Responding to the announcement that some newspaper groups are pressing ahead with their IPSO organisation, Hacked Off director Professor Brian Cathcart said:“This is the creation of a secretive group of big companies, led by Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, who have learned nothing from recent scandals and the Leveson Inquiry and are simply barricading themselves into the Last Chance Saloon.

“They are determined to avoid truly independent and effective self-regulation, as Leveson recommended. Instead, they have come up with a scheme that is at least as bad as the discredited Press Complaints Commission (PCC). It is a rebranding exercise designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the public.

“IPSO would allow newspapers to continue to inflict misery on ordinary members of the public, often when they are at their most vulnerable, and would allow papers to cover up their own wrongdoing in just the way they did before.

“These companies are powerful. They think they can defy the wishes of a judge-led public inquiry, of all parties in Parliament, of the victims of press abuses and of the overwhelming majority of the public, who have made their views clear in many polls.

“The public, who are their readers, will judge them harshly. These news organisations routinely demand high ethical standards from others such as banks and hospitals, but they seem to think that they have a right to ignore proper standards themselves. The rapidly disappearing public trust in newspapers will not be restored by this squalid confidence trick.

“IPSO is a disaster waiting to happen. The press are spending millions of pounds defending the indefensible. Newspapers are foolish to engage with it on any level.”