My six priorities for a new press regulator

The Prime Minister has said the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) would be scrapped, and said: "I believe we need a new system entirely."

So how should a new system be designed?

Here are my top six priorities for a new system of regulation - based on what didn't work about the PCC.

1. Regulator, not mediator.

Even sceptics (like me) accept the PCC did some excellent, unseen work in mediating between the press - mostly local papers - and those who feel they've been badly treated, misrepresented or had their privacy breached.

But it's clear now that mediation isn't enough. When the PCC chair Peta Buscombe tried muscle-flexing - telling Newsnight that Ryan Giggs should have come to her, not the courts, to protect his privacy - guffaws rang out across the land.

And, notoriously, it went missing in the last major press crisis: the McCann multiple libels. The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee had this to say about that:

"...any regulator worth its salt would have instigated an enquiry. The press, indeed, would have been clamouring for it to do so. It is an indictment on the PCC's record, that it signally failed to do so."

We now know that even News International's tainted management can't stomach what Rebekah Brooks' and Andy Coulson's generation got up to on the News of the World - though they seemed not to care quite so much when the whole scandal was firmly under the radar.

The public needs a new, vigilant regulator working on its behalf - not just a mediator.

2. It must become truly independent.

A majority of PCC members were 'lay' or 'public' members. That appeared to render the PCC 'independent'.

It wasn't.

Its activities were wholly circumscribed by two other bodies which, though separate from the PCC, paid for it and devised the code it 'enforced' - the Press Standards Board of Finance and the Editors' Code of Practice Committee, respectively.

Both were entirely composed of newspaper and magazine representatives. So it was a bit like the police or the nuclear industry writing their own rules and paying for those who keep an eye on them.

Therefore...

3. It will need a new funding arrangement.

It's right that newspaper and magazine publishers should pay for their own watchdog. But it should clearly be much more arms-length that it is now. Perhaps it should be placed on a statutory footing: if you want to run a newspaper, you pay the levy.

Nor is it acceptable that a serially offending newspaper group - Richard Desmond's Northern and Shell, which publishes the Daily/Sunday Express/Star - can simply walk away, refusing to pay or play when it doesn't like the idea of regulation.

Some better - and heftier - system of funding is a must.

4. It will need a new, stronger Editors' Code

The current code of the PCC is the least restrictive that newspaper editors themselves could contrive. Its flimsiness is striking if you read it alongside any US newspaper's code, or that for major news agencies such as Reuters.

It compares badly, too, with the BBC's Editorial Guidelines, Ofcom's code, or even the NUJ's. Plus, almost every line is qualified by a public interest exception - though, unlike most other codes, it makes no effort of any kind to define or describe the public interest, leaving it to editors to justify their breaches post facto.

And we now know what that means.

5. It will need investigative powers and a mechanism to trigger them.

Currently, in broad terms the PCC looks only at individual complaints - a restriction that's led to wholly inadequate oversight. Complaints on behalf of groups - for example, the portrayal of asylum seekers or Roma - have been routinely rejected.

BBC editors find it exceedingly irritating that the BBC Trust - and before it the BBC Governors - sticks its nose into what they're up to, asking awkward questions about how they report things like the Middle East, Europe, business, religion, rural affairs, science. Or demanding an explanation when people or groups complain about their work.

But whatever personal irritation BBC editors feel, somewhere at the back of their mind they know it keeps them honest. They need to stick to the Editorial Guidelines, or someone will want to know why.

The same is true of Ofcom for commercial broadcasting.

As someone once said: 70% of the public trust regulated broadcasters; 20% trust the unregulated press. You do the math.

6. It must be able to impose proper sanctions.

The Editors' Code and the PCC asserted that the requirement to publish PCC adjudications was an effective sanction.

It wasn't.

Some papers have played the system, ensuring that complaints are 'resolved' - usually with a private letter of apology and a promise never to do it again. That's like an out of court settlement and meant there was no adjudication. So no grovel had to appear.

Where there was an adjudication, it was often hidden away in spite of the requirement to publish it with 'due prominence'. Or it was published so long after the event that its sting was much reduced.

Without effective sanctions with the potential to truly sting, a regulator will never be effective and certainly never intervene credibly on the national stage on major privacy or public interest questions or breaches of journalism ethics.

Kevin Marsh is a former editor of the BBC's Today programme and former Executive Editor of the BBC College of Journalism.