MPs have voted once again to block a new Leveson-style public inquiry into the activities of the media, in what could be a decisive blow for supporters of reforms to press regulation. The House of Commons voted by 301 votes to 289 to reject the proposal after the government promised extra scrutiny of newspapers.

The proposal has been stuck in “ping-pong” mode for the last week, with peers strongly voting in favour a new inquiry and MPs narrowly rejecting it on two different occasions.

However, opposition sources said it was unlikely that the House of Lords would push the proposal back to the House of Commons for a third time, in part because of the constitutional implications of the unelected upper chamber continually overriding the votes of MPs.

This could mean an end to the campaign for a new inquiry. Although often described as being equivalent to the abandoned part two of the Leveson inquiry, in reality the proposal debated by parliament would have gone further and considered the use of personal data by newspapers, the role of social media companies, and governance issues at media groups.

“I support the convention that if something is in the party of government’s manifesto and this house passes it, then the Lords should be very, very careful about sending it back,” said the culture secretary, Matt Hancock.



“I hope the vote of this house today is respected because we will then have considered this question twice. We have made concessions in order to take on board legitimate concerns, but ultimately this house will have decided its view, having considered the question twice.”

The culture secretary was forced to make additional concessions in order to win the vote on Tuesday afternoon, unexpectedly asking the information commissioner to conduct a review of newspapers’ use of personal data, which will be repeated every five years. He also pledged regular reviews of the system of press self-regulation.

The government eventually won with a majority of 12, helped by the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party.

Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, conceded that his entirely separate attempt to introduce punitive legal costs for publishers who refused to sign up to an approved press regulator was now destined to fail and that he would not attempt to reintroduce it.

However, he said the government’s concessions were perversely “tantamount to state interference in press regulation”, since they would give the government regular oversight of the whether self-regulation of the press was working. “This vote has betrayed victims of press abuse once again and unravelled Leveson’s recommendations even further,” he said.

Theresa May’s spokesperson said the government welcomed the vote, saying: “MPs have now voted twice to reject a backward-looking, disproportionate and costly Leveson 2 inquiry. We would now urge the Lords to respect the wishes of the elected house.”

