146: Paul Foot Award: The Winner

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Page Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94. This is the Paul Foot Awards winner spectacular.

Over the last six days, you have heard all about the shortlisted entries for this year's Paul Foot Award for campaigning and investigative journalism. Six fantastic stories.

We're going to be finding out who has actually won the big gong and check in a moment's time.

Before that, though, we're going to go to last year's winner, Tristan Kirk of the Evening Standard, to tell us what his story was about and more importantly how things have changed since last year.

So over to Tristan.

My reports were on the single justice procedure which is a criminal case process

deals with hundreds of thousands of allegations each year

and there are deep flaws in the system whereby people are harshly and unjustly convicted in a system which is set up for cost-cutting cost

and efficiency and not necessarily for fairness.

So, my reports brought out some of those cases that passed through the system against people with dementia, people who are grieving deaths, who are facing criminal convictions for not paying bills in their time of need.

And our reporting brought to the fore some of those flaws, as well as some of the other problems with the system about targets being set for dealing with justice, which obviously leads to efficiency being put above fairness.

The details of the stories that you had found were shocking because there were people being prosecuted over really minor things, people who had never done anything wrong before and frequently, as you say, people who didn't really understand the system that they had been put into.

And then people who, if they, for example, had dementia and had not

renewed their driving insurance, somehow were put into this enormous justice machine, which then led to them being criminally convicted. And

it was really, it was kind of outrageous to hear.

And I think it got compared at the time to the post office story, just because of the evident unfairness, the evident injustice baked into this system.

I hope that you're going to say that in the years since you won the award, this has all changed.

I wish I could say it's all changed. There are positives.

I think winning the award was obviously a great accolade, but what it did was it put the stories and the issue onto a level that I think made the government sit up and take notice.

It's been almost a year, and the problems that were identified back then still exist, and the system continues to operate largely unreformed, which to me is an ongoing scandal and something of a national disgrace.

But the Labour government has undertaken a consultation between March and May to ask what possible changes could be made.

And so there is a sort of a light at the end of the tunnel that they are thinking about changing things, making prosecutors in the system read the mitigation letters, a rather simple change to things.

The kind of obvious thing that you would think already happens, but doesn't.

The problem I have is that it's now mid-May and the government hasn't committed to any kind of a timetable for when they might do this.

And so this system rolls on week by week. This is a system that was invented in 2015.
So this has been going on for many, many years.

The fact that I've started reporting on it doesn't mean that it's only just started happening.

As we're speaking this morning, the latest story about the single justice procedure written by you was published on the Standard website three hours ago about a mother who was convicted of not paying an £8.75 car bill while she was grieving the death of her baby.

And that's,

you know, it's clearly these things are ongoing.

It makes you really furious, to be honest with you, to come across a case like that.

In the summer last year, I looked into a case

jointly with ITV News, who went down

to speak to her, of a mother who had lost her baby in tragic circumstances. And at that time, grieving, obviously devastated, she hadn't paid her car insurance.

She was then prosecuted and convicted in the single justice procedure. And once we'd highlighted that case, they went back, revisited it.

It was obviously wrong, not something that our court should be doing. And the conviction was overturned.
And then we move forward a year, and we have the latest case, which was literally last week.

of a mother who lost her baby in terrible circumstances and didn't pay for the car tax. It's almost exactly the same thing.
And we are nearly a year later, and we're still dealing with the problem.

It just makes you really mad that nobody in power has said, okay, there might be bigger changes we need to make to this system, but there are these obvious small changes that can be made, and yet nobody's doing it.

So, as much as I'm happy that there are politicians and officials who are looking at this, every week these cases come come up.

Winning the Paul Foot Award was just a fantastic launch pad for this story.

And I really appreciated that this recognition of an issue that really had trucked on in the background for me for many months, if not years, without receiving much attention at all.

And I think Privatize got an incredible record of highlighting and recognizing stories and issues that don't grab the the national media agenda in any way, that really struggle to make that kind of breakthrough.

And I appreciated that. And that's obviously led to an awful lot of other things to do with the single justice procedure being put onto the national agenda as a consequence.

A few months after winning the award, I reported on a very, very niche anomaly within the system to do with train fare evasions.

That

people are being convicted and

sentenced in the single justice procedure of fair evasion

when that wasn't allowed to be done in the single justice procedure because of its fast-track court process nature.

It was a very technical niche story that people on train blogs and enthusiasts have been talking about for a long, long time.

And incredibly unexpectedly, that issue was then seized upon by the government and the courts. And something like 70-odd thousand convictions were then overturned.

I really do believe that that's something that wouldn't have happened if this issue weren't on the national agenda, because that's the kind of thing that could very, very easily be swept under the carpet.

But it's because Private Eye had seized on this and said this is a really big issue.

I do genuinely believe that that helped to convince people in power to say, look, we need to take this seriously, we can't just sweep this one under the carpet.

So, thanks to Tristan there. That was last year's award.
Now, we're going to go over to Ian as he makes his speech and announcement of this year's winner.

So, good evening, and welcome to the Foot Awards 2025. These are the premier journalistic awards.
There was another big event for journalists, the Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalists Summit.

This took place

earlier this month. No one from Private Eye invited.

But it featured a lot of prominent UK figures. One of these figures who appeared on the platform was billed as a truth teller.

His name was Alastair Campbell.

WTF,

as the younger journalists say, and WMD,

as us older ones do.

So, this is a traditional event. I mean, it is a particularly sad day.
Today is the death of Brexit,

which obviously is a source of great

sadness all round,

particularly for the Tory papers who've been claiming benefits for all those years.

Boris Johnson, writing, you know, obviously a fellow journalist. he's

cheap but inevitable.

He wrote about Kirstarma. He said Kirstarma was the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels.

And we always tell young journalists, write about what you know.

Some of you will remember that a lot of Tory MPs were actually found with orange balls in manacles at various stages of the last government.

Anyway, it's slightly odd for the Mail to actually run that. I mean, it's a family newspaper, the Mail.
I mean, it's the Rothermere family newspaper, but

I think maybe they think the word non-dom is some sort of SM thing.

Anyway, the foot awards are 20 years old, like a fine old port, or a really rotten new free port like Teesside.

In the olden days, I just wanted to give a bit of history.

This event was co-funded by the Guardian.

But the Guardian became very short of money,

and as they still are, and the Guardian decided they could no longer pay for the award or for this party, which, let's be honest, they're down to their last billion pounds

in the holding fund. So, you know, it's no wonder they had to sell off the Observer.

They've sold it to a company called Tortoise, which you all know, named after Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the harebrained scheme to run

a Sunday paper. I always say at this event, I find it very cheering, and I always say journalism is alive and well.
And I feel a bit like Joe Biden's PR team.

No, he's fine, he's fine,

he's very well, he's fine,

really kicking, strong, tough.

But

I do mean it.

I do genuinely believe it, and every year I get inspired by the entries for these awards. And this award is named after Paul Foote.
Paul was an absolutely extraordinary man and brilliant journeys.

It is extraordinary to think about Paul and his legacy going on. I mean, there are two documentaries about Lockerbie now and his first special, The Flight from Justice.

I mean, Paul followed that story, and we're still following it today. He was one of the first to write about the infected blood scandal decades ago, and you watch a protest going on now.

Someone wrote to me about Han Ratty. God, 1960s miscarriage.
Someone still wants to rectify that.

He wrote about the Birmingham Six, the Guildford 4, Death on the Rock, the Piper Alpha disaster, the Scott Report, and so many more.

Paul was always a brilliant journalist, but B, he did it with a lightness of touch.

I was looking it up, and I found he had actually done the joke about privatization in the health service the first time. And the headline was, The NHS Safe is in my hands.

I mean, that was 25 years ago. I mean,

this event still convinces me that there are real people out there writing really good stories that matter.

And we have a long list of 10, The Times, The Guardian, Liverpool Post, Liberty, Open Democracy, London Centric, proving we're not, Reuters Institute, nothing from the Mail this year.

I was hoping for a joint entry. The Mail on Sunday, their Let Be Is Innocent campaign,

and the Mail podcast, Killer Nurse Coming to Get You.

Anyway, maybe next year.

The Paul Foote Awards 2025.

Patrick Butler and Josh Halliday,

could you come out?

Patrick, Josh, congratulations on winning. You must be very glad.
I'm completely over the moon. Of all the awards, of all the journalistic awards, this is the one.

I mean, this is the one that when we've discussed it, we've thought, this is the one we really want to win. And my government won it.
It's amazing.

We've just spoken to Tristan Kirk, last year's winner, who talked about the changes in the single justice procedure, his story, and how the story's evolved from last year to this.

In an ideal world, when you're back for next year's award, what would you like to have seen happen with this story?

I mean, if we're back here in a year's time, you know, we'd like to see an end to the sort of persecution of unpaid carers, an end to the criminal prosecutions, an end to the punishing of people via this cliff edge fiasco.

And, you know, this is really an important point about does the state side with unpaid carers who are propping up the social care system and give them the benefit of the

when they are just trying to survive. That's all they're doing.
They're not trying to con the system. They're not

defrauding the public purse by earning an average of 50p or £1

over the threshold for a year or two. They're just trying to survive in an incredibly difficult time of their life.
And so what we really want is a more compassionate system.

You mentioned in your speech, Patrick, the editorial support that you'd had and I think it's always worth talking about that a little bit. I wonder if you'd mind saying a bit more about that now.

I think when I first came to the news session with the story they thought this was a great story. They recognised the injustice and I think lots of people think that carers don't matter.

Who are carers? They're just basically

hundreds of thousands if not millions of mainly middle-aged women who look after their loved ones, whose lives are basically an act of love to their family and their sons and their daughters and their partners.

In the back of my mind, I was thinking like a journalist is always thinking, is this a story? And the more and more we did it, the more I thought this is an amazing story.

And thanks to my colleagues who saw this and put a lot of resource and time and energy and enthusiasm behind it. They backed us at every stage.

They cleared the front page every now and then for us to do a story. They gave us space inside.
We went on the podcast. They backed it from start to finish.

And I have to say, you know, that was great judgment on their part. I mean, I don't even need to ask this.
Is there more to come on this story?

Are you working on whatever's next in terms of the carers' allowance scandal? Yeah, we're absolutely focused on this dead set.

I mean, what has been shown by previous Pole Foot winners is that you've just got to hold your nerve.

And all of those shortlisted tonight have held their nerve against official denial, official obfuscation. And, you know, that doesn't put us off.
We'll keep going.

This award I hope will really turbocharge our investigation,

put it in the public spotlight even more than it is and

power us on to proper change in government. The main reason why this story happened and it worked and it made so many people angry at the unfairness was that lots of people, unpaid carers, not least,

spoke to us and they were incredibly brave. Most of them were very ashamed of what they've done.
They thought it was their fault.

They thought no one was listening to them and would listen to them and they were just going to take their punishment beating.

And their bravery in talking to us was incredible and I think both of us would say that if anything this award is dedicated to unpaid carers.

So that's it from this year's Paul Foot Award. We will be back again next year with another Paul Foot Award, but we'll also be back again tomorrow with another regular episode of Page 94.
Tune in.

It's going to be great fun. We'll see you then.
Thanks to you for listening and as always to Matt Hill of Wreath Incordio for producing. Bye for now.

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