the B.B.C. and the I.T.A. should only have the same protection as the Press now has; that is, that if they print in the course of a newspaper comment or if the television media as a result of drive-in activities reproduced in an edited programme of Parliamentary proceedings something that was defamatory, in either case they should have qualified privilege. Section 3 of the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840 confers that privilege. I leave out Section 2 for a deliberate reason. I do not think it necessary to examine it closely. It deals with "copies" and it not directly germane to the pith of this debate.

Section 3 confers the qualified privilege. Independent of it—and I hope I am not being too technical—there is at common law a qualified privilege which at the moment is slightly different in one respect, a respect in which we submit in our Report that the two should be made the same. If the Press, the I.TA. or the B.B.C. make a fair and accurate extract from a debate, and they do so without malice, under Section 3, if they can prove they did so without malice, they are immune from proceedings and action against them for defamation would fail. In common law the position is the same except that the onus of showing absence of malice is not upon the newspaper concerned and would not be upon the B.B.C. or the I.T.A. but is on the plaintiff who brings the action. One of our recommendations was that it being rather foolish that there should be that difference, and the reason for the difference being difficult to ascertain, the two types of qualified privilege should be made the same in that respect. For that purpose there would have to be an Amendment to Section 3 of the 1840 Act to remove the onus of proving absence of malice from the Press or television media to the plaintiff who made the complaint against them.

That being the general purport of our conclusions, we then had to consider whether, assuming any of them required to be implemented, depending upon the type of television or broadcast recording that was decided upon, Amendments would be necessary. There would have to be an Amendment—and I will not describe the technical character of it—to Section 1 of the Parliamentary Papers Act in order to make Section 1 applicable to the broadcasting unit, if there were to be a broadcasting unit. A corresponding Amendment would be necessary in Section 2. I have described the Amendment that would be necessary in Section 3 in order to bring together the two types of qualified privilege.

That was what we concluded and that forms the major part of our Report. We had been offered drafting assistance from Parliamentary Counsel, but we came to the conclusion that really it would be unjustifiably occupying their time to call upon them to prepare the necessary; drafting Amendments until it was decided by either House or both Houses whether they wished to have their proceedings televised or recorded by sound broadcasting, or not, and, if so, which of the three systems they would adopt, because the Amendments necessary would depend upon that. Therefore, that is as far as we went. We also construed, as I have said earlier, our terms of reference as going beyond that and we made certain recommendations with regard to what I will call "Act Papers"—and I will not trouble the House with that; "Command Papers"—I will not trouble the House with that; and correspondence between Members of Parliament and Ministers and others. That involved a consideration of the meaning of the phrase "proceedings in Parliament"; and, as I have said, in our Report we suggested a rather comprehensive formula which we thought might be enacted in order to define the expression "proceedings in Parliament" as used in Article 9 of the Bill of Rights of 1688.

My Lords, that is the whole of the matter. I hope I have not been too confusing. It is rather difficult to explain it with great clarity because the matter is one of some technicality. That is what we did, and our position at the moment is that we would be delighted. either ourselves or for some successor body to us, when it has been decided what the form of television or sound recording is to be —if there is to be either—then to proceed to work out the actual terms of the Amendments which, according to our thinking, would then be necessary. I do not think I can assist your Lordships further. That is what we did, and it will of course be for both Houses in due course to consider whether they think that our conclusions were justified or need amendment.

7.53 p.m.

LORD AIREDALE

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, for having introduced this debate because it enables me shortly to draw attention to the absurdity of the practice which has grown up of what is known as "laying in dummy Act Papers". It is the Second Report, paragraphs 41 to 45, which deals with Act Papers. These are Papers laid before Parliament pursuant to a statutory obligation, and each year there are some 600 of these Act Papers. One finds that about half of them, about 300, are laid before Parliament and receive a printing order from the House of Commons, whereas the other 300 are not published pursuant to a printing order from Parliament. This seems curious; and indeed no wonder the Committee, at the end of their Report, in paragraph 44, say: …the Committee draw attention to the somewhat haphazard manner in which printing orders are accorded to some Act Papers, but not to others. They recommend that rules should be prescribed to regulate this matter The distinction here of course is that those Papers which are published pursuant to a printing order from Parliament have conferred upon them the absolute privilege which the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, has explained, whereas the other 300 Papers, which are not published pursuant to a printing order from Parliament. receive only qualified privilege. I need not go into the distinction because Lord Stow Hill put the matter before your Lordships so very clearly just now.

Of course, a printing order from Parliament can be obtained only when Parliament is sitting; but of these 300 Act Papers a number are expected to appear during, for instance, the long Summer Recess. What happens then is that during the month of July the Paper concerned is laid in dummy; that is to say, the title page only, and nothing else, is produced and a printing order is obtained. The person concerned then goes away and proceeds to draft his Report, or whatever it may be, in the knowledge that he has the blessing of absolute privilege for it covering even matter which he might publish maliciously and not in good faith. Needless to say, this does not in practice happen, but it seems a rather absurd way of going about things.

Just briefly, three examples of the sort of thing that happens. On August 2 last, 16 Reports from Area Electricity Boards and the Report of the Atomic Energy Authority were laid before Parliament and they were not published until the month of October. If we take the Construction Industry Training Board Report, we find that that was laid on July 27 and, so far as I have been able to discover, has not been published yet. So we have this enormous delay between the laying of a document—and of course an entry appears in the Minutes—and its publication. Here is a document which has been laid, and people who are interested in the subject naturally expect that within a reasonable time they will be able to get hold of a copy of it. We cannot expect all these people to appreciate that all that has happened is an extraordinary charade and that the document concerned is not going to be published for probably weeks, perhaps months or even, I suppose, more than a year. This seems a rather senseless procedure that has grown up. There is everything to be said for a public servant's producing a complete report which can be looked at to see whether it contains objectionable matter, and, if it does not, a printing order from the House of Commons can be forthcoming; but, as against that, there is the ridiculous process of producing a title page and nothing else and getting a printing order for the whole report which may not even have been drafted.

The remedy for this state of affairs can be found if we ask ourselves first the question: do these Act Papers really need absolute privilege? Is not qualified privilege for them enough? If they do not need absolute privilege, then House of Commons printing orders for them can be abolished and these Papers will be published and laid at the proper time. But suppose that absolute privilege really is necessary for these Act Papers, then surely time can be found for a short measure which will give blanket protection for them; a measure which will say that Act Papers when published shall be deemed to have been published pursuant to a Parliamentary printing order; and then, again, the result will be that the absurdity of laying in dummy, and this extraordinary delay, will no longer be necessary.

8.0 p.m.

THE EARL OF SELKIRKM

My Lords, as a member of the Committee I should like to say a few words. First, may I say how greatly I admired the clarity of mind of the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, in repeating to us broadly the problems which the Committee had to face. I would particularly endorse what he said about the late Lord Donovan. I did not know Lord Donovan before this Committee met. Knowing him was a great privilege and I recognise fully the great loss his death is to the public. I also wish to say what a great pleasure it was to work under the noble and learned Lord, Lord Pearce, who has, if I may put it this way, a very strong liberal cast of mind, and I would need strong arguments to find myself differing from him in matters which concern human liberty.

I should like to endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, has said. During this examination we found an extraordinary confusion in the subject of Papers. There are enormous numbers of Papers submitted to Parliament in a great variety of forms. The noble Lord is perfectly right when he says that the matter should be looked at. For instance, some Papers were not printed and were not published. I was never wholly able to discover exactly what that meant; nor, indeed, could I find a paper which fell into that category. I think it is desirable that the purpose for which papers are laid should be made much clearer. In my view, we are enormously indebted to the Officers of the House for ensuring that we do not get into a much greater muddle than in fact we do.

The other point I wish to mention concerns the matter of absolute privilege. I find it hard to say that absolute privilege should be extended at all unless there are exceedingly powerful reasons for doing so. To give someone the unfettered right to say what is damaging and untrue about another individual, which might conceivably ruin his whole life, is a Parliamentary privilege which I think should be extended only in the most limited sphere and only after very careful examination. After all, this is not really a question of justice: the purpose of absolute privilege is really to prevent somebody from having the bother of either answering a summons or going to the expense of doing so. Frankly, from a practical point of view qualified privilege would meet almost every case. The real object of absolute privilege is to block any form of action at all. It is all very well to do it under Article IX of the Bill of Rights for discussions in Parliament, which sometimes need definition. but any extension of that would require very careful examination indeed.

On the whole I believe that our Report shows that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the present situation. For that reason I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, for raising this subject, because while there are changes which could be made I do not think any serious damage is done by the existing procedure.

8.4 p.m.

LORD ABERDARE

My Lords, I do not think there is anything very much that I can usefully say at the end of this debate, especially since the noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill, who was such a distinguished member of this Committee, has so admirably answered the points that were put by my noble friend Lord Ferrier. The noble Lord, Lord Stow Hill asked whether he had spoken with great clarity: I have never known the noble Lord not to speak with extreme clarity and I thought he put the case very clearly. Since then my noble friend Lord Selkirk has added his powerful voice. I am sure we should all like to thank my noble friend Lord Ferrier for drawing attention to these two Reports and for giving rise to this short but interesting debate, and I would join with other noble Lords who have spoken in paying tribute to the two Chairmen of this Joint Committee, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Pearce, and Lord Donovan.

My noble friend Lord Ferrier has throughout, and for many years now, taken a deep interest in the question of televising the proceedings in Parliament, and he was a most active member of the Select Committee on televising the proceedings of the House of Lords. Your Lordships will recall that it was as a result of evidence from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor that the whole form of the law relating to publication of proceedings in Parliament needed tidying up that that Committee recommended that there should be a detailed examination of the question of privilege and law involved and that this examination should be undertaken by a Joint Committee of both Houses. This recommendation was endorsed by the Broadcasting sub-committee of the House of Commons Services Committee and resulted in the setting up of the Joint Committee whose two Reports we are considering tonight. Therefore it is true to say that the Joint Committee came into existence as a direct result of the consideration of broadcasting the proceedings of Parliament, although its terms of reference were widened to include other forms of reporting Parliamentary proceedings. Therefore my noble friend Lord Ferrier is fully justified in having directed our attention specifically to the relevance of these two Reports to the televising and radio broadcasting of our proceedings.

My Lords, I am a layman without legal qualifications and I am very conscious of the fact that I am speaking about complicated legal issues. However, put briefly and in a layman's words, the conclusions reached by the Joint Committee were that the B.B.C. and the I.T.A. are already accorded qualified privilege under Section 3 of the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840, as amended, and in this respect they are treated in exactly the same way as the Press, and this is as it should be. Section 3, as amended, provides that in any civil or criminal proceedings for printing, including broadcasting, any extract from Parliamentary Reports, Papers, Votes and Proceedings it is sufficient for the defence to prove that such extract was published bona fide and without malice. The Committee concluded that this was sufficient protection for the broadcasting authorities, as it had always been for the Press. However, they went slightly further in suggesting that the 1840 Act should be amended to confer absolute privilege in respect of the broadcasting of Parliamentary proceedings by any broadcasting unit set up by this or the other House. This was in response to a suggestion by the Select Committee on the broadcasting of proceedings of the House of Commons, that the task of providing a full television and sound feed should be in the hands of a special unit to be known as the House of Commons Broadcasting Unit. As your Lordships are aware, the other place are currently engaged in a study of the pros and cons of televising their proceedings and it would be premature to take this matter any further at the moment.

The Joint Committee also considered matters of privilege concerning all other forms of reporting Parliamentary proceedings and made a number of recommendations. However, these were in a sense subsidiary to the question of broadcasting the proceedings of Parliament. The Committee themselves realised that it would be premature to start drafting a Bill until decisions had been taken in respect of broadcasting.

I listened with great interest to the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, and I am grateful to him for so kindly having given me notice of the matter that he intended to raise. The Joint Committee themselves draw attention to the haphazard manner in which printing orders are accorded to some Act papers and not to others, and recommend that rules should be prescribed to regulate this matter. The noble Lord went on to draw attention to the absurdity of laying Act papers in dummy, and of course on the face of it this is an absurd practice. As he said, it occurs because of the wish of those concerned to publish when Parliament is not sitting, most often during the Summer Recess, and at the same time to obtain for them absolute privilege under the 1840 Act by having them published by order or under the authority of the House. The only alternative that occurred to me would be for printing orders to be made in advance of publication, but this is a matter for the other place. I noticed that when he spoke he made another suggestion, and I will certainly see that it is carefully considered. I know that he is a good Liberal and may think it a very conservative argument, but these papers have been laid in dummy for the last 70 years without causing any undue difficulty.

I do not think there is very much more I can usefully say. We need to await the outcome of the other place's consideration of televising their proceedings before it is really worth while taking action on these Reports. Nevertheless, their existence will help very significantly if and when a time comes when some form of television or sound broadcasting of the proceedings of Parliament is permitted, and my noble friend, I am sure, has done the House a service in drawing attention to them.

LORD FERRIER

My Lords, at this late hour it remains for me to thank noble Lords who have taken part in this very interesting little debate, which has fulfilled all I hoped of it although it did not start quite as early in the day as I had expected. I do not want to hold up the noble Lord, Lord Henley, any further. I am glad to think that the debate has been worth while, and we have, by discussing this matter, discharged the task laid on both Houses in the paragraph in the Report which I quoted. I am not altogether sure that what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has said covers the whole ground, because, whatever the position may be in regard to what the Committee thought, the doubt in my mind is that the broadcasters may not be satisfied that that is sufficient to let them broadcast if, when the time comes, this task is laid upon them. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion standing in my name.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn