14 Mar 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
The president of the Crime Reporters’ Association, Jeff Edwards, was encouraged by his former boss at the News of the World to bribe police officers for information, the Leveson Inquiry heard today.
Edwards joined the now defunct tabloid in 1981 and was appointed crime correspondent soon after. Around the end of 1983, his then line manager told him he was unhappy with his work, arguing that he was not producing enough stories.
Pressuring him to improve his performance, Edwards’ boss told him: “we have plenty of money available, let your contacts in the police know that we will reward them for good information.”
“I do not remember what I said in return but I remember being worried about both my job and what my boss was suggesting as I had never paid police officers before, and was worried about the legal and ethical issues involved,” Edwards wrote in his witness statement.
“No more was said for about three or four weeks, but I did not offer bribes or rewards to any police contacts and clearly my performance was still not good enough because the News Editor confronted me again. He was angry and again said words to the effect that I should be paying police officers to induce them to pass on information,” he continued.
“I do remember that I became upset and said to him that I disapproved strongly of such methods and said something on the lines that I thought we were about exposing hypocrisy and corruption and yet here we were with him instructing me to bribe police officers.”
Edwards added that he felt this was the “final nail” in his coffin: “I remember him becoming angry and saying words to the effect that ‘if you will not do my bidding I will find someone who will’.”
He was removed from his position as crime correspondent and returned to the main newsroom as a general reporter the following week.
Edwards said he worked with “many excellent and enterprising journalists who upheld the best traditions of the profession” at the News of the World, but noted his feeling that there was a “section of the staff who displayed dishonest and devious behaviour”. He said the culture at the Daily Mirror, where he later became chief crime correspondent, was “far removed” from that of the Sunday tabloid.
Elsewhere in his oral testimony, Edwards claimed the police operate on a “blame culture” during crises or scandals, and will take the “easier option” of closing down “as much engagement as possible.”
He advocated “delicate adjustments” being made to the rules of engagement between police and the press, pushing for a more “common sense” approach rather than what he termed a “carpet-bombing of the system.”
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with further evidence from crime reporters, as well as former Times lawyer Alastair Brett and Peter Tickner, former Director of Internal Audit at the Metropolitan police.
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14 Mar 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Crime reporters have lamented the current atmosphere of more restricted contact between the press and police at the Leveson Inquiry today.
Testifying this morning, the Guardian’s Sandra Laville said that there has been an “over-reaction” by the Metropolitan police in response to the Inquiry into press standards, and that “open lines of communication, which have been there for many years, are being closed down”.
“It affects everything I do at the moment,” she said. She told the Inquiry that when she recently approached a senior ranking officer to ask him about a subject he knew well, he said he had to ask the Met’s press officer who then refused her access to him. Laville said this was “absolutely not” how it was in the past.
The reporter stressed that the country’s police force needed to be held account, which could not be done by journalists relying solely on official sources. She warned that limiting information to official sources might drive information “underground” and turn it into a “black market”.
“I think we already have laws and guidelines in place and I think they should be reiterated,” Laville said. “You can regulate as much as you like, unless you can trust them [police officers], I don’t think it’s going to work.”
The Independent’s Paul Peachey added that there was a concern that the current eagerness to drive information through official channels — namely the police press office — would lead to less contact between the media and the force, and that restricting information further would be a “worrying trend for the way we hold the police in this country to account.”
Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas of the Sunday Times told the Inquiry he disagreed with recording every exchange between journalists and police officers, as suggested in the recent Filkin report into press-police relations. “It would be a mistake to unnecessarily restrict flow of information between journalists and police officers,” he said.
Laville defended using informal contacts as a source for information alongside official channels, noting that they often bring “texture” and “colour” that official sources might not provide.
She disagreed with the view of former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Condon that hospitality can be “the start of a grooming process that can lead to inappropriate or unethical behaviour”, calling the suggestion “faintly ludicrous”.
“These people are grown-ups, they make life and death decisions,” Laville said.
She said that she saw it as “perfectly legitimate” and part of “normal human relationships” for meetings between journalists and police officers to take place in a social setting, noting that taking contacts out for drinks occurs in every journalistic sector.
She noted differences between Condon’s and Lord Stevens’ commissionerships in dealing with the media. “Under Lord Condon you could not talk to an officer without a press officer present,” Laville said, noting that his successor adopted a policy of “more openness”.
She stressed that the press and police have for years had a “mutually beneficial relationship” and that it was in the public interest. “It’s lasted for a long time because it actually works,” she said, but added that she believed that training on both sides could help to “understand each other’s worlds”.
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13 Mar 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
The Metropolitan police’s senior press officer has told the Leveson Inquiry that she was not aware that the force had hired a former executive editor at the News of the World as part of a PR consultancy arrangement until after his contract had been terminated.
Giving evidence this morning, Sara Cheesley said she only became aware of Neil Wallis’s £24,000-a-year PR consultancy at Scotland Yard in July 2011. Wallis’s company, Chamy Media, provided communications advice to the Met on a part-time basis from October 2009 to September 2010.
Cheesley said she was “a bit surprised” when she learned of the contract. An incredulous Lord Justice Leveson said: “I am just surprised that you didn’t know anything about him at all.”
Also giving evidence today was the Met’s communications chief Dick Fedorcio, currently on extended leave from Scotland Yard since August pending an investigation into Wallis’s contract arrangement.
Leveson questioned him about the possibility of a “reputational risk” for the Met hiring Wallis months after the Guardian reported on phone hacking at the now defunct tabloid. “And here you were contemplating giving a chap who was deputy editor at the time?”
Fedorcio, who has been the Met’s director of public affairs since 1997, responded that he did not see it that way at the time. In his witness statement he wrote that “on a professional basis, Nell Wallis fully met my requirements; we knew nothing about Neil Wallis that would be to his detriment.”
“There was no indication that he was suspected of involvement in criminality — he had never been named, implicated or questioned regarding phone hacking; he had never been required to resign over the issue at the paper; the phone hacking investigation was closed; and Nell Wallis was no longer employed by the News of the World and was now setting up his own media business,” Fedorcio continued.
He added that former assistant commissioner John Yates had asked Wallis in August 2009 if “there was anything that was going to emerge at any point about phone-hacking that could ’embarrass the MPS, me, him or the Commissioner’,” and that Yates received “categorical assurances that this was the case”.
“As John Yates had obtained and recorded this assurance I felt there was no need for me to repeat the question,” Fedorcio wrote.
In his oral testimony he revealed he was “surprised” about the extent of the out-of-hours meetings between Yates and Wallis, but said he was aware that the two “got on well” and that there was “banter” between them over football matters. Fedorcio added that, had he known the pair were close, he might have thought that hiring Wallis was inappropriate.
He also clarified that Wallis himself had put his name forward for the position over a lunch, “rather than it being proposed by anyone else”, as Ferdorcio had suggested to the Home Affairs select committee in July 2011.
He also revealed that on one occasion in 2010 he let former News of the World crime editor Lucy Panton type a story from his email account on his standalone computer, as the reporter was “under pressure” from the tabloid to file copy. He recalled that Panton had arrived at an end-of-the-week meeting, which Fedorcio had set up with the tabloid paper in order to work with them at an earlier opportunity on stories, with her notes for a story on former Metropolitan Police commander Ali Dizaei, who was jailed for corruption in 2010.
“I was present in the office throughout this time, and therefore got advance sight of a story about an MPS officer,” he wrote in his witness statement, admitting to the Inquiry later that it “may have been an error of judgment”.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with evidence from crime reporters.
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12 Mar 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Lord Justice Leveson has said he is not giving his “endorsement, let alone agreement” to a proposed reformed setup of the Press Complaints Commission, adding that and that a new package will be “subjected to forensic analysis”.
“My mind remains open to all options,” Leveson said in his opening remarks at this morning’s Inquiry session, responding to last week’s disbanding of the current PCC, and its chair Lord Hunt’s subsequent draft proposal for a new body “with teeth”.
“To say that the PCC was never a regulator (…) only underlines the concern that the public have been misled about what it could do,” Leveson said, raising a number of questions for the as yet unnamed new body. He took issue with the five-year rolling contract endorsed by Lord Hunt, questioning if it was “sufficient to deal with the fundamental problem of industry acceptance.”
“The threat of what I might recommend may well encourage to sign up those who (…) do not consider that the PCC worked for them, but that simply potentially puts the problem off for five years,” Leveson said. He added that “previous crises have concerned adequacy of regulation and there was no problem of publishers leaving the system.”
He also questioned the structure of the new body, which, as Lord Hunt outlined, would have two arms: one that deals with complaints and mediation, and another that audits and enforces standards and compliance with the editors’ code. “What is the view about concurrent legal proceedings and why should the complaints arm not be able to award compensation,” Leveson asked. “Is the new independent assessor an appeal mechanism and, if so, what will be done to prevent complaint fatigue and what has been said to be the grinding down of complainants by passage of time? What is meant by a serious or systemic breakdown in standards?”
The judge stressed his role would be to recommend what he perceived to be the “most effective and potentially enduring” system. “It will then be for others to decide how to proceed,” he said.
Leveson also responded to today’s call from the Hacked Off Campaign for the Operation Motorman database to be published. He said core participants’ barrister, David Sherbone was “at liberty” to formally submit the reuqest if he felt it were appropriate or may highlight a broader culture of press practices rather than “who did what to whom.”
Also today the Inquiry heard from Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Cressida Dick, and Sir Dennis O’Connor of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.
Dick outlined her approach to relations with the media as not “obsessively monastic”, noting that she preferred to speak with journalists through the Met’s press office if a reporter was seeking information. She told the Inquiry she held monthly briefings with two to three journalists, which she said were “important to break down barriers”. Yet the meetings did not produce “a single scoop or really good story.”
“Certainly I wasn’t saying anything secret or exciting,” Dick said.
Questioned over the decision taken by then Assistant Commissioner John Yates not to re-open rhe phone hacking investigation in 2009 in light of reports by the Guardian was “not only poor, it was disastrous.”
Dick clarified that Sue Akers, the Met officer leading the current Operation Weeting investigation into hacking, was now working more widely under section one of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) in terms of potential lines of inquiry than during the original 2006 investigation.
“Public opinion in terms of these issues is in a very different place than [in] 2006 when we were completely dominated by the terrorist threat,” Dick added, reiterating the testimony of other Met staff.
O’Connor spoke in favour of a “common frame of reference” for police forces in dealing with the media, but on more than one occasion warned against constraining relations between them.
“The last thing I would do is restrain the relation between the police and the press,” he said. “That would defy reality.”
He said he hoped the Inquiry could help reinforce the legitimacy of the police.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with the Met’s senior information officer, Sara Cheesley, and communications director, Dick Fedorcio.
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