Having listened carefully to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Ms. Short), I can fully understand her feelings about the inquiries which she has reason to believe a Sunday newspaper and other journals—I believe that she referred to other sections of the press—are making about her personal life and relationships going back many years. Judging by what she says she has been told about the questions and the assumptions, and the assertions that lie behind them, I can readily understand why she is distressed and angered. I understand her reaction to the other unfriendly and inaccurate press coverage as she described it.

As the hon. Member for Ladywood mentioned, hon. Members on both sides of the House have been and remain concerned about journalistic abuses, especially invasions of privacy that cannot be justified in the public interest. The hon. Lady commented that a couple of years ago several private Members' Bills that would have given a right of privacy or a right of reply were introduced in response to cruel and irresponsible journalism that had caused widespread dismay in this place and among the general public. The Government were unable to support the Bills for reasons of principle and because of technical flaws. However, we announced on 21 April 1989 the setting up of a committee to consider the case for a new remedy for unwanted intrusions into privacy by the press.

The report of that committee, under the chairmanship of Mr. David Calcutt, was welcomed by hon. Members on both sides of the House on 21 June 1990. We accepted its main recommendations, which were for the replacement of the Press Council by a Press Complaints Commission, for new offences of unwarranted invasion of privacy for publication purposes and for slightly stricter court reporting restrictions. At the same time, and consistent with the Calcutt committee's approach, we made it clear that self-regulation under a new Press Complaints Commission was the industry's last chance to put its house in order, and that we would review the effectiveness of the commission after 18 months' operation to ascertain whether it should be put on a statutory footing.

We are naturally pleased that the industry set up the Press Complaints Commission at the beginning of the year, and did so with considerable dispatch. The previous Home Secretary welcomed the appointment of Lord McGregor of Durris as its chairman for his mixture of independence of view and experience as chairman of the last Royal Commission on the press, and more recently of the Advertising Standards Authority.

However, the composition of the commission—something to which the hon. Member for Ladywood referred particularly—its remit and its adjudicatory code are not matters for the Government at this stage, and we would not wish to influence them. We have made it clear that we are concerned only with the effectiveness of the new arrangements in terms of making abuses things of the past. We are not concerned with the detail of those arrangements. It is for the commission to decide how best to regulate the industry, but it is clear to me that the issues to which the hon. Lady referred are matters for the commission. I am not so certain that any of the activities that she described would be caught by the offences of physical intrusion recommended by the Calcutt committee and accepted in principle by the Government, but they may be. I shall have to read the hon. Lady's remarks carefully.

The commission is proposing to adjudicate according to a code that will be modelled on, but not identical to, that proposed by the Calcutt committee. The code includes matters such as inaccuracy, to which the hon. Member for Ladywood referred, confusion of fact and comment, to which again she referred, opportunity to reply and, pre-eminently, intrusion into privacy. I suggest that the hon. Lady should do what she said she was intending to do, although she was sorry that she did not have the hot-line to do it, and ask the commission to intercede in the matters that she has outlined before publication. If the article is published, I suggest that she should consider whether to make a formal complaint on the ground that the code has been breached. Alternatively, I suggest that she takes both actions. For my part, I shall ensure that the official record of the debate is sent to the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. In that way, the commission will have, at the earliest opportunity, the full catalogue of intrusion, innuendo and distortion to which the hon. Lady is convinced that she is being subjected and which, as I say, I can well understand she finds deeply hurtful.

I shall consider carefully the references that the hon. Lady has made to the police, as well as all the other important and worrying points that she made during her speech.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at half-past Eleven o'clock.