Insights High Court rejects judicial review of the Press Recognition Panel’s recognition of IMPRESS as independent regulator

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The claimant, News Media Association, represents UK news media. The defendant, the Press Recognition Panel was established by the Royal Charter on Self-Regulation of the Press 2013, which followed the Leveson Report of 2012 recommending establishment of an independent self-regulatory regime. The PRP determines applications from regulators for recognition.

NMA sought judicial review of the PRP’s decision of 25 October 2016 to grant recognition to IMPRESS, which regulates a number of small publishers. NMA argues that the PRP misinterpreted and misapplied the Charter and invited the court to quash its decision and to declare that IMPRESS had failed to meet the Charter’s Recognition Criteria.

The PRP resisted the application contending that the decision challenged, taken after three rounds of open consultation during which NMA more than once advanced its views, was “unimpugnable”.

The court rejected NMA’s contention that Leveson had said that a “Regulator” had to have the support of a minimum number of, or a proportion of, the total body of publishers and that he had envisaged recognition only with substantial industry support. The court found that there was nothing in the Charter that imposed any minimum number or size of publishers.

The court also rejected the NMA’s submission that IMPRESS had failed to satisfy the funding criterion since its funding was derived overwhelmingly from third party sources and did not come from its members.

The NMA also submitted that to be recognised, a body had to be independent, which was not the case with IMPRESS since it was dependent on funding from Mr Mosley. The court disagreed, finding that the PRP had “scrupulously considered the robustness of the structures and satisfied itself that they did not permit Mr Mosley to exert influence.”

The NMA also argued that, contrary to Charter requirements, the IMPRESS Board would be seen as lacking impartiality because of the views and connections of some members. The court found that NMA’s argument was “hopeless on the facts” and rejected the point.

The NMA argued that the Charter required a Regulator’s Code of Practice to be in place before recognition could be decided so that the PRP’s decision would be based on the Code the applicant intended to apply. Here, IMPRESS had consulted on and then adopted its Code after it had been recognised and had used the Editor’s Code during the recognition process. The court found that there was no requirement to adopt the Editor’s code post recognition, save as an initial code. That is what IMPRESS had done. That IMPRESS said it would consult on and replace it with a new code was what the legislative regime envisaged.

Finally, NMA argued that IMPRESS was required to have a serving editor on its Code committee and had failed to do so. Again, the court rejected this argument. It found that such requirement was “simply not found within [the Charter]”. The (R v Press Recognition Panel [2017] EWHC 2527 (Admin) (12 October 2017) — to access the decision in full, click here).

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