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Sweeping changes to the internal workings of the Press Complaints Commission are called for in a report released today.

The governance review urges the PCC to institute reforms to its structure and organisation in order to improve its service and to raise its public profile and credibility.

Its key conclusions, centred around what it calls "five key tests of the quality of governance" - clarity of purpose, effectiveness, independence, transparency and accountability - are largely bureaucratic.

But there is an insistent demand throughout the report for the PCC to promote itself and its functions more openly, so that the public are made aware of its operations.

It calls for the PCC to "define its purpose and the range of its activities", making it clear in public "when it will act proactively and when it will wait for a complaint."

The report says: "There should be more clarity about how complaints are handled, how decisions can be challenged. The Commission should also specify that the sanctions that are available and how they apply."

Aware of the fact that the commission is often accused of being "toothless", it says: "The PCC must do more to demonstrate the effectiveness of its current sanctions, and ensure that they are properly exercised and understood."

To this end, it lists what he calls "the ladder of sanctions", 6 "step", from soft to very hard:

1. The negotiation of an agreed remedy (apology, published correction, amendment of records, removal of article); 2. The publication of a critical adjudication; 3. Public criticism of a title by the PCC chairman;

4. A letter of admonishment from the chairman to the editor; 5. Disciplinary action against a journalist on the back of a PCC ruling that confirms a breach of the editors' code of practice; 6. Referral by the PCC of the editor to the publisher for disciplinary action.

These sanctions, though known within the PCC and the industry, have never been made explicit in public before. It is one example of the way in which the governance review panel, led by former PCC commissioner Vivien Hepworth, recommends greater openness.

She led a four-person panel that spent nine months investigating and deliberating over ways to improve the PCC. Several of the commission's critics were among those who gave evidence to the panel.

Most of the changes involve the internal structure, including the renaming and redefining of committees along with the creation of working groups "to develop thinking in challenging areas of policy", such as the the problem of whether apologies are published prominently enough by offending newspapers.

Other recommendations include practical measures to save time and money, such as the creation of a secure intranet so that commissioners can deal with their work online rather than wade through mountains of paper.

It urges the commission to "agree a list of performance objectives every year and publicly report on whether they were achieved."

There is also a call to lay commissioners - those from outside the industries that make up the majority of PCC board with 17 members - to participate more actively in several areas, including contributions to the code editor committee '.

The report calls for a deputy chairman to be appointed from the lay commissioners "to enhance the influence of the lay majority and support an improved scrutiny function."

The review panel recommend that editors should regard service on the PCC "as a duty" and that national newspaper editors should establish a rota system to guarantee that all of them serve on the PCC. There are currently no daily national paper editors on the commission.

The panel also touches on the need for the industry to increase funding for the PCC. "While the industry has provided a considerable amount of funding to the PCC over the last 20 years," it says, "the budget has not increased significantly in real terms over that time."

Though the boundaries of the governance review were limited, it does stray outside its remit on occasion. One key example is its rejection of widespread calls for the PCC to be formally subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

There is no certainty that the PCC will adopt all of the review panel's proposals. It will be considered jointly by the PCC and the industry body that funds and oversees the commission, the Press Standards Board of Finance (PressBoF).

It greeted the report cautiously, saying it will study its recommendations "as part of its own internal review of press self-regulation covering areas beyond the remit of the review team."

s PressBoF 'Chair Guy Black, said: "Vivien Hepworth and her team have produced a thorough and detailed report, and we are grateful to them for all the work they have done... we will need now carefully to consider how they will make self-regulation more effective."

The Media Standards Trust, which issued a critical report on the PCC in February last year, welcomed the review's recommendations as "detailed and intelligent", calling it "a good start."

Its director, Martin Moore, said: "There are substantive recommendations here to ensure some real change â€" provided the PCC and the industry accept them and make them happen".