With privacy, the principle is easy enough. Everyone has a right to privacy. What that means in practice will depend case by case. Attention-seeking celebrities who try to define the terms of their own publicity will obviously have less of a right to privacy than the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus. But how much less; and is the public interest involved; and if so, how is it to be defined? At the PCC we now have a pretty sophisticated set of precedents to guide us in these matters. It is, I believe, a more coherent and useful guide to what is proper to publish than the rather higgledy-piggledy rulings that have recently emerged from the courts on aspects of privacy and confidentiality. While the courts in recent years have dealt only with a handful of cases, we have the advantage of having ruled on hundreds.

After 15 years, the PCC has established a substantial corpus of its own case law, not just on privacy, but across the full spectrum of the 16 clauses of the Code of Practice. The pioneering phase is over. The cases that come now to the Commission for adjudication can be fiendish in the dilemmas they pose; and the judgments finally reached will frequently be highly contentious. There are very few open-and-shut cases for adjudication since these are, by definition, almost always sorted out at the mediation phase. These dilemmas would, by the way, be no less tractable whoever played the regulatory role.

Making a judgment on what is in the public interest is perhaps the most contentious thing we do. In British society there are widely differing views on where the line between private lives and public interest should be drawn. It is a particularly sensitive matter for us at the PCC because nine out of the 16 clauses of the Code of Practice have a public interest exception: namely, that all or part of these clauses can be set aside if the public interest is served in so doing.

Key principles

More than half of the PCC’s work as mediator, regulator and general advice bureau comes from readers of regional and local newspapers. Last year, to the surprise of some, we had more privacy complaints about regional papers than national. We have created a PCC roadshow, which twice a year visits the great cities of the UK. We were in Liverpool in the spring and will be in Glasgow in the autumn. The roadshow has been to Manchester, Belfast, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Newcastle. The format is much the same everywhere. We advertise our arrival in advance. We make camp in a central hotel, town hall or, as in Manchester, at an art gallery. We invite the public to afternoon workshops on self-regulation, followed by an open, town meeting. The latter is an occasion for members of the public to throw questions at a panel, which typically comprises the editor of the local paper, one or two of our lay commissioners, Tim Toulmin, our director, and me. The event is free and we encourage people to come in off the street.

We learn a lot from these forays beyond the M25. Sometimes I think the PCC should be based outside London. The audiences we address in the countries and regions of the UK are close to their local newspapers. The debates we have with them are very different from those in which we engage in London. The concerns and questions put to us are practical and grounded in everyday life. Do I have to pay to complain to the PCC? – No. Do I need a lawyer? – No. How long does it take to resolve a complaint? – Six weeks on average. How do I get a correction into a paper? – We will help you. Will you help me also with the prominence of the correction? – Yes. What can I do if I’m persistently badgered by a reporter? – Use our 24/7 anti-harassment service and we will stop it. And so on. It is the stuff also of the emails and phone calls that pour in every day. This is the man and woman in the street telling us what they expect from a service which they are now using in record numbers. In 2005, more than 3,600 complaints, around 8,000 general enquiries, more complaints resolved than ever before (and, by the way, more editors than ever before looking for a steer before running a story or photo).

We have learned a lot as well from journalists outside London. It was a Liverpool editor who pointed out to me a few years ago that, while he schooled his reporters in the Code of Practice, they in turn wanted to know more about our case history – how, over the years, the PCC had developed its jurisprudence around each of the clauses of the Code. This led to the commissioning of the Editor’s Codebook, drafted by Ian Beales of the Code Committee. It explains clearly and succinctly how the Code has been applied in the last 15 years. It has become an indispensable tool for high-quality journalism. Because the Code evolves constantly, it will not be long before the Codebook goes into a second edition.

This is the PCC’s grass-roots activity. In London, it passes largely unremarked and unnoticed. Yet, it is essential context for the debates on press freedom that endlessly swirl around the villages of Westminster and Whitehall – debates, incidentally, that are becoming more complex with the arrival of multi-media platforms and multiple ways of delivering editorial content. There is much that remains to be clarified in the world of blogs, podcasts and audio-visual material on newspaper websites. But of one thing I am certain – that where editorially-controlled content is concerned, we must plant the PCC’s standard of self-regulation. To do otherwise is to leave a vacuum which others, some in Brussels, will be only too happy to fill.

At the PCC we have thrown ourselves with a will into these metropolitan debates, with judges, politicians, academics, civil servants, captains of industry, heads of charities, minority groups, religious leaders, lawyers and, of course, editors and journalists. The debates are all the more useful because many of the participants can be sceptical of the merits of self-regulation. They have been enriched by visitors from abroad – most recently the chairman of the Indian Press Council – which, in its quest for the proper balance between rights and responsibilities in journalism, sees us as a model that works pretty well.

Opinionated views

This is the group that not only rules on the tough cases where it has not been possible to resolve the complaint, but also sees all the casework on which the PCC permanent staff submits its recommendations (checking that no breach of the Code has occurred or that the publication in question has offered sufficient remedial action to the complainant). None of the permanent staff of 14 has a background in journalism. It means that new recruits have to climb a steep learning-curve. But that is preferable to any suggestion that they may be beholden to some past employer in journalism.

Some people question the propriety of having editors on the Commission at all. Others would like to see them replaced by journalists of lesser authority in their daily work. I think they are wrong. A fundamental principle has to be that the buck stops with the editor, who must take full responsibility for the editorial content of his or her publication. It flows from the original recommendation of the Calcutt Committee, when it advocated the setting-up of the PCC in 1990. This was that the Editors’ Code of Practice should be drafted by the editors themselves because it would more readily command respect than one imposed from the outside. It seems to me only logical that editors should therefore have a place on the Commission, provided they comprise a clear minority. It is indispensable that the lay commissioners should hear how a case looks from the editor’s chair.

In reality, 15 years on, the term “self-regulation” inadequately defines the system. It is self-evidently not journalists sitting in judgment on journalists. It is open to independent, outside scrutiny through the Charter Commissioner and the Charter Compliance Panel, innovations introduced in 2004. Its decisions can be put to judicial review. Of course, in theory, the newspaper and magazine industry could pull the rug from under us tomorrow. But it won’t. A former permanent secretary at the Treasury said to me not long ago that his department retained the nominal authority to interfere at will in the running of the Bank of England. But having given the Bank effective independence to set interest rates, it would be politically very difficult for the Treasury to do so. At the PCC we have a similar relationship with the newspaper and magazine industry: effective independence.

Those who hanker after tougher penalties for breaches of the Code look to statutory regulation or the imposition of fines – or both. Another message, which remains very hard to get over, especially to the political class, is that the unexpurgated publication in their own newspapers of PCC rulings against editors – which is what we do when a complaint is upheld – is regarded as humiliating and harsh by the profession. Two or three negative adjudications from us and the editor’s job will be in jeopardy. In a very serious case we can “report” an editor to his or her management. By contrast, even if – and the “if ” is huge – you could agree a tariff, fines would have the perverse double disadvantage of being a lesser deterrent that would slow the system to a crawl. Fines would be absorbed into running costs and you can take it that editors would be insured against personal loss. As soon as money became involved, so would be the lawyers. The system would no longer be either free or fast, as it is now. It would be back to the bad old days of the Press Council.

Even at one place removed, statutory regulation is objectionable in principle and incompatible with a properly functioning democracy. (I would be ready to bet that one of these days the State will get out of the business of regulating content on television and radio; and that an expanded system of self-regulation will cover all forms of content delivery.) There are also practical problems. When I became the Prime Minister’s press secretary in 1994, the first thing I found in my in-tray was a draft White Paper proposing a Privacy Bill. After innumerable redrafts, it foundered on the intractable problem of defining where private space met public interest, and on the political objection to passing a law from which only those who could afford the legal bills would benefit. None of these objections has gone away.

It is important sometimes to tell people what we cannot do. Some want us to impose standards of taste and decency – but that goes straight back to the Lord Chamberlain telling the public what plays we can see and can’t in the West End. Others want the PCC to curb the political partisanship of the press – but that’s censorship. Still others blame the press for the trivialisation of politics and, as they see it, the voters’ disenchantment with politicians. Why can’t the PCC do something to raise the tone of public discourse? The answer, I am afraid, is that, though newspapers go regularly over the top, nobody contributes more to politics as soap opera than politicians themselves.

Churchill once said that democracy was the worst system of government until you compared it to all the others. Something similar can be said about the PCC in relation to the alternatives. We will make mistakes, we have our rough edges and we are never complacent about the scope for improving our service to the public. But regulation by the State or Brussels or some combination of the two would mark the beginning of the end of a freedom painfully acquired over the centuries.