Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Prash Naik, Controller of Legal & Compliance, Channel 4, David Jordan, Director of
Editorial Policy and Standards, BBC, and Valerie Nazareth, Head of Programme Legal
Advice, BBC—Oral evidence (QQ 273–325)
David Jordan: We resolved it by not using the material other than in the case of
Vince Cable, where it was felt the public interest justification reached a new level.
Incidentally, I should say we told the story but did not use the recorded material.
Prash Naik: Channel 4 is in a rather unique position. We do not make any of our
own programmes; we work with a sector of several hundred independent producers. So the
extent to which we are required to comply with the code and the imposition of sanctions,
which would ultimately be imposed on the broadcaster, we have to instil a culture of ethics
and standards at arm’s length, but it is a very collaborative process. In addition to the
regulatory framework for the broadcaster, which has existed for several years, under its
legacy regulators, the ITC, BSC and BCC, we ensure that within that framework we support
it with our own supplementary codes and editorial protocols backed up with extensive
training, and we provide this service free to the independent producers. Effectively, we
provide them with free legal and compliance advice, so it is an integrated system. If you are
the producer and you need advice, you can pick up the phone 24 hours a day and talk to any
one of my team. We ensure, therefore, that we are working within the regulatory
framework to get programmes to air safely. It is not necessarily only because there is a
threat of statutory sanctions being imposed; in part, it is also a reputational thing. We want
to have high-quality programming. Viewers and the public look badly on us for having
regulatory decisions against us. It is in our interests, therefore, to maintain certain
standards, so working within that system is in our best interests.
As to whether there have been any inhibitions in our airing programmes, very rarely
do we have injunctions against us. On average in the last eight years we have probably had
about five or six privacy injunctions, which we have won on all counts. We are not in a
position when we regularly have to fight in the courts on privacy issues; it simply does not
happen. Perhaps part of the reason is that we do not engage in kiss-and-tell stories, where
the bulk of privacy injunctions have predominated. The fact that under our regulatory
framework we have a right to reply, and therefore have to give individuals an opportunity to
respond to allegations before broadcast, means that often we will already have worked
through our public interest justification and, that will be communicated to the other side.
Therefore, they are less likely to want to go to the court because they are less likely to be
successful.
Q1156 Lord Janvrin: Would both BBC and Channel 4 say that they are engaged
in constant pre-broadcast mediation with producers, looking at the codes and the balance
between freedom of expression and privacy? Have you always got a queue of producers
knocking at your door so there is a constant stream of mediation or discussion going on, or
do they tend to be few and far between?
David Jordan: Given the amount of output of the BBC, nothing is ever “few and far
between”, but in that context this is not something that crops up on a daily basis by any
means, particularly in relation to investigations. We do quite a lot of secret recording, for
example, in relation to investigations that clearly raise important privacy issues, particularly
where we might be dealing with vulnerable adults and sometimes children. Those raise very
important issues. Those issues crop up from time to time in our programming, but this is
not something that occurs on a daily basis. I would not describe it as “mediation”, but we do
give advice to our editorial line management. Within the BBC the editorial decision-making
line management lies within the line management of the division concerned. For example, in
the case of news it goes up to the director of news, and my small department and I offer
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