LONDON, March 8 (UPI) -- The British watchdog Press Complaints Commission is being shut down and replaced with another regulatory body, officials said.
The closure, approved Wednesday, came after the PCC's response to the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World tabloid during the Leveson inquiry, The Guardian reported.
The PCC will be replaced by a transitional body that will regulate the British news industry until a new body is set up, PCC Chairman Lord Hunt said.
"So we're very much now on the front foot and listening to all sides and determined to bring forward the sort of independent self-regulatory structure that everyone will approve of," Hunt said in February.
Hunt said the new body will retain the functions of the PCC that worked.
"I'm determined that we should make sure that we still keep those procedures which 80 percent, 85 percent of people who have used them have found so helpful -- pre-publication action and various other ways," he said.
