Andrew Gilligan at House of Lords committee

Andrew Gilligan told the House of Lords select committee his concerns that 'the whole of journalism has been tarnished' by the phone-hacking affair


London editor of the Telegraph Andrew Gilligan has warned a parliamentary committee that the Leveson inquiry "is not proportional to the problem" and has prematurely determined that the current system of regulation is not working.

Giving evidence to the House of Lords communications select committee, as part of its look at the future of investigative journalism, Gilligan clarified at the start of the session that his answers given were his own opinion and that he was not speaking on behalf of his employers.

In his answers to the committee, which he also published on the Telegraph's website today, Gilligan listed the inquiry as a "potential threat" to the future of investigation journalism.

"Leveson's principal task [in his terms of reference] is to recommend a 'new, more effective…regulatory regime' on the press," he said.

"The inquiry's essentially decided, before it even starts work, that the current regime is not effective and needs replacing. In newspaper terms, it's written the headline before it's done the reporting."

He argued that the phone-hacking scandal "was quite clearly not a failure of regulation".

"There already is a rather strong regulation against hacking people's telephones – the law. It was the failure of the police to enforce the law. And the reason this scandal became so consequential is not just because of what it told us about the press, but because of what it told us about the police and politics.

"And unfortunately, Leveson's terms of reference bear much more heavily on the press than on the police or politics, and I think that's unfair. He is to make recommendations as to how we are to be regulated – in other words, how we should be forced to behave – but merely for the "future conduct" of the police and politicians. In other words, how they should merely be asked to behave.

"We've heard a lot at the inquiry already about the issue of proportionality. I've spoken about it, and I think it's an important principle in deciding how far you do a practice that might be controversial.

"And my concern is that the Leveson inquiry is not proportional to the problem. I don't believe that the problems it exposes – although hideous – were the work of more than a fairly small minority of journalists. And I'm concerned that the whole of journalism is being tarnished, and may be subject to some kind of future, more onerous regulation, for the sake of the activities of a comparative few".

The session also heard from Phil Hall, a former editor of the News of the World and via video-link from Sir Harold Evans, editor-at-large of Thomson Reuters, and the company's editor-in-chief Stephen Adler.
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