Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

16:30

[Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 700086 relating to a minimum age for social media.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. The House is considering whether social media should be banned for children under the age of 16. I start by thanking Kim Campbell, who is in the Public Gallery, for submitting this petition, which has gained over 130,000 signatures. Kim believes that the answer to the question posed is yes. When I asked my two boys, aged 14 and 10, whether social media should be banned for children, their answer was predictable: [Hon. Members: “No!”] No—of course. But when we ask the same question of UK adults, the overwhelming majority respond: [Hon. Members: “Yes.”] Yes—75% of them, in fact, according to a poll published last month and based on a survey of 2,000 adults, I think. On the same theme, I asked my constituents in Folkestone and Hythe last week whether smartphones should be banned in schools. Almost 2,000 responded and, again, 75% thought that they should—I must say that many of the 24% who thought that they should not looked to me as though they were still at school themselves.

Are adults imagining a problem here? Do we just not understand our young people? I have heard it said more than once that most adults do not see how important social media is to young people’s social and digital identity and that we cannot teach boundaries if we ban access to these apps altogether. I totally agree that social media can be a space where young people can build positive relationships with their peers, reduce loneliness, improve coping skills and improve general knowledge and creativity—social media can of course be a wonderful tool, but it is currently a wild west where there is too much harmful content.

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree, given where we are with social media today, that legislation just has not kept up with the pace of change? We are far behind in being able to deal with and tackle this issue, given how extensive social media usage is. Our pace of change, in terms of legislation, just has not met that demand.

[Tony Vaughan]

My hon. Friend raises an interesting point. The legislative regime that we have at the moment, as I will come on to say, will require risk assessments. The state of the evidence when the Online Safety Act 2023 was being passed is different from the evidence that we have today, so the nature of those assessments and of the risks is necessarily different. As I will come on to say, we need to look at that on a continual basis.

As I was saying, social media can be a wonderful tool, but it has become a wild west where too much harmful content is being pushed on to young people, and social media companies are simply not doing enough to tackle it. The sad fact of the matter is that social media is pushing content that radicalises, that catalyses mental health crises and that is highly addictive. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, last month raised the alarm about how extremist ideologies are reaching children as young as 12 through social media platforms, and young people radicalised by social media are on its books. That, of course, is a growing threat to national security.

Another issue is mental health crises. We are seeing skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and even suicide among adolescents.

[Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend on an excellent speech. On that point, students from Brighton Hill community school in my constituency recently raised the issue of the significant impact that social media was having on their mental health and wellbeing. Does he agree that it is not just adults who are concerned, but young people, and that they should be involved in the review of legislation, because it is they who are seeing the most detrimental impact on their health and wellbeing?

[Tony Vaughan]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and I congratulate the children in his constituency on taking a very sensible approach. It is interesting that children themselves are coming forward and saying that—perhaps because they see the harms that I am talking about and want to do something about them. We have seen cases where children as young as 14 have taken their own lives after being bullied or exposed to harmful online content. During preparation for this debate, I was informed by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that there is an online website posing as a community that encourages suicide. That is the dark and depressing side of the online world that we have to do more to tackle.

What about addiction? Social media platforms are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in our young people. Algorithms push harmful content—body image issues, self-harm or anxiety videos—directly on to their feeds. A recent survey showed that on TikTok the algorithm was 4,343% more likely to show toxic eating disorder content to users who were already vulnerable to such issues. Many Members will have seen the Channel 4 documentary “Swiped”, where a secondary school took the phones of year 8 pupils for 12 weeks to see what would happen. The results were impressive: children talked to their friends more, reported less anxiety and were more focused in class.

[Maya Ellis (Ribble Valley) (Lab)]

Given that 70% of youth services investment has been slashed since 2010, does my hon. and learned Friend agree that we need to provide opportunities, aside from school, where children can interact before taking away one of the few places that they have to spend time with their peers?

[Tony Vaughan]

My hon. Friend raises a really important point. This cannot be about shutting down avenues for young people to socialise with each other. Whatever action is taken to make it harder for young people to access social media, we have to make sure that other things are going on in society so that they do not feel that that is the only place they can go to socialise.

The petitioners’ view, as I said, is that we should ban access to social media until children are 16. I spoke to the NSPCC before this debate; its position is that it does not think an outright ban is the answer. Without changing the software or the devices, a ban on children using social media—without doing more—would be unenforceable. The NSPCC’s view is that a ban would push children into unregulated and more dangerous online spaces.

Does the Online Safety Act do enough? Several people I spoke to in preparing for this debate think that it does. For example, there is a requirement for social media companies to conduct children’s access assessments to determine whether children are likely to access their platform. There are online age assurance measures that require social media companies to assess whether their services are likely to be accessed by children and to adopt robust methods such as photo ID matching, facial age estimation and mobile network checks.

Age assurance measures are of course right, but groups such as Smartphone Free Childhood do not believe that risk assessments, and the Online Safety Act more broadly, go far enough. They do not advocate for an approach of risk assessment and risk reduction methods; rather, they say that the onus should be on the social media companies to demonstrate that their apps are safe for children to use and that, if they cannot, their app must not be used by children. That seems to be the opposite of putting the onus on the regulator to prove that an app is dangerous or harmful. It might well be that that would be something the code of practice under the Online Safety Act could do. It would require tightening that code of practice, so it would be useful to know whether the Minister agrees that the Act would be capable of reversing that burden, and that we ought to think about those methods.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

Does the hon. and learned Gentleman agree that, while legislation can go so far, we have a broader responsibility as adults in society and as parents—myself included—to make sure that we monitor not only what our children are using and how they use it, but our own habits? A headteacher in my constituency was alarmed that she had to write to parents to tell them that when they collect their infants from the playground, they should put their phones away and have eye contact and engage with their children.

[Tony Vaughan]

The hon. Lady makes a common-sense point: if we are going to advocate for change, we have to lead by example. It might be said that the harms we are talking about are a somewhat separate issue to that. Of course we need to take responsibility, but where we have social media companies that are pushing content that is objectively dangerous, we need to have the conversation that we are having today about how the system and social media companies should be forced to ensure that that space is a safe one.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I thank the parents who have brought forward this petition—they are often way ahead of us as legislators when it comes to issues affecting children’s safety. My hon. and learned Friend is doing a very good job of setting out some possible risks that the Online Safety Act will not fully be able to mitigate some of the challenges that we are seeing. Considering robust measures on the age of access to social media is timely and important in thinking about the best way of protecting young people from possible exposure to online harm. On top of that, though, we must recognise that some exposure is always likely to be there. Would he also agree that it is important to ensure that we think how, through the curriculum review, we can best empower and set up children, young people and their parents to protect themselves from harm where they are exposed to it, even with the stronger regulations that we are looking to put in place?

[Tony Vaughan]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We will not protect children through just Government or social media while expecting parents to do nothing. Of course, we parents will have to do our part. Interestingly, on that point, I was going to say that an important potential measure is the approach put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) in his private Member’s Bill, the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill. His concept, which I hope to hear more about in the course of this debate, is about raising the age of data consent from 13 to 16, which essentially stops the social media companies being able to harvest data and keep feeding the kind of content that will be harmful. That seems to me a no-brainer.

Very briefly, I want to talk about smartphones in school, an issue closely connected to the one posed by the petitioner. Many teachers and parents who I have talked to believe that this “never seen, never heard” guidance, which was introduced by the previous Government, is not working. We have students still using phones during break time and often during lessons, and the problems that that causes are significant. I have had many teachers say to me, “This takes up so much time—it is a huge distraction and it interferes with learning.”

[Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)]

Prior to entering Parliament, I worked for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a type 1 diabetes charity, and one of the issues that came to light when this measure was previously proposed by the Government was the fact that children who might need to use their phones to monitor their type 1 diabetes, or who have parent carer’s responsibilities, need to have an exemption. That creates a stigma between children who might have a medical requirement to use their mobile device and those who do not. How would the hon. and learned Gentleman see this measure interacting with that?

[Tony Vaughan]

Every school has to comply with the Equality Act 2010. Whatever policy a school puts in place, one would have to check that what they are doing complies with the law. Those sorts of exceptions would obviously have to be looked at very carefully.

We do not have to look far to see examples of local areas that have banned smartphones in schools, such as the London borough of Barnet.

[Dan Tomlinson (Chipping Barnet) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. and learned Friend for mentioning the action that has taken place in the London borough of Barnet, for which I have the honour of being one of the three Members of Parliament. I have been working closely with local teachers in primary schools and secondary schools and with the fantastic Smartphone Free Childhood campaign in north London, led by a wonderful volunteer called Nova. We now have 103 primary schools in the borough committed to going smartphone free from September. Every secondary school has also said that they will go from year 7 or upwards—with some going further and faster—to go smartphone free. That is not just “not seen, not heard”, but headteachers working together, so that they have safety in numbers and are backed up by their MPs, to say that, unless there are specific exemptions that apply, smartphones will not even be allowed on the premises.

Further to an earlier point, it has also been really encouraging that some teachers are going further and saying that parents should also not be allowed to use smartphones on the grounds, for the reasons that have been pointed out. I thank my hon. and learned Friend for raising Barnet. It has been fantastic to work with the campaign locally to support parents and young children in my constituency.

[Tony Vaughan]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his activism and organising on this issue. I know that he has played a big role in the outcomes that he has just described.

An example more local to my Folkestone and Hythe constituency is a policy designed by the John Wallis academy in Ashford in Kent, where students put their mobile phones in a locked pouch during the day. The principal, Mr McBeath, had intended that the rule would limit disruption in school and support safeguarding. I, for one, will be advocating for that whenever I speak to headteachers in Folkestone and Hythe. I commend the work being done by Smartphone Free Childhood nationally and by its group in Folkestone and Hythe. It is important to work closely with everyone involved to address the problems that social media use is creating for our young people.

I am conscious of all the other people who want to speak as well as the Minister, but I have a few questions for him, one of which I have raised already. Is the code of practice likely to be robust enough in the coming years, as we see more evidence of the harms caused by social media? What changes may be needed as time goes by? Is Ofcom striking the right balance between safeguarding children from harm and ensuring economic proportionality? Is there anything that Ofcom is doing or can do to tackle the small but high-risk sites I mentioned earlier, which act as online communities and encourage things like suicide? Last, what measures can the Government take to get ahead of AI development to ensure that children can be effectively protected from the risks posed by AI so that our politics can forge technical progress? That is enough from me. I look forward to hearing others’ contributions.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind Members that, even if they have put in to speak, they should bob if they wish to be called in the debate. The debate is well subscribed, so I ask hon. Members to stick to about six minutes. I will not impose a time limit now, but that should enable everybody to speak. Finally, Mr Speaker has made it clear that if people are called to speak, they should be here for the wind-ups, as in the Chamber.

16:47

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to be here today to support the petition calling for social media companies to be banned from allowing children under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. I stand here today in complete agreement with the over 700 Reigate constituents who signed the petition urging us to take action on this important issue.

As a mother of three, I spend much time worrying about the impact of social media and screen time on my children and their peers. When I was growing up, in the school holidays I was out playing with my friends, climbing trees, building camps and learning the critical social skills that we all need in adulthood. Now, instead, we do not let our children out, and the only world we allow them to explore is a fantasy one that is rife with risk and does not equip them with the life skills that they need.

When children are online, they can interact with predatory individuals without realising, see unrealistic body images that batter their self-esteem and be convinced that black is white by false information. That is extremely damaging. Many adults fall for those things, so how on earth do we expect our children not to? It is no coincidence that we see a mental health crisis in our young people at the same time as mass adoption of smartphones and access to social media. Yes, increased mental health support is needed, but the best remedy is to remove the root cause.

I note that the previous Conservative Government took some welcome first steps in the fight to safeguard our children through the introduction of the Online Safety Act. Thanks to that Act, providers must be proactive in removing illegal content such as child sexual abuse material, and they must protect children and young people from content that is harmful. That could include harassment, abuse, bullying or content about suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. The Act also includes welcome measures to prevent children from accessing online pornography, something I particularly welcome in the light of the huge damage that material does to both our girls and our boys.

While the Online Safety Act is a welcome starting point, we must go further. That is overwhelmingly the view of Brits, 75% of whom now back raising the minimum age for creating a social media account from 13 to 16, as a recent More in Common survey shows. If, as I hope, we raise the minimum age to 16, more thought needs to be given to enforcement. While platforms may set a minimum age requirement, with 13 being the standard for most social media sites, those limits are easy to circumvent. If teenagers can evade the ban by using a simple virtual private network, we will not get the full benefit of raising the age limit. It will be of great value to hear more today about the best ways to overcome this challenge.

I also want to touch quickly on smartphones, as this is another route to better safeguarding and protecting our children. The hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) made some really powerful points on this. I strongly support a ban on smartphones in schools for children under 16. When asked, 42% of older teenagers say that on a typical day their smartphone distracts them from schoolwork, and nearly half say social media has distracted them enough to affect their grades. Currently, only 11% of schools are genuinely smartphone free, and children at these schools get GCSE results one to two grades higher, so there is clearly a big upside to banning smartphones in schools.

The Conservatives recently tabled an amendment to Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to do exactly that. Unfortunately it was voted down, but I urge the Labour Government to seriously consider implementing this much needed restriction in some form. To be honest, I am perplexed as to why they rejected the amendment, when this one measure would be a game changer in terms of protecting children and improving educational outcomes, which is the whole purpose of the Bill. I hope that they will reconsider the amendment at a later stage.

[Mike Reader (Northampton South) (Lab)]

I am very grateful that one of my constituents who has campaigned hard for a smartphone ban is here today. Does the hon. Lady recognise that although we can ban phones in schools, as the majority of schools have, it will not prevent kids from bringing phones to school and playing with them when they get outside the school gates? It is a much bigger challenge than just banning phones within the school boundary.

[Rebecca Paul]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. It is a tricky and difficult thing to achieve, but a ban it makes it a little easier for schools. We have implemented guidance, but it has not cut through as much as we wanted. We now need to accept that we need to go further and introduce a ban, because it is much easier for schools to take action when it is on a statutory footing.

I thank the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for his great work on safer phones for our children. I hope to be able to support his private Member’s Bill on 7 March. These are exactly the type of initiatives that we should be working on together on a cross-party basis, because we all agree that we want to protect our children.

I encourage Ministers and the Government as a whole to engage fully with the excellent points made in this debate, and act swiftly to protect our children from an increasingly insidious online realm that they are simply not equipped to navigate. I hope the Minister will give serious consideration to raising the minimum age for social media use to 16 and banning smartphones in schools. The value from these two changes alone would be huge for our society, and we would all thank the Government for it.

16:53

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) and the petitioner for bringing this vital debate.

Since being elected to this place in July, I have spoken about children’s safety online several times, including in this Chamber. For too long, our children’s development and protecting them from harm from predators, inappropriate and disturbing content and from each other, have been treated as an afterthought. As legislators, it falls to us to protect our children, but we are way behind where we need to be.

In my constituency of Darlington, this issue came up time and again on the campaign trail as parents, siblings and grandparents all reported feeling ill equipped to fulfil their most important role of giving their children a safe and healthy childhood. It is vital we understand that parents are asking for our support now, because for many of them, the fight and pressure from their own children to allow them the latest phone, more screen time, or access to an adult version of a game and much more, feels relentless.

This debate is about social media, but it is also about the digital age of consent. My view is that children under 16 should not be given the responsibility to permit or to deny companies’ access to their data. The risks are too high, and the long-awaited children’s codes from Ofcom are not yet in place; we do not know what impact the measures in the Online Safety Act will have on children’s behaviour and experience online. We should, therefore, stipulate that 16 is the age of digital consent.

Last week I visited Firthmoor primary school in Darlington for an assembly on online safety. It was exceptional; the children had songs, raps, roleplay and helpful tips for staying safe online. These children, aged between four and 11, are online already. I was struck by their understanding of passive screen time versus active screen time. Passive screen time includes scrolling aimlessly through suggested content, and active screen time is about learning. These children are trying to protect themselves, but it cannot just be left to them. I do not think that we can ban children from accessing screens, but we must safeguard them from harm until they are old enough to navigate the risks themselves.

[Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)]

My wife and I regret ever getting a smartphone for our two eldest children. We have four, and we are wondering what to do when the third expects access to the same rights. Smartphone management is something we continually get wrong. My hon. Friend has talked about screen time. It cannot be beyond the wit of our smartphone creators to give parental controls better intuitive use, so that they cannot be undermined so easily by the smart children using the smartphones. Does she agree that while we need to strengthen the role of Ofcom in rooting out the toxic content that our children are pushed towards, the smartphone manufacturers also have a job to empower parents? It is a real concern, because children’s use of smartphones and their access to social media is a daily battle for their parents.

[Lola McEvoy]

I fully support what my hon. Friend says. Lots of parents in Darlington have said that although the default setting may be that children cannot access chat rooms on games or a more violent version of a game—because it is not just the phones and devices, but what they are accessing on those devices that really matters—they just lose the battle. When it comes to the crunch and their child is arguing that they want to go on the device and they are going to have a tantrum, they just allow them to go on it. Parents need more support from us as legislators, which is basically my point.

Children should be able to enjoy games and access safe and engaging educational content. Platforms should not be allowed to target them with suggested content. That is where the problems are coming in—with suggested content, children are exposed to harmful and unhealthy things. Platforms should have children-safe search engines, and features including live location and chat rooms should be designed to be transparent and child-friendly, with their safety at their heart. Accessing certain social media features, such as chatting with adults who they do not know or sharing content, should be solely for those who have been strictly age-verified as over 16.

[Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her work with my constituent, Ellen Roome, on issues to do with children and social media. As a Liberal, I am instinctively against banning things. However, liberal society has long tolerated minimum age limits for things that might be dangerous for children, such as cigarettes, alcohol or driving. Does she agree that we should consider social media use in the same light?

[Lola McEvoy]

That is absolutely right; I am grateful to the hon. Member for his intervention. It is important that we strike the right balance. For a long time, we have been behind on protecting children online. It is time now to use the Online Safety Act 2023 and the upcoming children’s codes to get it right the first time. We do not know how they will bed in, and it is crucial that we get it absolutely right with the first iterations of the children’s codes in April.

To be able to chat with strangers or have content suggested to them, a person should be age-verified as over 16. For me, the online world is a hugely valuable part of modern life. As with everything we do offline, we must ensure that it is safe and regulated for children to use, and if it is not, we should not let them use it.

In Darlington, I have set up an online safety forum with year 10s across every secondary school in the town. Their biggest concern is the disturbing content that the Online Safety Act and children’s codes should protect against, but they have also flagged to me awful, horrible examples of peer-to-peer bullying, which is totally acceptable on social media platforms and goes unchecked. Ofcom is required to issue new codes every three years, so if the first codes do not get it right in April, we could be waiting for three years for a 13-year-old to be protected properly, by which point they will be 16 anyway.

The age to use social media in its current form, where platforms can suggest content and children can chat unchecked with strangers, should clearly be 16. Those whose age is not verified should be able only to access child-safe, limited platforms designed for children. That is common sense. I am concerned that without further legislation, platforms will be left to implement their own safeguards. In some cases, those may well be good, but our job is not to leave the protection of children online to chance. We should stipulate an age, require ID and be bold leaders in this space. Our children will look back and ask us what we were waiting for.

17:00

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I thank Kim Campbell and the petitioners, including almost 400 from East Hampshire, for bringing this debate to Parliament. There has been a lot of interest of late in Australia’s upcoming ban on social media for under-16s, and I was interested in how the Australians are going to implement it, considering some of the complexities and definitional difficulties. I recommend to colleagues a very good interview on American National Public Radio with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, in which she said that it is not about flicking some big switch. She said that there was a possibility that some social media functionality could be removed, rather than an entire app being blocked; that

“messaging and gaming sites and anything that delivers education or health care information”

would be exempt; and that, ultimately, it would be for the Minister for Communications to

“decide which platforms are in and which are out.”

Well, I hope they have invested in their legal defence budgets.

It is true that parents vary widely in what they think is good or acceptable. Everybody agrees that their child should be able to call or text home to let mum or dad know that they are delayed or feeling worried, or that their club has been cancelled. Some also value things that can be done only on a smartphone—such as using a map to find the way home—and there is a whole other debate about education technology and the use of Show My Homework and all the rest of it. Some parents are totally happy with the entirety of the electronic world—smartphones and social media. Let us be honest: it is parents who often help children get around the minimum age limit to be on these platforms. Sometimes, we say that they do that only for fear of the child missing out, and that may be true, but we do not know that it is in the majority of cases.

In addressing these questions as legislators, we often fall back on saying, “Hang on, we’re not talking about banning all phones; we’re talking specifically about smartphones. And we’re not talking about getting rid of the good stuff; we’re only talking about getting rid of the bad stuff.” This, of course, is the easy stage in the legislative process, and things become much harder later, when we have to define precisely what we mean. I am about to recommit that sin: I am going to talk about an ill-defined “it” that we may in some way want to restrict. That “it” is something about smartphones and social media that I will today fail to define, but I hope to come back at the end to say a little about more precisely what I mean.

I am not in the business of trying to put new restrictions on how parents manage their families or of trying to do things to them that they could do for themselves. There is already a minimum age for using social media; it just happens to be an arbitrary age that is based on some legislation—not even from this country—from the 1990s. When the GDPR came in through the European Union, which we were in then, countries could choose an age anywhere between 13 and 16. Different countries chose different ages; we happen to have settled on 13. Most people would say that we have to set the bar somewhere, so the question becomes, where? Of course, we could, alternatively, say that the Government or a regulator have no role in setting an age at all. However, if that is not our view, and we accept that there should be an age, we have to ask the secondary question: what should it be? There is no ancient right to be on TikTok at age 13. These are novel technologies, and we are facing these questions now for the first time.

In this country, there are two main thresholds for the transition from childhood to adulthood, and they are 16 and 18. Those are not the only ones, but they are the main ones. In English law, there has never been a concept of an age of digital consent and nor, to my knowledge, was there a non-digital concept of consent in contract law previously for somebody under the age of majority. I grant that it is arguable, but it seems that 16 is the most appropriate threshold.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I have met parents from Smartphone Free Childhood, but also young people. This is a big issue in Brighton Pavilion. Has the right hon. Member thought about pushing for the Minister and Members to talk more with young people about where the age limit should lie, rather than trying to come up with a number in the middle of a debate? It is clear from talking to young people that they feel that parts of social media are very toxic, but I also think they are best placed to judge where the limit should lie.

[Damian Hinds]

To be fair to the Minister and previous Ministers, I think they do make efforts to hear from young people. An interesting survey by the Youth Endowment Fund, which I commend to the hon. Lady and others, put an extreme proposition to 13 to 17-year-olds: “If you could turn off social media forever for you and everybody else, would you do it?” While a majority did not say yes to that extreme proposition, something like a third did. We also have various other surveys.

It is true that when we talk to children, as I am sure many colleagues have done in schools across their constituencies, we get a variety of views. In particular, children do not want to be left out, and as parents we do not want that for our children either. If everybody else is in a certain group or has a certain means of communication, we tend to want our children to have that too.

The evidence is not perfect. There is even evidence that some screen time is a positive good. A programme for international student assessment study in 2019 talked about a Goldilocks effect, where about an hour of screen time was beneficial for mental wellbeing, after which the benefit declined. That same study found wide differences in life satisfaction between what it called “extreme internet users” and others. There are now plenty of other studies on everything from happiness, the quality of relationships and eyesight to the effect on sleep and concentration.

There is also the rising incidence of mental ill health among teenagers, which—for the avoidance of doubt and to take politics out of it—is not unique to this country and not uniquely a post-covid effect. Causality is still hard to prove, but it seems extraordinary that, when we are talking about children, we allow something to happen because we cannot prove 100% that it causes harm, rather than allowing it to happen only if we can prove that it is safe. That is not the way we deal, for example, with children’s food or toys. I would turn the question around: are people really suggesting that the prevalence of self-harm is nothing to do with the prevalence and normalisation of certain imagery on social media?

The Online Safety Act was a landmark piece of legislation, and we will debate it again in Westminster Hall on Wednesday. Everybody who worked on it— including myself—was always clear that it would not be the last time we had to come back to this subject in legislation. It is inevitable that there will be further regulation and restrictions in the interests of greater child protection. I therefore urge the Government to move from working out whether there will be further protections to working out what those will be. Of course, to write legislation—to return to where I started—one needs to be able to define things precisely and, in reality, there is no bright line between a smartphone and a brick phone, and no slam-dunk definition of social media either.

It can be instructive to think about individual platforms and services. One of the things we worry about is TikTok. Do we worry about Snapchat? Yes, we probably do, because of the association with bullying and the disappearing messages. But some families like the snap friends function, because they can see where different family members are. Do we worry about Instagram? Yes, we probably do, and it has a particular association with issues around body image. But it is also a way for people to share lovely family photos, and for extended families to keep in touch.

A lot of families allow children to have WhatsApp, when they would not allow them to have TikTok, and up until quite recently, some would not even have called it a social media platform. Where we think we have problems with disinformation on TikTok and Facebook, other countries have them with WhatsApp. What about YouTube? For many people, YouTube is not social media; it is a place where they go to watch videos or for music. But because it has user-generated content, it is also social media; it is certainly capable of sucking up a lot of young people’s time, and it has potential rabbit holes that people can fall down.

What about gaming? Gaming is different from social media, but modern gaming also has quite a lot of social media-like functions, such as lists of friends. Certainly, it is a way of trying to create communities of people with common interests. It is also often linked to the use of Discord or to streaming on Twitch. And, again, it certainly takes up a lot of time—unless, of course, someone is in China, where the Government will allow them to do it for only one hour a day, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

All of the above have risks attached, and they all have negatives, but we are unlikely to say that we want to ban them all—far from it. There is also a different risk: if we take one thing and ban it based on its specific features—its specific definition—we just push people to other places. Other things will then get more social-media characteristics, and children may end up in darker places on the internet. All of that is probably why the Australians ended up where they did: saying that it is probably more about specific functionality and that, at the end, it might be about having to make case-by-case judgments.

We worry about content; unwanted, inappropriate contact, as others have said; the excessive time children spend on platforms; potential addiction; the effects on sleep and concentration; and myopia. Crucially—my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) covered this very well—these technologies can also crowd out other things. Whether they, in and of themselves, are good or bad, there are only 24 hours in a day, and we want children, in the time they are not at school and not asleep, to be able to access the full range of things that childhood should be all about.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order—

[Damian Hinds]

I know I am going on for way too long, Mr Stringer.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

There is no defined time limit at the moment, but I did suggest that people take about six minutes. I presume that the right hon. Gentleman is bringing his remarks to a conclusion.

[Damian Hinds]

I confessed myself a sinner at the start, Mr Stringer, and I will now come to a close.

In the Online Safety Act, we covered a lot regarding content and contact, but we need to do more on the issues of time and addiction, and I am pleased to see some of that in the work of the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). In the meantime, as others have said, we also need to do more on parental controls. I would like to see NHS advice to parents, which can be very powerful, on what an appropriate amount of time would be for children. We also need to enforce the existing age limits, particularly the one at age 13, and to recognise that some people who falsely proved they were 13 when they were eight, nine or 10 are now showing up on social media lists as being over 18, when, in fact, they are still in their much earlier teens.

17:12

[Josh MacAlister (Whitehaven and Workington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. The debate so far has done a really good job of summarising lots of the reasons why I chose to bring forward a private Member’s Bill earlier last year to address some of the issues relating to the addictive features of smartphones and social media, such as the impacts on sleep, mental health and educational attainment. There are also increasing concerns about conspiracy theories and their ability to spread, particularly among young children.

Today, I will focus specifically on the evidence, because I think that that is where the political debate is moving and where there seems to be the greatest disagreement—particularly on whether we have enough evidence now to act with confidence or whether we should pause and wait for further evidence.

There are three ways I think about this issue. The first is that, in 2012, something happened not just here, but around the western world and beyond, and it was specifically to do with teenage mental health and levels of anxiety and depression among our young people. That global event coincided with the rise in access to smartphones and social media and high-speed internet. There is no other plausible hypothesis that I have heard or come across—I would welcome interventions from colleagues here today—to explain that global phenomenon; there is no coherent alternative hypothesis. So when we think about the evidence that we require to act in this country, we should think carefully about whether we are looking at developed, different hypotheses for why this problem has grown.

The second element is the precautionary principle, which links to another point that was made. The tech industry in particular is very effective at casting doubt over findings from studies. Over the years, the burden of proof and of evidence has fallen on those like the many Members present and the petitioners. It has been for them to establish beyond reasonable doubt that there is a causal link between the use of smartphones and social media and the harms that it may cause. It is important in this debate, and in others, to balance where that evidence should be brought from. Surely we should place a burden of proof on those rolling out technology and platforms that are gobbling up huge amounts of children’s and young people’s time. At a fairly conservative estimate, the average 12-year-old is spending the equivalent of a part-time job every week on their smartphone. That must have some effect on how they might otherwise have used their time, the development of their brains, and their relationships with other people while they are on those platforms.

[Joe Powell (Kensington and Bayswater) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for his private Member’s Bill, which I wholeheartedly support. On the subject of evidence, pilots are increasingly being undertaken, such as the one in the “Swiped” documentary that was referenced earlier. I met 70 parents at All Saints Catholic college in my constituency two weeks ago to discuss this topic, and they have seen, from the school’s own evidence base, the impact of a much stricter smartphone policy. We are starting to see both the evidence of the harms, as my hon. Friend talked about, and interesting pilots that show the improvements that could be achieved by measures such as the internet age of consent and a stronger policy in schools.

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank my hon. Friend for his work on this issue in his constituency. He is absolutely right. Micro-experiments and anecdotal feedback from members of the public, who have signed this petition in large numbers, show that parents are really worried that something is going on here, but it will take some time to gather the evidence. The second aspect is about where the burden of proof should lie. Applying the burden of proof in one direction only—to those advocating for tighter regulation—is not balanced. It should apply both ways.

The third point about evidence relates to the absence of causal studies. They will take many years, so what do we do, in their absence, with the weight of correlational evidence before us? This is where we must look at the work of Sir Austin Bradford Hill. The Bradford Hill criteria, which were named after him in the 1960s, were based on the epidemiologist’s work to try to fill in the evidence gap for policymakers when the debate was being had about the public health impacts of smoking. The tobacco industry did a very effective job of casting doubt over whether smoking itself caused cancer or, as the industry then said, it simply brought cancer out earlier—that cancer was inherent within people. That was the argument: the industry said that there was no correlational study to prove that that was not the case, which goes back to my burden of proof argument.

We need to fill in the gap, because we will not have causal studies for many years. Petitions like this will continue to come, the debate will carry on raging, and politicians will be pulled towards this problem until we find a way of solving it. In the absence of those correlational studies, we have to find a way of applying a framework to look at the existing causal studies. I will not go through all nine of the Bradford Hill criteria, but one of them is dose-response rate: does the dose of a certain factor relate to the degree of the impact? In 2019, the UK millennium cohort study found that

“social media use is associated with mental health in young people”,

and greater use means greater impact. A 2022 dose-response meta-analysis found that more time spent on social media was “significantly associated” with depression. There are stacks of studies out there that show the correlation between time spent and impact. When one works through the nine criteria, in the absence of a causal study or series of causal studies, the evidence points in a clear direction: we need tighter regulation that can empower parents to set boundaries and the collective rules for how our children use smartphones and social media.

There is a risk, at times, that the sides to this debate are characterised as pro- or anti-tech. My final reflection is that, for the UK to be the global sandbox and incubator of great tech development that it should be, we need good, intuitive shared rules that can garner high degrees of public consent and support. If we move quickly on this issue, and do it smart, as a country, we will get benefits not only for economic growth and the tech industry, but for our children and their future.

17:21

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this debate. It was good to briefly chat to Kim Campbell outside the Chamber. She has done a great job in getting this petition debated. This issue is something that thousands of parents around the country are agonising over.

We live in an era when social media connects us instantly, but that often comes at quite a cost. As the Lib Dem spokesperson for mental health, I knock on a lot of doors and speak to a lot of parents, headteachers and teachers. At the moment, one of the top issues that is brought up, often unprompted, is people’s struggle to get access to treatment for their children’s mental health. Nearly everyone seems to agree, throughout society, in whatever area, that children’s mental health issues are increasing in incidence. Everyone is reporting an increase in anxiety, depression and body image issues, as the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) mentioned. All those things are on the rise, and many people believe that that is fuelled by platforms designed to capture and keep children’s attention at any cost.

The risk goes far beyond self-esteem: social media is an open door for strangers to make contact with vulnerable children. Grooming, exploitation and harmful content are just a few clicks away. As several Members have mentioned, parents, despite their best efforts, struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. We know that children are often much quicker, more adaptable, and quick to circumvent any safeguards with workarounds. They can quickly access restricted content and bypass age limits with ease. We also know that once one child in a cohort has managed to get hold of that content, they can send it to other children quickly and easily. That is why, along with nearly everyone present, we support reviewing the minimum age for social media access.

We are in an environment where online bullying is relentless and inescapable. Bullying has always taken place in schools, but people went home. Now, when a child gets home, though they might be in bed or having dinner, the bullying can continue. They might even wake up in the morning to bullying that has come in overnight. We must ensure that restrictions are not just appropriate and evidence-based, as far as they can be, but properly enforced. There has been a lot of discussion about what age should be the minimum for social media access, but the age does not matter if the restriction is not enforced by anyone. At the moment there is a minimum age, and we know that people younger than that are accessing this content anyway. That is one reason why, as I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) will speak about shortly, the Liberal Democrats are calling for more of a public health approach to children’s social media use.

I have just spent a month sitting on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill Committee, going line by line through that legislation, which is one of the most impactful pieces of public health legislation in decades. It will have a huge impact on public health by creating a smokefree generation. As a Government and as a society, we recognise that potentially harmful behaviours such as smoking and gambling need to be appropriately regulated. The hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) reminded everyone very eloquently about the supposed research that tobacco companies carried out for years to try to obfuscate the real situation. They pretended to add scientific value and knowledge, when it was really about trying to confuse the situation and slow any regulation of their products.

Just like the tobacco companies that prioritised profit over people’s health, social media companies will prioritise profit and engagement over young people’s mental health. Tech giants must be held accountable for the impact of their platforms on young minds. We need stronger protections, real enforcement of age limits, and proper digital education—not just for young people but for parents and teachers. All children will have to receive education in online safety and safer screen use to ensure that they are equipped with the skills to safely navigate the digital world, because when they finally hit whatever age is deemed appropriate, they need to be prepared and have the skills to engage critically, safely and responsibly with online content.

This is not about restricting freedom; it is about protecting young minds and improving the mental health of young people. We have allowed the digital world to move faster than our policies. Now we must act to keep up, because everyone agrees that our children deserve better.

17:26

[Mike Reader (Northampton South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the campaigners who brought this petition forward, and particularly my constituent, who I mentioned earlier, for her tenacious campaigning on this issue at regular surgery appointments and for sharing some fascinating research with me.

While I understand the concerns driving this debate, I do not believe that a blanket restriction set at an arbitrary age is necessarily the most effective way of protecting young people online. While I believe that we need to protect young people, and adults, from the harms of social media, I will set out why I do not believe that an age restriction change is necessarily the best course of action.

A huge proportion of our young people use social media daily for research, to connect with friends and to explore the world. We know that around 40% of kids under the age of 13 are already using social media platforms, which suggests to me that age restrictions alone have limitations in practice. It is worth noting that parental awareness of those age restrictions and requirements is mixed; while nine out of 10 parents of young kids have said that they are aware of the requirements, recent studies show that less than half can actually pinpoint that 13 is the age restriction for most sites. More concerning is that a third of parents with children below the current age restriction said that they would still allow their kids to use social media. That shows that a blanket restriction will not work, and that we need to bring parents and young people along with us if we are to make online spaces safer.

The figures are concerning because when we look at the impact of social media on young people, we see a complex picture. On the one hand, research suggests that over half of 12 to 15-year-olds have negative experiences online, and a magnitude of studies, as referenced by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), have shown a link between heavy social media use and mental health concerns. Seven out of 10 young people admit that they have experienced cyber-bullying, with over a third reporting that it happens on a frequent basis. Some have described social media as much more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, so clearly there are concerns.

On the other hand, 90% of young people said that using social media makes them feel happier and closer to their friends. During the pandemic, these platforms provided a crucial connection when face-to-face interaction was simply not possible. Social media has prompted a revolution in peer-to-peer interaction and sharing; we, as a Government, should not do anything to stifle that growth, and the grasp of creativity that our young people are showing. Social media offers our young people an opportunity to read, watch and understand the experiences of others around the world like they never have before.

The real question is not simply whether young people under the age of 16 should be able to use social media. As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) recognised, social media is not just about TikTok and Snapchat; it is about all the different ways in which young people connect online—and even me, when I get time to jump on the PlayStation.

The real question is this: young people are using social media and are unlikely to stop using it even if we bring in a ban, so what can we do to make it safer? Social media companies, schools and parents all have a role to play in creating safer online environments for our young people. I believe that social media can do a lot more to moderate content and provide safer spaces for our young people. Harmful content that promotes self-harm, disordered eating, bullying and body image issues should not be making it to online platforms. There has to be more accountability for the big tech giants.

Parents have to play a more active role in supervising and guiding their children’s online activities. Research shows that only six in 10 parents are aware of the technical tools and social media controls available to them, and less than a third admit to actually using them to fully control how their kids use systems online.

[Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)]

As a parent of four teenagers, I do battle on screen time every single day—so much so that my children actually thought I was coming into Parliament to give screen time to the nation. I think it is grossly unfair to blame parents or attribute responsibility to them when most parents are having this battle every single day. With the addictive algorithms on social media platforms, it is impossible for children to resist. I have a child who was 16 last week and is sitting his GCSEs. He is finding it very difficult to look away from his phone and concentrate on his studies because of these algorithms.

[Mike Reader]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. I am not saying that responsibility sits solely with parents, but parents definitely have a clear role to play. We cannot look solely to the state to help to raise our kids.

Teachers also have a big role to play. My mum, as a teacher, could tell us how important digital literacy is in this day and age. Children need the skills to navigate online spaces safely. Rather than focusing solely on age restrictions, we should consider how we make social media platforms safe for kids and improve their literacy so that they can connect with the world and explore the opportunities in front of them. Children should be aware of the risks that they face and should know how to report harmful content and navigate platforms safely. As the Government look at curriculum reform and at how we support our schools, teachers and parents, I hope that digital literacy will have an important place.

Social media is now fully embedded in young people’s lives. It offers the opportunity to connect and provides for creative expression and learning. Our challenge is to maximise those benefits while minimising the risks, not to remove the opportunity altogether.

17:32

[Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)]

Mr Stringer, you would struggle to find a Member of this House who is more committed than I am to classical liberal ideas surrounding individual liberty and personal responsibility. I do wish there were more of us. However, when it comes to children, I very much agree with the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) that the Government’s role is very different. Our job is to protect children and give them the skills they need to make decisions for themselves as they grow into adults. That does not mean mollycoddling them or wrapping them in cotton wool: there is a clear difference between a bloody knee or a playground argument and exposure to graphic violence and pornography, which can be easily accessed on social media.

As many hon. Members have noted, anxiety levels in children are at an all-time high. In particular, suicide has increased dramatically: since 2012, the rates have doubled in boys and trebled in girls. According to the “Good Childhood Report”, British children are now reporting some of the lowest happiness levels in Europe. In my constituency, a freedom of information request submitted to the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead found that mental health referrals in children had doubled since the pandemic.

The problems are due in large part to smartphones and social media. As was stated in a recent Select Committee session, the average 12-year-old now spends 21 hours a week on their phone. As well as the obvious direct harms, there are indirect consequences, which is the point that I believe the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) was making. Those are hours in which they are not having formative experiences or interacting with the world around them—experiences that our generation took for granted. I spent my early teens climbing trees and playing rugby, not staring at a screen. Something is being missed today in the healthy development of young people.

What sets social media apart is the ability to circumvent the traditional safeguards of parent, family and community, with children now exposed to the weight of the world in their bedroom. Feeling unable to protect their children from the ills of social media, many parents are resorting to banning phones entirely, which I do not think is sustainable. Things need to change. By changing the law to limit under-16s’ access to social media—I take the point from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) that that is easier said than done—we can give parents and children a fighting chance.

I believe that changing the law will play a key role in reversing the fortunes of our children, but we also need to make sure that they are prepared for the challenges of modern life. As with many of the great initiatives that have been discussed today, change in Windsor has come from the bottom up. There is already a very active branch of Smartphone Free Childhood in my constituency, and parents have shared awful stories of hardcore pornography being circulated in primary school WhatsApp groups. Separately from the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign, there is a wider movement around children’s mental health.

In my constituency, the Well Windsor charity, which I emphasise is neutral on this particular proposition, is unique in what it does. I believe it could be the blueprint for change across the country. It was officially launched late last year by Andy Nuttall, along with seven other parents, who recognised that there was a gap in state services when it came to children’s mental health locally. It is more than a cluster of well-meaning adults; the charity is run by individuals with varied professional backgrounds, including former teachers, ex-CEOs, business leaders and clinical psychologists. They are proactive: they are raising funds, talking to schools and delivering already for students. The data that they have collected on mental health provision in schools in Windsor confirms what we already knew intuitively: parents and teachers feel underprepared for providing the necessary support when facing rising anxieties among children.

Well Windsor works with third parties such as myHappymind to provide schools with programmes to help children to check in with themselves, practise mindfulness and improve their resilience, so that they can face the modern world head-on. The NHS, local authorities and the Department for Education can often go round in circles, directing children and parents from one service to another, while children are left to fall by the wayside. Charities such as Well Windsor go directly to the schools that need help and deliver it—not in a month’s time or a year’s time, but within weeks of discussions first taking place.

Importantly, Well Windsor’s approach is non-invasive, with a focus on positivity, self-esteem and general mindfulness. We should be careful about raising awareness for the sake of it, because the last thing that suggestible children need is to be bombarded with information about depression, anxiety and mental health. That would be counterproductive. There can also be a tendency to medicate away mental health problems in children. That can sometimes come at the cost of addressing the root causes of those problems in the first place. One of them is clearly social media.

I believe that if we in this place can change the law for those in our communities who are taking matters into their own hands, we can help them to turn around some of the trends that we are seeing. The only thing limiting that is political will and time. I think most of us in this House, on a cross-party basis, would encourage the Minister to move in that direction. Communities across this country have had enough of the downward spiral in children’s mental health. Parents, teachers, children and charities such as Well Windsor are taking action. It is time that we in this place did the same.

17:38

[Liam Conlon (Beckenham and Penge) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. This issue has been raised by parents across Beckenham and Penge. More than 600 of my constituents have signed the recent petition, making Beckenham and Penge one of the top constituencies nationally for signatures. We have also had one of the largest sign-ups for the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign. That includes an active local group that I have been working with, which is led by Crispin Eccleston, Elizabeth Eastham and Raj Gandhi. Hundreds of people have emailed me. The issue has come up on the doorstep and has been raised through local schools and local groups such as the Scouts and Girl Guides, so I really welcome the opportunity to speak in today’s debate, and I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing it.

We know that a growing number of children use smartphones daily. Technological advancements are a fact of life and are here to stay. Smartphones and new media applications are a means of communication and come with many benefits. Before I became an MP, I worked in the tech sector for seven years, including as head of international operations for the global edtech firm Discovery Education, which teaches children coding and digital curriculum subjects. We want our children to be digitally native, confident in using technology and able to harness it for their own benefit. We also want them to be happy, healthy, safe and aware of and resilient to the risks of social media and the world online. We hope to find that balance in what is relatively new territory for all of us.

There is a growing body of concerning evidence about the amount of time that children and young people are spending online. A study published earlier this month by the University of Birmingham found that 12 to 15-year-olds in the UK now spend an average of 35 hours a week on their smartphone. That is the equivalent of a full-time job, and all that time spent online is time not spent interacting with family and friends face to face, playing outside and building the social and emotional skills needed to form deep and meaningful relationships. It is also time when parents have very little idea what their children are viewing or who they are speaking to. Increasingly, we are coming to understand that giving our children unfettered access to the internet is a safeguarding risk. We should think about it not only as giving our children access to the internet, but as giving the internet access to our children.

Over the weekend, I listened to a brilliant podcast on the BBC about Greystones, a small town in County Wicklow, Ireland, where a group of headteachers came together to work with parents who signed a voluntary pledge to delay buying phones for their children until at least age 11. One of the headteachers said:

“You wouldn’t let your child open the door to a room full of strangers and leave them in that room on their own. And unfortunately, that is what is happening when they have a smart device.”

The need for action, with solutions that are practical, proportionate and can be implemented, is clear. One thing we risk doing is excluding children and young people from that conversation. That is why I recently held a student focus group at Harris Academy Beckenham and spoke to young people from every year group about the impact that smartphones are having on their everyday lives. I thank students including Arek, Sara and Rose for organising it, alongside one of their fantastic teachers, Leila Hussein. While the majority felt that the benefits of having a smartphone outweighed the downsides, over half of the students present said that smartphones and social media overall had a negative impact on their mental health. The same number admitted that they could not survive a week without a smartphone.

When I asked the students what they rely on their phones for, the top things on their list were schoolwork, chatting with friends and filling the time. When I asked what they would be most excited for if they had a phone-free day, their responses included going to the park, walking the dog, spending time with family, playing music and making art—all things that we would eagerly encourage our children to do more of. Overall, the students gave a balanced view. While they were all clued up on the risks and agreed that social media needed properly enforced age limits, they also saw the positive role that it can play if used in moderation and with the right protections.

Listening to different perspectives is important in this debate, and we should respect the idea that, in the large, parents know what is best for their children. I strongly believe that the best approach will be community-focused. Working as a community and creating voluntary codes and pacts means that we can support parents and schools and bring them with us. I believe it is clear to parents that this is coming from a place of concern, rather than judgment, that we share their fears and that we need to work together to address them. I pay tribute to the work of Smartphone Free Childhood, which has secured recent wins in Barnet, Southwark, Ealing and many more areas across London and the rest of the country.

I hope to learn from the examples in Beckenham and Penge as I continue to work with parents’ groups, local schools and students to find a way forward that will mean children and young people can lead happy, healthy and carefree childhoods while obtaining all the benefits that the digital world offers. That includes a meeting next week at Harris Academy Beckenham on Monday to bring stakeholders together.

I look forward to continuing to push social media companies to take greater responsibility in a range of areas including on age verification and the sort of content that children and young people are being exposed to daily. I strongly believe in the principle of reverse burden, which was explained really well by the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) when he said that we would not take such an approach to children’s toys or food. I again thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe for securing the debate and the Minister for his time.

17:45

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I pay tribute to Kim and the other petitioners for bringing the petition to the House. In the Government’s response to the petition, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology referred to

“a systematic review by the UK Chief Medical Officers in 2019”

that

“does not show a causal link between screen-based activities and mental health problems, though some studies have found associations with increased anxiety or depression. Therefore, the government is focused on building the evidence base to inform any future action.”

That review is six years old now, so how much evidence do the Government need? Things have changed radically in the past six years, and we live in a very different digital world from 2019.

The evidence I read in preparation for the debate included a 65% rise in mental health admissions to hospital among under-18s, a staggering 638% increase in admissions for eating disorders among girls aged 11 to 15, a 50% rise in childhood myopia, a 56% increase in ADHD diagnosis since the widespread adoption of smartphones, a 27% increase in just the last two years in the number of children with speech and language challenges, and a rise in obesity that means that about a quarter of children leaving primary school are now judged to be overweight or clinically obese. The evidence comes from the UK, Japan, Canada and Australia—it is all there and is growing.

As many other Members have said, we protect our children from smoking and alcohol. We do not allow them to buy those products because we know the damage they can do. Just because mental health damage is not as visible as a damaged lung or a damaged liver due to cirrhosis—just because we cannot see it, measure it and photograph it—that does not mean the evidence is not there. We can see it all around us.

This morning I spent time talking to the mental health leads in Devon about children’s mental health. They talked about the difficulty in employing enough psychologists and psychiatrists to cope with the mental health crisis among children in Devon, because of the vacancies they have and the ever-increasing need for children’s mental health support—it just grows and grows. Although it is right to give children the mental health care that they need, which they and the parents ask for, we surely have to look at this the other way round and say, “We have to stop this rising trend and to look at the cause. We have to turn it on its head; we owe it to our children.”

As the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) said, all the graphs show that the change started in 2012. For the sake of our teachers, who are trying to cope with the ever-increasing pressure of special educational needs, autism spectrum disorders and so on, the time has come for us to act and not look for more evidence.

It is time we used the precautionary principle for smartphones. That enables decision makers to adopt precautionary measures when the scientific evidence about an environmental or human health hazard is uncertain but the stakes are high—and we know the stakes are high for our children. Some may see that as unscientific and an obstacle to progress, but to me it is an approach that can—and, in this situation, must—be used to protect the health of our youngest humans. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said the Online Safety Act

“puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them responsible for their users’ safety, with the strongest provisions in the Act for children.”

Platforms

“likely to be accessed by children will have a duty to take steps to prevent children from encountering the most harmful content”—

such as—

“pornography and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide.”

We all know that we cannot trust the tech companies to do that. It is not in their interest. They have developed addictive apps to keep our children on them, using them hour after hour; it is not in their interest to do what is required to protect our children. Where, in the code, is a restriction of content that perpetuates the myth of the perfect body, that is not hardcore content like online pornography or suicide videos? The subtle stuff of social media—the addictiveness—is really dangerous. My concern is about the long hours that children spend on screens, and the time spent indoors instead of playing with friends and making real human connections.

Although we are talking about teenage use, what is even worse is the fact that 25% of three to four-year-olds in the UK now own a smartphone. Tiny children are looking at a screen rather than interacting with other humans. Children are not learning to speak and communicate, because babies do not learn from a machine. They are captivated by the videos, but they are not learning how to communicate with other humans. Older children are not experiencing boredom. We all remember standing at bus stops, right? We did not have a mobile phone; we got bored. We looked at the sky, around us and at other people. It is part of the development of the human brain. Has anyone ever seen a teenager standing at a bus stop now getting bored? It just does not happen.

I would like to leave the last word with John Gallacher, professor of cognitive health at the University of Oxford. He said that he found

“a linear relationship between higher rates of anxiety and depression and time spent networking on social media sites…In the most extreme cases, we had young people reporting they were spending up to eight hours a day using these sites.”

We must find a way to change that for our children. I do not believe in a ban on smartphones—that is not workable—but we must raise the minimum age for social media use. We must change the conversation and give parents the support they need, so that there is peer pressure not to have phones rather than to have them. We must support all the brave schools trying to eradicate this problem for their teenagers. I fully commend the petition and, cross party, we really need to do something about this.

17:52

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I did a lot of research in preparation for my speech today and, as a parent of three primary-age children, what I found really alarmed me. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that there were more than 7,000 offences of sexual communication with children last year, which was a significant increase on the year before. It says that typically in those offences, the perpetrators start to talk to children on fairly mainstream web services, and then encourage them to communicate instead on more private messaging services such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram. I was pretty shocked. I did not appreciate that this was such a widespread problem. We all know that if there were 7,000 offences reported to the police, a considerably larger number will have happened. I also discovered the prevalence of dating app use among children. Children experience terrible offences when they go to meet people who were, in fact, adults preying on them.

Fundamentally, we need to understand that when we talk about social media, children are a product. If anything that we use on the internet does not cost any money, the gain for the provider is access to our thoughts, feelings and communications—in this case, our children’s thoughts, feelings and communications with their friends. We have a generation now for whose entire lifespan those thoughts, feelings and communications with friends can be monetised and tracked across multiple different websites or social media apps. The complex picture that those companies have of our children is incredibly sophisticated, and their ability to target content at them is like nothing we have ever even imagined.

There is also a problem with parents inadvertently facilitating some of this stuff. I would count myself within that description to some extent, so it is certainly not judgmental. When a parent naively says that when a child is 13, they can access something that they would broadly consider uncontroversial—such as WhatsApp so they can chat to their friends—that creates an ageing risk throughout the lifespan of that app use. As was mentioned previously, children subsequently appear to be 16 or 18 before they actually are, and therefore obtain access to services that are unsafe for them much younger than they otherwise would have done. The parents do not appreciate the ageing risk that they are creating, potentially several years down the line.

The NSPCC says that we have a fundamental problem. We now have the Online Safety Act, introduced by the Conservatives, and we are working hard as a Government to bring it into force. Ofcom has been given a significant role in looking at child risk assessment by online providers. We all know that if those people had children’s best interests at heart, they would already have done a lot of the things that Ofcom requires. The fact that Ofcom is having to do an investigation into OnlyFans, and its ability or willingness to prevent under-age children from seeing sexualised content, does not sit comfortably—that is the minimum I will say about it.

[Martin Vickers in the Chair]

If I am honest, I am not quite sure what the right solution is to those problems. If we do not get societal consensus on the right solution, we will, for instance, carry on seeing parents helping children to circumnavigate age restrictions, and children using VPNs to circumnavigate them themselves. Plenty of teenagers are sophisticated enough to do that. I am not sure what the right answer is. I am not sure that preventing under-16s from accessing such content will solve it. There is a risk that it will create a false sense of security and enable providers of the facilities and apps to say, “Well, under-16s can’t use it. We don’t have to put any safety features in because children are not allowed it anyway.” They will completely abdicate responsibility.

It is important that we keep talking about these issues, and that we move forward on a cross-party basis. These are sophisticated problems and I am not sure whether we have a sufficiently sophisticated response to them. The Online Safety Act provides us with a lot of tools, and I can see that its potential fines of 10% of global revenue are quite high. That has the potential to drive some behaviour change, provided the companies involved really see that the tools have teeth. I hope that we will monitor very heavily how Ofcom gets on with the new legislation; I am sure that Members of all parties will be interested in that.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) said that he spoke to his children before the debate to tell them that he was going to raise these issues. I did so with my children over breakfast this morning, and one of them berated me for not having been in her online safety assembly. We have to be realistic about the capacity of both parents and schools to manage these issues without making it a blame game between different organisations—parents versus schools versus major corporations. These corporations have a huge vested interest in exploiting our children, and we have to figure out how better to protect them.

17:59

[Gregor Poynton (Livingston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on children’s online safety, but I am contributing on my own behalf.

The opportunities and perils of social media are increasingly weighing on the minds of parents, educators, society and, above all, young people themselves. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) spoke about balance, which I think is one of the key issues. Our young people require digital skills and literacy in order to access the modern world, be it the world of work, public services or their social lives, and we need to give them the tools to do that. This has been a useful debate to think about how we do that.

We can see the strength of feeling about this measure reflected in the parliamentary petition that we are discussing. It is a petition signed by 92 of my Livingstone constituents, and it speaks to the widespread anxieties about the impact of social media on our children and young people. Those concerns are real and heartfelt, and they come from not only parents and communities, but young people themselves, who are having to navigate those digital landscapes every single day. They tell us that social media is not merely a tool for connection, but a space where the line between reality and illusion is often blurred, and where photoshopped images and curated lifestyles can distort self-perception.

I am convinced of the merits of enforcing a minimum-age requirement of 16 for social media on the Australian model. I am in favour on mental health grounds, with social media shown in study after study to be linked to increased anxiety, depression and low self-esteem for young people. I am in favour on online safety grounds, with social media exposing children to cyberbullying, predators, misinformation and harmful content. I am in favour in order to try to reverse children’s decreasing attention spans; we need to give our kids the support they need to focus, to learn and to reach their full potential.

I believe, however, that it is vital not to leave young people out of those conversations, but to centre on their concerns and experiences. I spoke the other week to academic colleagues at the University of Manchester, who stressed the complexity and variety of young people’s views on these subjects. They have conducted research, including focus groups, to understand how children use social media and what it means to them and their lives. They pointed out that a key concern of those young people in the focus groups, short of a ban, was the capacity to better distinguish between content that is real and content that is faked, manipulated or highly curated. Their point was not so much about disinformation or misinformation, but more about those perfect lifestyles that are shown on Instagram and other platforms. As has been mentioned, that is more insidious and not easy to ban, but it has a real effect on young people and on their perceptions of themselves and their lives.

That point brings me to the role of social media companies. Many hon. Members have mentioned those companies in this debate, and it is right to say that they have not taken enough responsibility for the content on their sites. The incentive at the moment is to let loose, for eyeballs and time spent, rather than to ensure that the content is properly moderated and is going to the right people. We already have various minimum-age restrictions in place, but the challenge has been to enforce them. Social media companies must adhere to and enforce them. With or without a ban, we need more effective oversight and accountability for how those platforms operate. There is also a vital role for industry leaders such as Google and Apple through their app stores. These gatekeepers possess significant influence and could do much more to ensure that age verification and content moderation is robust and reliable.

Hon. Members have also mentioned smartphone bans. I was pleased that at the Scottish Labour conference at the weekend Anas Sarwar, our leader in Scotland, said that in our manifesto for the 2026 Scottish parliamentary elections will be a ban on mobile phone use in Scottish schools. That gives parents and educators—and children themselves—clarity on what we think is right and not right. I do not believe that having phones in schools is right for children or for the educators trying to do their jobs.

I believe that the minimum age for social media is an idea whose time has come. For me, it is a matter of protection and of ensuring that we prepare young people mentally and emotionally as best we can to handle the pressures that social media can bring. Even without a ban, however, we must ensure today that existing age limits are being properly and rigorously enforced, and we must engage robustly with the tech companies to ensure that they are doing all they can to protect our young people and children.

18:04

[Irene Campbell (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this debate, and for his excellent speech. I thank Kim Campbell and the other petitioners who have brought this subject to debate today.

I recently met with one of my constituents in North Ayrshire and Arran, Sam Rice, who told me about the charity he set up called Kids For Now. He was extremely concerned about a lot of things that have been discussed already, so I will not repeat that, but he shared with me the work of his campaign, which is all about smartphones and social media use in children. His organisation Kids For Now is a grassroots movement that connects parents within the UK to help to delay smartphones together. It is not really about banning them entirely, but about delaying their use and working on campaigns calling for child-safe phones in the UK. He very much mentioned child-safe phones, but I am not sure that young people want the old-style phones that we all used to use and rather than a smartphone like the rest of their peer group. He also mentioned banning smartphones in Scottish schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Gregor Poynton) has just stolen my line on that as well, because we were delighted that that pledge was made at the Labour conference in Glasgow at the weekend—that was very positive.

My constituent Sam also spoke about making primary schools internet free. Now a lot of this is obviously up for debate, but what he said to me was that he helps parents to take positive collective action against peer pressure and challenges the norm of young children feeling as though they need social media. We have discussed a lot of that today as well—including other things people can do while standing at a bus stop. When I was growing up there were clearly no mobile phones, so that was not a distraction we were ever going to have, but it is really important that we actually have time for our children to be children.

Sam was extremely concerned about the mental and emotional health of children, as has been discussed today. For example, as has been said, research from the project Delay Smartphones found that children can no longer have any respite from bullies at home. It said a shocking 84% of bullying of children with smartphones now happens online. That is a huge figure. Additionally, smartphones and social media are more likely to expose children to sexual and offensive content, which can include young people being pressured into sending sexual images of themselves. For example, Ofsted found that 80% of teenage girls are being put under pressure to provide images of themselves.

When we look at a strategy tackling violence against women and girls, that needs to be considered because of the damage that access to social media can have on young girls. It is really important to consider young people’s safety on the internet in a time where technology is constantly evolving and changing. I am pleased that this debate is taking place to allow for further consideration of where we go with this conversation, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on the future of smartphone and social media legislation.

18:07

[Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I thank the British public for bringing this petition forward so that we can debate it today, and thank those who have led on this issue. The petition comes from a place of real strong feeling among parents. This is not some blind moral panic; it is the lived experience of anybody who has raised a teenager in the last few years. My wife and I spend a lot of our time discussing our own parenting. Like many parents, we agonise over whether we are getting it right—on the one hand, wanting not to be too autocratic and to give our children the freedom to engage in a social space which their friends are in, while, on the other, knowing that we are allowing them access to something that we believe is causing them damage.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for an excellent speech setting out the strong evidence base for why it is imperative that we, as a Parliament, act. There have been some excellent speeches from Members across all the parties in this place today. I was reflecting, were I ever fortunate enough to place where my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington did in the private Member’s ballot, and to be able to one thing to improve our country right now, what I would do. I think that he has got it right—it has to be about what we do to protect the next generation. It is not a cliché to say that they are all our futures and that we face an epidemic of youth mental unwellness today that is holding back a generation.

Many people have spoken well about the damage that we know social media is causing to our children: apps that are designed to addict, requiring users to get streaks, which we know affects concentration; an over-connectedness that is driving anxiety and disrupting children’s sleep; content that distorts children’s relationships with reality on bodies and lifestyles, which is damaging to self-esteem, and, while some of these sites do not host explicitly pornographic material, in the sense that certain body parts are covered, children are often overexposed to a general timbre of content that is still sexualising the human body and causing them to think in sexualised terms at a young age. There is also the challenge of apps that are designed for children to communicate through images, which are driving the phenomenon known as sexting. Despite schools’ valiant efforts to teach children not to do that, we know it is happening—and happening at a worrying scale.

We also know that children are overconnected to a social space, which is completely unsupervised, where they can encounter humiliation and bullying. I had a conversation not long ago with a child and asked the question, “Well, why don’t you just not go online?” The response came back, “Because I need to know what people are saying about me.” As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) suggested earlier, if young people were asked, “If you could switch this off for everyone, would you?” lots of them would actually say, “Yes, I would.” However, there is a phenomenon, which my teenagers tell me is called FOMO—fear of missing out—that means that they have to be in a space, while simultaneously not wanting to be in that space, all the time.

In our generation, we might have found school life difficult, but we could go home from school and switch off. For many children today, the first thing they experience when they wake up in the morning is the notifications from the night before, and those notifications are the last thing they see when they go to bed at night.

Therefore, I think we do need to regulate. We already regulate childhood in various ways to protect children, such as with laws that prevent children from going to nightclubs, the requirement for disclosure and barring service checks to protect children from coming into contact with adults around whom they would not be safe, and even film classification ratings. There is a huge industry around those ratings—yet, were the content that children can access on Facebook to be classified by film standards, we would often say that they were not old enough to be seeing that regular content.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) said earlier, many children and young people actually agree about the benefits of limiting social media. Before I was in this place, one of the roles I had was tutoring in various north-east high schools, and often our conversations in seminars would turn to this challenge of mental health. A lot of young people talked to me about how they can simultaneously feel lonely while also being overly connected and not having a place to switch off.

Girls at Teesdale school, which was my first visit as a new Member of Parliament, also talked to me about a change in attitudes that they saw among many of the young men that they go to school with and the increasing misogyny in the way that they would treat them, because of far-right content that those young men were accessing.

What can be done? People have spoken for and against an outright ban, and I think all their arguments have merits, and some have highlighted the challenge of simply banning things. Having said that, I think we do need to consider an age of consent; we need not just a legal shift, but a cultural shift, with greater parental controls and greater support for parents to supervise what their children are viewing. Perhaps we could have time-limit controls that would force a child to switch off.

Education around social media already exists, but we know that it is not yet effective. Perhaps we need education that looks not just at the don’ts, the warnings to young people, but at the do’s and reimagines childhood. We need to provide fewer virtual experiences and more real experiences for our children. I think back to my own childhood and remember learning an instrument, playing after-school sports, riding my bike around the block, attending a weekly youth club, going for a walk and bopping along to my Walkman, and yes, it also involved being bored and just being able to take in the world around me.

Children need more family time. We need to be real and acknowledge the fact that one of the things driving smartphone use in children is that parents are often less present in their children’s lives, and every parent feels guilt about this. That is why I was proud to support the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers’ “Keep Sunday Special” campaign on Sunday trading laws. It is why I support flexible working and laws in the world of work to make sure that families can have time together.

There are many things to be considered, but what we can all agree on is that we cannot allow the status quo to continue. It is imperative that we as a Parliament and the Government consider how to better safeguard our children’s future.

18:16

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate, because the safety of young people online is possibly one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

I have a confession to make: I hate social media, but I feel compelled to use it. It cannot be denied that social media is an inescapable reality of modern life. For young people, it plays a role in how they interact with the world, form their identities and access information. I do not for a second dispute that social media is a tool of extraordinary power for connection, education and creativity, but it has increasingly become a space where harm is done that is profound, persistent and deeply damaging. Legislative change has not kept up with the pace of social media growth. As a society, we are playing catch-up to the impact of social media, and we are not doing it fast enough.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) detailed, the evidence base that surrounds this is much debated, but something we can all agree on is that numerous studies have exposed declining mental health in adolescents and rising cases of anxiety, depression and self-harm. Algorithms are designed to drive engagement on platforms. They do not prioritise wellbeing. Instead, they prioritise views, clicks and the user’s attention. It is easy to see how our children become passive observers of extreme content and harmful trends when harmful material does not need to be sought out but is instead delivered to their phones.

Unfortunately, it does not just stop at exposure to harmful content. The dangerous reality of the online world is that it has become a hunting ground for those who seek to manipulate and exploit others. We have seen the rise of online grooming facilitated by the anonymity of fake profiles. We are in a situation where children are being targeted in their own homes through their own devices by individuals who have never had easier access to them. I understand why parents are worried. Since being elected I have received numerous representations from concerned parents in Gillingham and Rainham who just want their children to exist and go through life free from harm. I appreciate that everybody wants that, but they perceive the risk to their children now extends into sanctuary of their own home. They see no pause, no protection and no escape.

While I support a review of the minimum age for social media access—there is certainly a need to look at it in closer detail—I do not think that will be a quick fix that solves the issues we face at this point. I encourage everyone here to go and speak to an average 15-year-old—clearly, some hon. Members have already done so, as their speeches today show. One finds very quickly that they are extremely capable of being inventive and circumventing the rules. That is what teenagers have done since time immemorial. The fundamental problem is that these platforms were never designed with the safety of children in mind. We would be doing our children a disservice by raising a legal barrier and simply hoping that the risk disappears, because that is not what will happen. Children deserve more. They deserve more responsibility from social media companies, more urgency from regulators and perhaps more action from us, the Members elected to this House.

The Online Safety Act was a huge step in the right direction under the previous Government, but we must ensure that the protections are not diluted to the point where obligations are placed on platforms only where they are seen to be the least burdensome. Harm reduction for our children must remain the fundamental priority. I welcome this Government’s commitment to working with Ofcom to effectively implement the 2023 Act so that children benefit from the protections as soon as possible, but clearly the legislation alone will not be enough. We have heard powerful speeches about cultural change. Implementation must also be done at speed and with determination. Ofcom is now armed with new regulatory powers and must move at pace to protect our children from the harms that colleagues across the House have spoken about time and again. We have to get this right.

My constituents in Gillingham and Rainham are particularly interested in ensuring that implementation of measures such as user identity verification are sped up, so that adults and children alike can benefit from the protections. We need to send out a clear signal that delays will not be tolerated and that platforms need to be held to account. Various platforms do that to different degrees, and some are much better than others, but all still have a long way to go. Online safety should be not a distant ambition, but acknowledged to be an immediate necessity, because every day that action is delayed, another young person is exposed to harm, and we have to prevent that.

I end by thanking my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for introducing this debate. It is incredibly important that we continue this conversation. I also thank the Minister for his time and for listening to the powerful representations that have been made today.

18:22

[Patrick Hurley (Southport) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I will set out some facts and figures before moving on to the substance of my speech. Seventy-one per cent of children report having experienced harm online. Twenty-one per cent of children report having been contacted online by adults they do not know. Vulnerable children are twice as likely as their peers to encounter online bullying. Fifty-seven per cent of parents report that their children’s sleep patterns are being negatively affected by online activity. And here is the killer stat: despite the age limit of 13, 85% of 9 to 12-year-olds are reported to use social media. It is obvious that a mere increase in the threshold to 16 years of age is insufficient; the measure needs to go hand in hand with enforcement.

Many Members in this debate have, rightly, concentrated on the harms to children. My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) somewhat stole my thunder by so eloquently drawing an analogy with smoking in the 1950s. I have truncated my speech accordingly, but the analogy is accurate: we are now at the stage where social media usage is analogous to smoking in the 1950s. Obvious harm is being done, but we are not yet at a stage where we can accurately quantify it, categorise it or come to a settled conclusion on how to deal with it.

Evidence continues to emerge around harmful content, disrupted sleep patterns, damage to the mental health of children, addictiveness and more, but we as a society, a Government, a Parliament and politicians do not yet know how to adequately deal with all of that. As a starting point, I support an increase in age restrictions, in line with the petition, but we need to learn more about the causes of the problems affecting our younger generations and find out how to prevent them for future generations. In addition to an increase in the age limit, I want stronger enforcement of age limits by Ofcom and through self-regulation by social media companies. We also need more high-quality, robust research to prove causality beyond any doubt.

I finish with an aspect that has not been touched on in the debate. Last week in the House, I noted how there is increasingly a political element, where social media companies reflect the national interests of the host countries in which they are situated. There are national interest considerations for the UK in regulation of social media. We do not want foreign agents and foreign actors to influence our democratic process in relation to adults and we certainly do not want them to influence the formation of the politics of our children.

18:26

[Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. We are holding this debate because over 128,000 people across the UK signed a petition calling for social media companies to be banned from letting children under 16 create accounts. This reflects a deep and growing concern among parents and professionals about the impact of social media on our children’s wellbeing. I thank Kim Campbell for launching the petition and thank Members across the Chamber for their contributions to the debate and for their consensus on action.

At the heart of the call for social media companies to be banned from letting children under 16 create accounts is a mental health crisis that requires a public health emergency response. The evidence is stark, as was eloquently highlighted by the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) and reinforced by my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers). Between 2016 and 2024, child contact with mental health services increased by 477%, rising from 96,000 to 458,000 cases—and those are just the ones reaching out to those services. There has been a fivefold increase in eating disorders among 11 to 16-year-olds, particularly girls. Our young people are struggling, and social media’s role cannot be ignored.

I have spoken to young people in schools across my local area of Harpenden and Berkhamsted. Young men and women alike are worried about the content they are consuming and the impact it has on them and their friends. Young people told me about their concern for their mental health, and young men told me that they are seeing things they do not want to see. Young girl guides told me that they worry about bullying, online harm and the impact it is having on the young men around them. Many parents have also written to me about their concerns. That is why I launched a “Safer Screens” tour, to listen to young people first hand, as well as parents, teachers and healthcare professionals.

The current system is fundamentally broken. Social media platforms remain easily accessible to young children despite having minimum age limits. Social media companies must go further to implement those limits, as the hon. Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) highlighted. Even more concerningly, the platforms’ own designs actively work against child safety. They are built with features that nudge children to share photos, videos and location data—indeed, all of us have been victims of those nudges. Their recommender systems can push harmful content, from extreme dieting to self-harm, continuously to vulnerable young users.

The Online Safety Act is a step forward, but it has critical gaps, particularly in addressing those addictive design features. As the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) highlighted, this is the wild west; the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), who I know has done a lot of work on the issue, reinforced that point. Although the Act made important progress on harmful content, it failed to address the fundamental issue: the addictive architecture of the platforms themselves.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) highlighted, these are not neutral tools; they are precision-engineered addiction machines. Every pull to refresh, every infinite scroll and every notification is designed to trigger dopamine pathways, similarly to what happens in gambling or substance abuse. As research from the University of Sussex shows, teen social media binges mirror behaviour seen in drug addiction. I absolutely welcome the work that the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington has done and is doing to push forward his private Member’s Bill to address the issue. Between one in three and one in 10 young people now show behaviours consistent with problematic smartphone use. That is not an accident; it is by design, and that design puts profit before children’s wellbeing.

As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) highlighted, we should look at what other countries are doing. Australia is moving to ban social media for under-16s entirely. Norway is raising the age of consent for data processing to 15 and developing a robust age verification system. France has passed a new law requiring parental consent in relation to minors under 15. Those countries recognise, as this petition does, that we must act decisively to protect our children. That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for an explicit public health approach to children’s social media use. Just as we eventually recognised that cigarettes and gambling products needed strict regulation—as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) and the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington highlighted—we must now acknowledge that social media requires similar oversight.

Let me be clear: this is not just about social media. It is about age-appropriate experience across the online world. We cannot ignore other reasons why children are gravitating to phones. As the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth) highlighted, if youth clubs are closed, sports facilities are underfunded or safe community centres are out of reach, the path of least resistance is to spend hours online. A real shift in tackling screen overuse must include supporting these third spaces—providing well-funded, welcoming spots where young people can socialise, explore hobbies and simply be children.

[Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady share my concern about what seems to be a growing phenomenon in my area of Fife, where young people are filming themselves committing acts of violent crime and then sharing the footage on social media? Last month, there was an attack on a young boy in Cowdenbeath by a group of other youths; they filmed it and shared the footage on Snapchat. Does the hon. Lady agree that although raising the online age of consent to 16 would not solve that problem completely and it would need to be properly enforced, it would be an important first step in tackling this kind of harm?

[Victoria Collins]

I am so sorry to hear about what is happening in Fife. I am sure that other Members across the House see that impact. Social media reinforces negative images, thereby changing social norms, so there is a wider problem, but there are indeed important first steps that need to be taken.

I was talking about providing well-funded, welcoming spots where young people can socialise, explore hobbies and simply be children, without the allure of an endlessly scrolling feed or of sharing those viral images that reinforce dopamine hits. That is an important aspect. Investing in after-school programmes, libraries and youth clubs not only gives children alternative outlets, but strengthens mental health, builds social skills and eases the pressure on parents to supervise every minute of screen time. In short, offline opportunities are just as crucial as any digital safeguard.

To tackle the public health emergency in relation to mental health for young people, we need three immediate actions. The first is the establishment of a safer screens taskforce empowered to ensure that a public health approach to children’s social media is taken across all Departments, examining international best practice and developing comprehensive solutions. That includes ensuring measures for protective defaults on phones and other connected devices, and looking at safety by design, such as having no infinite scrolling, no notifications at night and no addictive engagement algorithms unless explicitly enabled by a parent. Secondly, all children should receive stand-alone education on online safety and safer screens at each key stage. Children and parents need to be equipped with the skills to navigate this digital world. Thirdly, we must expand safe third spaces to give young people a true alternative to being on their screens.

I started my uni days without social media, but ended them with it. It is worrying to say that that was 20 years ago, so this is not an overnight phenomenon; it is a debate that has been a long time in the making. The Government have stated that a ban on under-16 social media use is on the table. Now is the time to look carefully at international precedents and bring forward whatever measures will be effective, practical and implementable to keep our children safe. We need to protect parents’ rights to make decisions, but let us be clear: we already accept age restrictions on activities that can harm children’s development. We do not let under-18s gamble or buy cigarettes. We have age ratings on films and video games. We cannot allow our children’s developing minds to be left at the mercy of platforms that are deliberately designed to be addictive.

Parents are crying out for support. They want help from the Government and industry in managing their children’s online safety. We simply must get this right. Whether the answer is an outright ban at 16, as the petition suggests, age-appropriate experiences across the digital landscape, or a robust system of graduated access with proper age assurances and parental oversight, one thing is clear: the status quo is failing our children.

18:35

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank the Petitions Committee for enabling this debate; Kim Campbell for launching the petition; the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for opening the debate; and the 128,000 signatories of the petition, including 225 people from my constituency of Huntingdon.

In a recent survey by More in Common of more than 2,000 parents, social media and excessive screen time was ranked as the top issue affecting children’s mental wellbeing: parents ranked it higher on the list of threats than alcohol, bullying and financial problems. Exposure to harmful content online was deemed the second biggest risk to mental health. The challenges facing children have changed astronomically in recent years. Children now face a boiling point of addiction, constant connectivity, online crime and harmful content. Many feel that it has become too much for children to handle.

The evidence base is growing stronger. Smartphones and social media are adversely impacting our children’s mental health. The Royal Society for Public Health says that about 70% of young people now report that social media increases their feelings of anxiety and depression. In increasing numbers, children are coming into schools up and down the UK having stayed up all night on their phone. A child who has not had a healthy night’s sleep is not equipped to contribute to the classroom, except perhaps to disrupt it.

Evidence from Health Professionals for Safer Screens shows that children who routinely spend extended periods on their smartphones have poorer eyesight, inhibited speech and language development, interrupted sleep and rising rates of anxiety. Smartphones are designed to be addictive. Platforms are constantly seeking to develop new design strategies that encourage children to stay online longer. Notifications, comments and likes are designed to drive feelings of happiness. It is easy for children to feel obliged to engage and even compete with their peers online.

Of course, children access social media on mobile phones via the internet. Individually, each tool brings its own benefits. Mobile phones allow children to let parents know that they have reached school safely, providing an extra safeguard that allows them greater and earlier independence. The internet itself allows children to further their education, whether through research tasks, homework or practising coding; it also provides better connectivity, information and entertainment. The internet is so integral to society that we must ensure that children have the skillset and the know-how to navigate it.

I expect that many hon. Members use social media every day, scrolling through their feeds, checking the news or drafting updates to their constituents. Social media has its benefits, not least because it allows us to communicate with people instantly and en masse, wherever they may be in the world. Used responsibly, social media can provide some benefits for children. Children may use it to stay connected with friends and family around the world. They may use it for civic engagement or to fundraise; they may use YouTube or short reels for online learning or content discovery.

The drawbacks, however, are considerable: addiction to their screen, online bullying and exposure to harmful content such as eating disorders, self-harm and body shaming. There is some bad content on the internet. It is deeply concerning that half of 13-year-olds reported seeing hardcore, misogynistic pornographic material on social media sites. There are widespread concerns that this is impacting the way young people understand healthy relationships, sex and consent. Half of parents worry that online pornography is giving their children an unrealistic view of sex. We see the same with knife crime: there is constant exposure to content that glamorises violence, exposes children to a world of criminality, gangs and scoreboard videos, and contributes to the perception that every teenager carries a knife and thus drives the urge for them to carry one themselves, too often with deadly consequences.

What can be done to tackle these issues? The previous Government passed the world-leading Online Safety Act, which places significant new responsibilities and duties on social media platforms and search services to increase child safety online. Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and to provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they arise. As well as content, the Act applies to service functionality, including the way in which platforms are operated and used by children. Will the Minister confirm whether platforms will be obliged to manage and mitigate addictive functions if a provider’s risk assessment identifies habit forming that could cause sufficient harm?

We are cleaning up the online space with world-leading legislation and an enforced regulator, but I worry that that is not enough. We should be having a conversation about the use of mobile phones in schools. The previous Government took action and issued guidance backing headteachers in restricting access to phones in schools. However, new research has shown that only 11% of schools are genuinely smartphone free, while children at smartphone-free schools get one to two grades higher at GCSE. That is why the Opposition tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to ban mobile phone use in schools. It was disappointing that the Government rejected that amendment and that argument. Will the Minister update us on what conversations he has had with colleagues in the Department for Education about that policy?

Conservatives want to put the safety of children first. I hope that the Minister agrees with that aim. The More in Common poll showed that nearly nine in 10 parents—86%—backed raising from 13 to 16 the so-called digital age of consent, the point at which children should be allowed on social media. Some Members have also proposed banning social media for children under 16. I note that the Secretary of State has not ruled that out, saying that it is “on the table” and that he “is not currently minded” to enact such a policy.

Instead, the Government have announced the launch of a study to explore the effects of smartphone and social media use on children. It seeks to build the evidence base for future decisions designed to keep children safe online. The work is being led by a team at the University of Cambridge, with contributions from researchers at other leading universities. The project lead, Dr Amy Orben, says:

“There is huge concern about the impact of smartphone use on children’s health, but the evidence base remains fairly limited. While the government is under substantial time pressure to make decisions, these will undoubtedly be better if based on improved evidence.”

The Opposition agree that the evidence base needs to be improved, and we welcome the study.

The last piece of substantial Government-backed research into children and mobile phone use was completed in 2019, before covid. We know the devastating impact of lockdown on children and how pandemic restrictions forced children to connect with their friends and schoolteachers online. That pushed children towards technology and social media, potentially leading to irreversible changes in behaviour.

However, the timeline for the work is unclear. Although the research should be detailed and thorough, its publication should be timely. Will the Minister please outline when the study will report back to the Department and, given the dangers of delay, whether he has considered speeding it up? I am aware that the Children’s Commissioner has recently done some work to better understand the impact of mobile phones on children. Her insight could prove very valuable while the academics are researching in depth. I presume that the Minister has spoken to the commissioner, but can he update the House on what he has learned from those discussions? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on those points.

The poll is a clear illustration of the strength of feeling among parents, but we all know—from our own families and our conversations with parents, teachers and children in our constituencies—the impact on children of mobile phones and social media. As legislators, we have a responsibility to ensure that the online world is a safe place for our children. We also have a responsibility to ensure that online platforms take their obligations seriously. I am pleased that the previous Government’s Online Safety Act delivers on both those points, and I urge the Minister to ensure that it is fully implemented as soon as possible.

18:43

[The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)]

It is always a delight to see you, Mr Vickers—and particularly to see you in the Chair, where you cannot take part in the debate.

First, may I pay enormous tribute to Kim Campbell? Many other Members have already done so, but it is a significant achievement to force Parliament to debate something. Getting 130,000 people to sign up to the petition is a phenomenal achievement, so thank you very much. I think I can say that on behalf of all the political parties in Parliament and all Members of the House.

I also thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan): first because he is a Labour Member for Folkestone and Hythe, which is a great advance in the world, and secondly because he advanced the cause on behalf of the Petitions Committee so effectively. Many Members may not know this, but when I was first elected back in 1873 under Queen Victoria, we did not have online petitions. It is an irony, in a way, that today we are talking about an online e-petition about online activity.

If colleagues do not mind, I will not answer each contribution individually. Members have put their own arguments powerfully; there has been a mix of views, but with a general direction of travel, which I fully understand and to which I am very sympathetic. I want to lay out where we are at now and where we, as a Government, think that we could get to and should get to.

The first thing to recognise is the utter toxicity of large parts of social media. You do not have to be an MP to be aware of that, but being an MP certainly does make you aware of it. The toxicity for children is utterly degrading and pernicious, as I think everybody in society recognises. We all recognise, too, that the social media companies need to go much further to protect children. We have talked about some of the misogyny that is evident on many platforms and to which kids have access—it is pumped at them, in fact, because that is sometimes what the algorithm seems to support. Similarly, there are large amounts of utter misinformation. I do not know who is driving that or why it is being driven; sometimes it may be state actors from elsewhere in the world, and sometimes it is just pernicious actors in their own right.

Completely unrealistic body shapes are being promoted to girls and, for that matter, to boys. There was a time when the concern was solely that girls were being encouraged to be a particular shape, but exactly the same concern applies to many young men and boys today. I used to be a priest in the Church of England, many years ago; I was a clergyman in High Wycombe. While I was the curate there, a young girl took her own life, and then three of her friends took their own life in successive months. Undoubtedly, they had somehow or other managed to engage one another in that spiral. That was long before social media. Now, social media can play a pernicious role in undermining young people’s self-confidence and their belief in themselves through a whole series of images, videos and so on. That is very dangerous.

Tackling this is one of the most important things that the Government have to do. It is good to have a former Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), with us today.

[Mr Frith]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, of course; my hon. Friend is always intervening on me.

[Mr Frith]

I thank the Minister; as ever, he has been very generous and is making excellent remarks. Away from the emergency—the toxicity and the worst aspects of this—the mundane sapping of hour after hour after hour is just as dangerous when we consider social media use and our ineffective guardrails for smartphone use. Yes, we all agree that the content the Minister has described should be done away with and prevented, but what is his reflection on the mundane drip and sapping away of the energy and attention of our young people and the doomscrolling ethos that has developed in their expectation of their everyday lives?

[Chris Bryant]

I do not want to be a hypocrite; this 63-year-old engages in all those things as well. In fact, it is a shocking shame for me every time I get that notification that says, “You spent on average x number of hours a day on your mobile phone.” I can make justifications—I have to find out what an hon. Member’s seat is, I have to send things back to my private office on WhatsApp and all of those kind of things—but the truth is that if somebody had said to us 40 years ago that they were going to invent something that would make us all, in an addictive way, spend hours and hours and hours looking at a phone rather than engaging with other human beings, we would have said, “Maybe not, eh?”

I was really struck by that when I went to a primary school in Blaengarw in my patch. The headteacher was saying that one of the difficulties is that all the parents waiting to pick up their kids were on their mobile phones outside, as the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) mentioned earlier. Whatever they did inside the school, the message that every single child got was that life was about being on a mobile phone. As has been said, one of the most important things that a parent can do is engage eye to eye with their children. If they are engaging eye to eye only with their phone, I would argue that that is as much of a problem. I will come on to some of the issues, but I do not want to be hypocritical about it.

I think we all accept that we have to do more. One thing that was not included in the list of things that someone might do if they did not have a mobile phone to spend all their time on was reading a book. I would love more young people to read a book. That longer attention span is one of the things that is an admirable part of being an adult human being.

Several hon. Members referred to the fact that legislation needs to keep up. I will put this very gently to Conservative Members: we argued for an online safety Act for a long time before one ended up becoming legislation. It went through a draft process, and there were lots of rows about what should and should not be in it, and whether we were impinging on freedom of speech and all those kinds of things, but the legislation did not end up on the statute books until the end of 2023. Even then, the Act provided for a fairly slow process of implementation thereafter, partly because Ofcom was taking on powers that, on that day, it simply would not have had enough staff to engage with. The process has been difficult, and I am absolutely certain that the Online Safety Act will not be the end of this story. That is why the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has said clearly that everything is “on the table”, and that is why today’s debate is so important.

Of course, legislation has to be proportionate, balanced, based on evidence—I will come to that in more detail in a moment—and effective. That is why the Online Safety Act will require all platforms that are in scope, including social media platforms, to set up robust systems and processes to tackle the most egregious illegal content or activity proactively, preventing users from encountering it in the first place. Platforms will be required to remove all other illegal content as soon as it is flagged to them.

The Act will also require platforms easily accessed by children—this goes to a point made by several people—to deploy measures to protect children from seeing content that is harmful to them. That includes the use of highly effective age assurance to prevent them from seeing the most harmful types of content, such as that which promotes, encourages or provides instructions for self-harm, suicide or eating disorders. Platforms will also be required to provide age-appropriate access for other types of harmful content, such as bullying, abusive content or content that encourages dangerous stunts or serious violence.

Additionally, under the Act, providers that specify a minimum age limit to access their site must specify how they enforce that in their terms of service and must do so consistently. As many Members have said, this spring will be a key moment in the implementation of the Act, and that is an important point for us to recognise: later this year, things will change, because of the implementation of the Online Safety Act. Ofcom has already set out its draft child safety codes of practice, which are the measures that companies must take to fulfil their duties under the Act.

Ofcom’s draft codes outline that all in-scope services, including social media sites, will be required to tackle algorithms that amplify harm and feed harmful material to children. I would argue that that includes the process of trying to make something addictive for a child. Services will have to configure their algorithms to filter out the most harmful types of content from children’s feeds, and to reduce the visibility and prominence of other harmful content. In January, Ofcom published its guidance for services to implement highly effective age assurance to meet their duties, including the types of technology capable of being highly effective at correctly determining whether a user is a child.

[Josh MacAlister]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, of course. I am about to come to my hon. Friend’s speech, in fact.

[Josh MacAlister]

I and a number of colleagues have had fairly extensive dialogue with Ofcom over the past few months about some of the detailed points, and there are two important gaps in the existing legislation. First, social media companies might put in a minimum age requirement, but there is no power to provide that social media platforms need to have a minimum age requirement to start with, so there is a big gap in the legislation in that respect. Secondly, despite the fairly extensive drafting in the Act, there is no requirement on Ofcom to look at functionality beyond where it relates to harmful content. Ofcom has stated clearly in writing to myself and other Members that it cannot regulate functionality unless it is specifically about harmful content, so much of what has been discussed today would not be covered by Ofcom’s current powers.

[Chris Bryant]

There are four or five different areas where the legislation is not sufficient for the task. Both codes require parliamentary approval, but that process will happen in the next few weeks, with the powers coming into effect this spring. As a Government, we have to decide whether it is better to make that happen now and bed it in, or say that we will have another piece of legislation. I am not allowed to make commitments on behalf of the Government, but I would be absolutely amazed if they did not bring forward further legislation in this field in the next few years. All these issues—and the others that will come along—will definitely need to be addressed, not least because, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe said at the beginning of the debate, we need to make sure that the legislation is up to date.

My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) talked about the burden of proof, and he is quite right. Of course there should not be a one-way burden of proof. We have to bear in mind two things about proof—perhaps evidence is a better word, because it is not about criminality; it is about evidence-based policy. The first is that, as everybody has said, causation is not correlation. I apologise for the slightly flippant way of putting this, but Marathon became Snickers at the same time as Mrs Thatcher gave way to John Major. I am not aware of any causal relationship between those two events. Many people understand that, but it is often very difficult to weed out what is causation and what is correlation in a specific set of events. For instance, we have all laid out the problems in relation to mental health for children, but only one Member mentioned covid. I would argue that covid is quite a significant player. It was shocking that we strove hard as a Parliament to open pubs again before we opened schools, and that children, who were at the least risk, bore the heaviest burden and that sacrifice on behalf of others. I think we need to factor that in.

The second point is something that I have campaigned on for quite a long time: acquired brain injury. Children from poorer backgrounds are four times more likely to suffer a brain injury under the age of five than kids from wealthier backgrounds, and again in their teenage years. Acquired brain injury in schools is barely recognised. Some schools respond to it remarkably well, but it is likely that there are somewhere between one and three children with a brain injury in every single primary class in this land. Nobody has yet done sufficient work on how much that has contributed to the mental health problems that children have today. We certainly know that the use of phones and screens after brain injury is a significant added factor, but we need to look at all the factors that affect the mental health of children to ensure that we target the specific things that really will work in a combination of policy changes.

[Damian Hinds]

The Minister speaks with a great deal of knowledge and authority, particularly on acquired brain injury, but I want to come back to the covid point. Obviously, a Westminster Hall debate is not the place to establish correlation versus causality in any sense. However, if we look at a graph of what has happened with children’s and young people’s mental ill health in this country, France, Germany and the United States, while the data are not perfectly comparable, the shape of the line is not consistent with the hypothesis that it is mainly the result of covid. It predates covid, and it carries on going up afterwards.

[Chris Bryant]

I am sorry if I indicated that it was mainly covid; I was not trying to say that at all. I am simply saying that that is one factor, and there may be many others—social factors, personal factors and the structure of education. One could argue, as one of my hon. Friends did, that there are other things that kids could do in society. We might, for instance, want to intervene by having a creative education option. We hardly have a youth service in most of the country any more.

[Damian Hinds]

The Minister would be making perfectly adequate points if we were talking only about this country. We could make all sorts of points about what Government policy was and what happened to Sure Start, the curriculum and youth clubs, but those things did not happen in France, Germany or the United States.

[Chris Bryant]

I have not seen any of the statistics for what has happened to youth services and the cultural education offer in schools in France and other countries.

[Damian Hinds]

I think the Minister takes my point.

[Chris Bryant]

No, I do not. I am trying to make a very simple point: many factors have contributed to the mental health problems that many young people have, and social media is undoubtedly one. The question is, how do we rate and address all those different factors? As the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) said, we must address this from a public health angle, and that is essential. But then, when we have the whole bag of evidence, rather than just individual bits of evidence, the question is, what is the most useful intervention that we can make?

I want to come on to the definition issues. Several Members raised the issue of what social media is. That is partially addressed by the Online Safety Act, but we may want to go further. As to the reason why the previous Government landed on 13 rather than 16—which was an option available to them—the consultation at the time came back with 13. It is interesting that Members referred to content availability and to there being two ages in the UK that are generally reckoned to be part of the age of majority: 16 and 18. Actually, for film classification, it is 12 and 15. There is an argument for saying that we ought to look at film classification because it is long established and—although the issues are different in many regards—some of them are similar. We might want to learn from that—I say this from my Department for Culture, Media and Sport angle—to inform the debate on this matter.

On enforcement, several Members referred to the fact that there is no point in just changing the law; if we do that but have no form of enforcement, that is worse than useless. That is one of the Government’s anxieties, and we need to make sure that the enforcement process works properly. I take the point that there are two areas where Ofcom feels it is unable to act, because the law does not allow it to do so, and we will need to look at that. That is why we are keen to get to the moment in April when the two codes will be voted on in Parliament. We will then make sure that Ofcom has not just the powers but the ability to enforce. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs Russell) said, Ofcom has the power to fine up to £18 million, or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue in the relevant year, which could be a substantial amount, but it needs to ensure it is in a legally effective position to do so.

My final point is that the Secretary of State has made it clear that nothing is off the table. We are keen to act in this space. The question is, how do we act most proportionately and effectively in a way that tackles the real problem? Some of that is about how the evidence stacks up, and some of it is about when the right time to legislate is. But, as I said earlier, I do not think for a single instant that this debate or the Online Safety Act will be the end of the story. I would be amazed if there were not further legislation, in some shape or other, in this field in the next two or three years.

With that, I once again thank Kim Campbell for bringing the petition to us, and I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe for introducing the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee.

19:00

[Tony Vaughan]

I thank hon. Members and the Minister for their valuable contributions and explanations. As the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth) said, the status quo cannot continue, and I think everyone can agree with that. Several Members also said that we need a cross-party approach to these issues and, again, I think everyone would agree.

Like many others, I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for his analysis of the approach we should take to the evidence. The anecdotal and correlational evidence of the effects of social media is known to us all—especially to parents and teachers—and we have heard much of it in the debate, but putting the onus on social media companies to prove that social media is safe, rather than on the regulator to prove that it is not, seems to be common sense, and I was grateful to hear the Minister agree.

Reversing that burden would mean that the social media companies would have to show that the mountain of correlational and anecdotal evidence of harms, which we have all talked about today, is explained by something else, but none of the discussion today has really pointed to what that “something else” could be. Of course, as the Minister says, there are other things—other material is part of the picture—but it is not good enough for the social media companies to say, as they currently do, “Well, it’s very complicated. You can’t prove that our social media is the problem, so we can get away with doing what we like.”

I was therefore heartened to hear the Minister reiterate that everything remains on the table and that this is the first stage of rolling out what the Online Safety Act seeks to do, but not the end of action on this issue. Whatever the burden, the evidence is evolving and, while we wait, our children are losing out. I am a big supporter of evidence-based policymaking, but we as legislators have to make difficult decisions and difficult judgments on the evidence as it is, imperfect as it may be.

Ultimately, of course, a judgment call will be needed, and we should give weight to the precautionary principle. It is clear that social media is part of the context, even if we cannot say that it is 51% of the cause—or however we want to put it. So it is important to say that if it is part of the context, we should take it out or do something more ambitious. But I accept that, as the Minister explained, we need to put the current mechanism in place so that we can at least see what we are dealing with.

Lastly, I want to comment on the contextual point my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) made about the importance of keeping foreign state actors off our children’s screens. That is, of course, an important point, but I just want to acknowledge a big contextual factor here, without perhaps saying too much about it. I am under no illusion about the power of the social media and tech companies. To take the owner of X, who has a role in the US Government, the regulatory regimes are relevant to his bottom line—I think somebody else said that as well. The issues we are talking about do not only concern us here in Westminster; they may well involve relations with other countries, and how we go about persuading people who we want to help us in different ways to make the very bold changes that may ultimately be needed.

I will end on that because it is one of the most difficult aspects, which is perhaps why it has not been talked about too much today. Nevertheless, let us not worry about the difficulties, because we are all united in the desire to do something about this issue. For me, that is one of the big, important things that has come out of today: we are united in trying to sort it out, so let us all work together and do it.

Question put and agreed to. 

Resolved, 

That this House has considered e-petition 700086 relating to a minimum age for social media.

07:09

Sitting adjourned.