CHAIRMAN'S REPORT

Our task ahead is simple: to continue providing a first class service for all those with a grievance about the press - ordinary people and high profile public figures alike; and to carry on demonstrating how self regulation works to protect the most vulnerable in our society.

I am delighted to report on another year of solid progress by the Press Complaints Commission.

Our central task is a straightforward one: to resolve complaints brought to us, and to do so quickly and efficiently. As the pages of this report show, we fulfilled that aim in 1998 more effectively than ever before - the winners from which were ordinary members of the public who could never afford to use the law to conciliate a dispute with a newspaper or magazine.

As this report also demonstrates, we continued to make progress in our aim of seeking to protect the most vulnerable in our society - children, victims of crime, people suffering at time of grief, hospital patients and many others. In these areas, self regulation yet again demonstrates its strength over any legal system. The industry Code of Practice we administer goes much further in protecting the vulnerable than the law does - or, indeed, ever could.

As I pointed out in the debates last year on the Government's Human Rights legislation, we succeed because publications co-operate with the PCC, in the way they never would with a legal regulator. A free press in a free society would - rightly - spend its time trying to wriggle out of the straight jacket of legal controls, whether imposed by legislation or by the judiciary. The loser would be ordinary people, who would be left with no means of free or quick redress - and no protection from a tough Code.

For me one statistic proves this point more fully than any other. Since the Commission and the Code were established in 1991, the PCC has dealt with more than 25,000 complaints. Not once has an editor ever sought to defend him or her self in anything other than the terms of that Code. Given that no such Code had ever existed before, and given what a sea change in the behaviour of the press its establishment required, that is an enormous success - and a tribute to all newspapers and magazines. That is why the Government was right in 1998 - as this report records - to amend the Human Rights and Data Protection legislation to safeguard the position of tough and effective self regulation: the changes in press behaviour in the last nine years are too significant, and too dramatic, to risk having them jeopardised.

That we succeed in resolving so many disputes, and that we can do so much to protect the vulnerable, is testimony to the continuing commitment of all newspapers and magazines to effective self regulation.

Of course, there will always be those who believe that self regulation is not enough. Some people, for instance, want us to change our procedures pro-actively to pursue issues where no one has complained - a power we have but must use very sparingly. Others want us to move to a system of fines or more actively to monitor the press. What all such ideas have in common is that they would turn the Press Complaints Commission into a Press Control Commission. That would, in turn, undermine self regulation - because publications would, rightly, cease to be so co-operative with the PCC. They would see us as the first rung on a legal ladder, not as the alternative dispute resolution mechanism that we are.

In answering those critics, our task in the years ahead is simple: to continue providing a first class service for all those with a grievance about the press - ordinary people and high profile public figures alike; and to carry on demonstrating how self regulation works more effectively than the law does, or ever could, to protect the most vulnerable in our society.

This Annual Report charts our success in those areas to date. I am confident future Reports will set out even more significant accomplishments.