This inquiry is supposed to report back in a year's time. Yet it will have its work cut out to do so
David Cameron can at least head off on holiday confident that he has finally produced a comprehensive governmental response to the phone-hacking furore that so dominated the last three weeks of the parliamentary sitting. Lord Justice Leveson, to whose inquiry the bulk of that response has been entrusted, is therefore likely to have a much busier summer than the prime minister. Setting out his initial plans for his examination of the tangled web of issues highlighted by the hacking scandal on Thursday, Lord Justice Leveson did his best to impose some order on his multiple tasks. But he left a lot of questions unanswered, even so.
The scale of the inquiry's terms of reference, which were significantly widened last week, is already daunting. The problems involved in sequencing the various issues which it covers are particularly acute because of so many continuing investigations. This inquiry is supposed to report back in a year's time. Yet it will have its work cut out to do so. Lord Justice Leveson gave a broad hint that his timetable may be difficult to meet, given what he called the length, width and depth of the issues. This needs to be acknowledged more widely.
In Plato's republic, all the evidence of abuse would be collected first and dealt with. Then all the issues raised by that evidence would be examined. Finally a set of conclusions and new measures would be drawn up and enacted. If this were an old-style royal commission, that is how the sequence of events would unfold ? though the experience of previous royal commissions on the press is that nothing would then happen. But Lord Justice Leveson is conducting a judge-led inquiry which is taking place under great political and media pressure. Government and parliament rightly want solutions to the abuses revealed by the Guardian and others. The 12-month timetable, though politically understandable, imposes immense pressure. So one of the most urgent priorities for Lord Justice Leveson and his colleagues is to spend the coming weeks establishing a much clearer timetable than has yet been done.
No one should deny the importance of this. Many of the most egregious aspects of the phone-hacking saga, not least the scale of the abuse, will remain unclear until the police investigation is completed and until any criminal proceedings have been completed too. The fresh allegations that we report on today were timely reminders that these matters are not within Lord Justice Leveson's control. Yet without full knowledge, there is a danger that the solutions and new structures which the inquiry is now starting to examine will not address the hardest examples of abuse. This potential traffic jam of activity is not Lord Justice Leveson's fault. If anyone, ministers have created it. But Lord Justice Leveson nevertheless has to solve it as best he can. Above all, he needs to prevent the inquiry becoming bogged down in detail and procedural issues, as the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday did. This may mean being very strict about the number of lawyers who are required for an effective and fair inquiry.
Lord Justice Leveson laid out some sensible ideas on Thursday. The balance between seminars, written evidence and oral hearings is encouraging. He seems to want as sensibly brisk an inquiry as he can manage. In the end, however, the goal of this whole process ought to be that any necessary statutory or other changes should be enacted during the lifetime of this parliament. This points to legislation in the 2013-14 session. On that basis, the Leveson panel has until the end of 2012 to complete its work. Lord Justice Leveson should therefore return in September with a clearer inventory of the issues he plans to address on this demanding journey, and a list of what must be left for another day. He will not have much time for a holiday like Mr Cameron's. But the timetable and procedures must be sorted out more convincingly by September than they are now.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/28/hacking-inquiry-leveson-editorial
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