Thinking through Dacre's evidence now I've had a chance to read it -
He's repeating on oath in court what he's said in the Leveson Inquiry, as you'd expect - that he had carried out an internal investigation and is confident there was no phone hacking at the DM. Fair enough.
Re spending £3m on private investigators over 20 years: that works out as an average of £150k per year. I don't know the DM/MoS budget, but it's a pretty big organisation, so the amount doesn't seem out of the ordinary. (In contrast, didn't Graham Johnson pay someone £75k in relation to this trial?)
Again, paying for information isn't illegal. Asking someone to do something illegal clearly would be.
After 2005, when a private investigator who ran a search agency the DM had used was convicted of breaching information laws, there were multiple warnings sent out to journalists at the DM via editors about data protection laws and legal implications, and eventually use of search agencies was banned.
The suggestion here is that everyone was using these agencies, and the DM assumed the agencies were using legitimate methods.
It feels like this is the grey area - that if there was activity that falls under the heading of 'unlawful information gathering' this is where it might be found.
From my perspective, I can believe that there wasn't any phone hacking at the DM. I think I'm less confident that the search agencies they used always used legitimate methods before 2005.
If that is the case, whether the DM didn't realise, or didn't care at the time, I wouldn't like to say.
Meanwhile, the claimants still need to show that, in each case, there is evidence of illegal activity linking the DM to the article in question. So far, the evidence hasn't been overwhelming.