Children’s privacy campaigner Hannah Weller has said the public has no faith in the new press regulator, which she said acted in just the same way as the discredited regime it replaced.
Weller and her husband, musician Paul Weller, won a high court battle with Mail Online over its publication of seven unpixellated photographs of their children last year.
She told MPs on Tuesday that nothing had changed under the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), which replaced the Press Complaints Commission in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson inquiry.
Weller said the regulator had changed its name but was “still behaving in the same way”.
“I had great hopes things would change. In my opinion and in my research, I can see that it hasn’t,” Weller told the Commons culture, media and sport select committee.
“If there was an improvement in press standards, who’s to say when the heat is off in a year or five years’ time it is not just going to go back to old ways. I don’t think [Ipso] is independent enough. The general public doesn’t have faith in it; I certainly don’t.”
Weller said celebrity parents who appeared in glossy magazine spreads did not sacrifice their right to have their children’s privacy protected.
“I don’t feel personally just because a family may decide to do a glossy magazine spread and have their children photographed in a controlled environment, I don’t think that should automatically give the press the right to chase them down the street or photograph them on their way to school, things like that.”
She added: “Nothing a parent does negates a child’s right to privacy.”
Weller said lots of unpixellated photographs of children had been published since Ipso came into force on 8 September last year.
She said children’s privacy was not something to be left to the whim of a press regulator.
“I don’t think we should have to rely on a regulator that may or may not work and may or may not have our best interests at heart. We should have the assurance of law to protect our children in this way.”
