A spokesman for Hacked Off said: “Victims of press abuse will be relieved to hear that, at long last, the obstacle placed in the way of the cross-party royal charter has been removed. The PressBoF proposal was a wrecking manouevre by unrepentant sections of the press trying to avoid accountability and carry on with a broken system of press regulation.
"Notwithstanding that, we are alarmed to hear that the Prime Minister now seems prepared to risk the breakdown of the cross-party agreement by once again delaying the approval of the Leveson royal charter. Ten months after the publication of the Leveson Report and seven months after all parties in parliament endorsed its recommendations in a Royal Charter, there can be no legitimate excuse for yet another delay.
"Every day that the process is stalled is another day when the public will not have adequate protection from press abuses, and every day gives further encouragement to the big newspaper companies that were condemned in the Leveson Report for wreaking havoc in the lives of innocent people.
“The public and the victims of press abuses will rightly judge very harshly any politician who seeks to accommodate the interests of press proprietors at the expense of the public, as has happened so many times in the past. We are asking the Prime Minister to meet urgently with victims of press abuse to explain what grounds could possibly justify further delay."
