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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Let’s now pick up on some of those themes with the PCC Chairman, Lord Hunt who joins me from Bristol. A very good morning to you, Lord Hunt, I see there with the new Sun on Sunday in your hand. Give me a quick reflection on that, pleased to see the Sun now being published seven days a week?

LORD HUNT: Oh yes, I think new newspapers add choice and diversity and I’m sure that responsible ethical investigative journalism at the Sun on Sunday is going to add to British life.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well that’s the whole point isn’t it, responsible, ethical, even investigative, any form of journalism which you’re meant to regulate and I don't know if you heard Harriet Harman there saying the PCC, the ball is in your court, it’s up to you to come up with suggestions of how the PCC survives and I suppose has real teeth.

LORD HUNT: Well I accept that challenge and in fact last week the Press Complaints Commission met and agreed that we would in principle move now to a new body, for the first time a press regulator with teeth. So we’re very much now on the front foot and listening to all sides and determined to bring forward the sort of independent self-regulatory structure that everyone will approve of.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Can you survive then with a few tweaks at the margins there or don’t you need fundamental and wholesale reform and as Harriet Harman was saying, some kind of sanction against those who either refuse to be regulated by the PCC or refuse to listen to the rulings?

LORD HUNT: I accept that, Dermot. What I’m talking about is a fresh start and a new body. I think the PCC has wrongly been criticised for not exercising powers which it never had in the first place, so what we are now determined to do is to create a new body with those teeth, with the ability to fine, particularly where there has been systemic or serious breach of the rules.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But does … I mean that sanction, the fining, let’s talk about that. I mean can that be done voluntarily, can that be done through self-regulation or, as I was suggesting to Harriet Harman, does that not need some form of legislation because one guesses that if you refused to be regulated by the PCC you’re not going to pay your fines unless you are forced to.

LORD HUNT: Well Dermot, you probably know, I picked up the idea from a previous Royal Commission but you don’t need another Bill, you don’t need a statute, what you need is an agreement between the proprietors resulting in a commercial contract to set up an independent self-regulatory structure that can have teeth and so far, I’m getting a pretty unanimous view from the proprietors that they would support that. I am also getting from all the political parties a determination also to support that, so we’re very much moving ahead with the new structure.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Yes, but it doesn’t sound very different from what exists now because the editors and the proprietors have all the power, they appoint you for goodness sake, it just doesn’t seem independent from the outside.

LORD HUNT: Well it’s got to be independent, it’s got to be self-regulation. That’s what everyone is calling for so therefore these commercial contracts which are now being proposed, and I was very pleased indeed when Lord Justice Leverson agreed that we should just press on and Hugh Tomlinson and various others have put in lots of ideas about what should be in these contracts and how right you are to stress that we’ve got to get the terms of these contracts absolutely right.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, so you are talking about the contracts, you have also got to talk about, haven’t you, the rights of redress for so-called – and I hate the phrase really but it’s the only way of putting it in shorthand – ordinary members of the public, people who really have no recourse to the law, they certainly can’t afford it and they have been traduced, turned over, whatever phrase you want to use, in the press and they don’t know where to go. The PCC has been criticised in the past for not standing up for them.

LORD HUNT: Well those who have used the PCC, and I’m determined that we should make sure that we still keep those procedures which 80, 85% of people who’ve used them have found so helpful – pre-publication action and various other ways but above all, you are quite right, we need a mechanism which could be the third column of what I’m talking about with the new structure, a column representing standards and compliance, one representing complaints and mediation and this third column where ordinary people can have access to recover some way of redressing the damage that they’ve had. Now that could be a simple apology but it could be action in some way establishing what Lord Justice Leveson has spoken about as an arbitral arm. But that’s very much up for consideration at the present time and I’d be very interested to hear what Lord Justice Leverson says on that issue.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, Lord Hunt, thank you very much indeed for sparing the time to talk to us here on Murnaghan. The Chair of the Press Complaints Commission there, Lord Hunt, with his thoughts on what it might look like after the Leverson Inquiry.