The Burton Mail has been criticised by the Press Complaints Commission for failing to respond to a complaint quickly enough.

The press watchdog said it was “unacceptable” for editors to delay their responses after the paper took six weeks to answer its request for information.

And underlining the importance of co-operating swiftly with its enquiries, the PCC said that “one of the chief virtues of the self-regulatory system is its ability to resolve disputes quickly”.

Mail editor Paul Hazeldine said the delay had not been deliberate and had been due to staff holidays, including two weeks when he had been on holiday.

The complaint in question came from a Derbyshire man who claimed the Mail had intruded into his and his wife’s privacy by publishing his full address in an article about a robbery at his home, as well as details of when the crime took place.

Although the complaint under Clause 3 was rejected, the PCC said that editors must always consider the vulnerable position of individuals before deciding what to publish. It would not be enough of a defence to say the information had come from an official source – it must also be in the public interest.

The complainant had claimed that by publishing these details the newspaper had put his property at risk of further burglaries, and had breached Clause 3 (Privacy) of the Code of Practice.

But the newspaper said that the details included in the article ‘Thieves snatch farm jewels’, published on January 28, had come from local police and it did not consider the inclusion of the details to be improper.

It added that similar stories were published on a regular basis in the hope readers might be able to provide useful leads to the police.

The Commission said that although it sympathised with the complainant, it felt the paper was performing an important function by publishing a witness appeal – which included two police telephone numbers, and was acting on information that had apparently come from the police.

The PCC said it also had to consider that potential witnesses would need a certain amount of information about the incident in order to come forward, so had to balance the complainant’s right to privacy with the paper’s right to report factually on a matter of local concern and the public interest inherent with publishing details designed to help police enquiries.

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