Written Statements

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Written Statements

Tuesday 8 February 2022

Child Online Safety

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Chris Philp)]

Protecting children online is a Government priority and the strongest protections in the draft Online Safety Bill are for children.

The Online Safety Bill will establish new statutory duties requiring companies to take robust steps to improve safety online. The duties will cover user-to-user services—those that allow users to upload and share content that may be encountered by others—and search engines. All companies in scope will need to protect their users from illegal content and activity, and companies with services that are likely to be accessed by children will be required to protect children from legal but harmful content. While the Bill is technology neutral, we expect companies to use age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services that pose the highest risk of harm to them, such as online pornography.

The online safety regime covers many of the most visited pornography sites, social media, video sharing platforms, forums and search engines—thereby capturing many of the sites through which children access pornography. These companies will have to prevent children from accessing pornography or face enforcement action by Ofcom.

The Government recognise the concern, raised by the Joint Committee during pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and by other child online safety stakeholders, that the Bill needs to go further to protect children from online pornography on services that do not currently fall within its scope.

To strengthen protections for children further, we will make changes to the Bill to incorporate a stand-alone provision requiring providers who publish or place pornographic content on their services to prevent children from accessing that content. This addresses the concerns that have been raised about a gap in scope for non-user-generated pornography, and ensures that all services that would have been captured by part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, and all the user-to-user and search services covered by the Online Safety Bill, will be required to protect children from pornography. This new duty will be enforced by Ofcom with providers being subject to the same enforcement measures as other in-scope services.

The Government are committed to bringing forward the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children online. We will introduce the Online Safety Bill as soon as parliamentary time allows and will continue to engage with Members of Parliament in both Houses on the protections for children within the Bill.

[HCWS599]

Automatic Enrolment Review 2022-23

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)]

Automatic enrolment into workplace pensions (AE) has been a huge success to date. Since its introduction in 2012, over 10 million people have been automatically enrolled and savings by eligible employees have increased by £28.4 billion. This has been achievable through the 1.9 million employers who have played a crucial role by enrolling their employees and paying contributions as appropriate.

An objective of this year’s annual review of the AE earnings trigger and qualifying earnings band (the AE thresholds) is the continued stability of the policy. We also want to ensure that our approach continues to encourage individuals to save towards their pensions while ensuring affordability. Our approach is designed so that everyone who is automatically enrolled continues to pay contributions on a meaningful proportion of their income. The review has concluded that there should be a freeze of all AE thresholds for 2022-23 at 2021-22 levels. This is consistent with our ambitions to build a stronger, more inclusive savings culture. The Government are considering what more can be done to enable people to have greater financial security in retirement.

The 2022-23 Annual Thresholds

The automatic enrolment earnings trigger will remain at £10,000,

The lower earnings limit of the qualifying earnings band will remain at £6,240,

The upper earnings limit of the qualifying earnings band will remain at £50,270.

The analysis supporting the proposed revised AE thresholds will be published in due course. A copy of this will be placed in the Library of the House and will be available on the www.gov.uk website, following publication.

[HCWS598]