The PCC - the watchdog that failed to bark
On Wednesday 23rd March the London Evening Standard published a two page spread entitled “We buy a minister’s ‘passport’ for £2000”.
It was an interesting case where the journalist had taken considerable personal risks to co-operate with a gang of east Europeans gangsters described in the article as “hard core criminals” who make it known that “the penalty for interlopers and informers is death”.
There was little that was essentially new in the story as it is well known that east European gangs are involved in document forgery but it did add some graphic details about the nature of the criminals involved.
The story fitted neatly with the Standards editorial policy of exposing failures of government policy on immigration control and using the photographs of ministers (provided by the Standard to the criminals) to show how the offences were committed.
There is just the small matter of a newspaper commissioning a criminal offence, paying money to confessed criminals and not informing the police.
Normal editorial practice is to inform the police of the proposed action and the police co-operate so that the paper gets its story but the police get a chance of catching the criminals. The Standard didn’t do this. What the Standard did was to tip the criminals off and give them a few thousand pounds bonus!
Imagine a private citizen trying this. You go to a pub where you’ve heard heroin is for sale. You buy some and tell everyone in the neighbourhood except the police! Please do not try this – and if you do, have a good lawyer on standby!
I knew there was something dodgy about the background to this story so I wrote a short letter to the Standard asking them if they had informed the police and whether criminals had been paid. These were two simple questions deserving two simple answers which they got – but not of the type you might expect.
The Standard replied: “The information is, of course, confidential and we are unable to provide you with the information you have requested”.
As a former MP who voted enthusiastically for the Freedom of Information Act I knew that the Act did not apply to newspapers but I would like to think they might respond in the spirit of the Act. Why would they seek to conceal the information?
Clearly it was time to bring in the caped crusader in the form of that powerful regulatory body the Press Complaints Commission! I was not wildly optimistic.
In there response to me the PCC said they assumed my “concerns relate solely to Clause 16 (Payment to criminals), as there is nothing in the code to oblige newspapers to pass information to the police”. One wonders now many regulatory bodies take the view that the organisations they regulate can pay for a criminal offence to be committed and not pass the information on to the police!
Neither the newspaper nor the PCC knew at this stage that I had been in contact with the police although it would have been a safe assumption from my letter. The PCC forwarded my letter to the Standard who then confirmed that money had been paid to criminals which was pretty obvious because the article referred to various amounts paid for false documents.
The Managing Editor of the Standard then tried to deal with the question of giving information to the police with the interesting phrase “I confirm that the police are involved and we are co-operating”. You might think this would alert the PCC to an attempted cover up but no, they simply said to me that the newspaper was in contact with the police!
The PCC then wrote saying the Standard had confirmed payment but claimed public interest and therefore I could either ask for adjudication or accept the explanation offered. They would “…be happy to record your complaint as resolved on that basis”.
The PCC was acting at best as a postman and at worst as a defence counsel for the paper. It was not acting as a regulator.
In a letter to the PCC the Standard claimed it was not relevant to ask if they had contacted the police first and in another letter asked the PCC “What evidence does Mr Soley have that we failed to co-operate with the police?”
The evidence of course was that the police had told me that the Standard had not contacted them. The police had to contact the Standard after publication of the story. So the criminals had been given a chance to escape.
The Standard also acknowledged that the information in the story was well known but claimed it had added details to it. This was correct although in my view it is only in the public interest to pay for another offence if it is likely to lead to an arrest.
The Standard also claimed that money had not been paid to anyone who could come within the codes meaning of a “convicted or confessed criminal” Wow! So all that talk of criminal gangs was hogwash! And if that was not enough try this quote from the article after the criminal had got the journalist in a car and was giving him a body search “Sorry mate but the cops are breathing down our necks”. Most people would assume this was a confessed criminal speaking or did the editor think that this guy was just the touchy feely type who wanted a friendly grope with a journalist?!
The PCC stretched the code to the maximum in order to protect the Standard. In their adjudication they said “Payment was necessary to secure the relevant evidence – and had not been made to a convicted or confessed criminal in relation to a particular crime that had already been committed, or to glamorise crime in general”.
These people were by any standard “confessed criminals”. They were also committing a crime for which the Standard was paying them.
Apart from the question of putting their own journalist – already at physical risk – at risk of arrest the Standard made a very important mistake in not informing the police. They also made a mistake in trying to hide the information from me.
They were quite safe however because the watchdog didn’t just fail to bark during the night. It actually hid under the bed!
