Grand Committee
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Scott of Needham Market) (LD)
, My Lords, good afternoon. If there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Treaty Scrutiny in Westminster (International Agreements Committee Report)
Lord Goldsmith
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the International Agreements Committee Treaty Scrutiny in Westminster: Addressing the Accountability Gap (10th Report, HL Paper 168).
Lord Goldsmith (Lab)
My Lords, it is fitting that my final act as the outgoing chair of the International Agreements Committee is to open a debate about the process of treaty scrutiny in Parliament. I am delighted to see that so many present and past members of the committee will take part today.
The inquiry we launched last year was designed to take stock of how scrutiny has operated in the committee’s first five years. Our conclusion, in short, is that the current framework for treaty scrutiny under CRaG is, to quote one of our witnesses,
“a weak and insufficient mechanism for securing meaningful accountability”.
I will briefly address the main reasons leading to that conclusion.
As many will know, the framework for treaty scrutiny is set out in Part 2 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, commonly known as CRaG. This legislation gives both Houses of Parliament 21 joint sitting days to consider a treaty and decide whether to vote against ratification. This process has not fundamentally changed in 100 years.
The first issue is that the CRaG process does not allow enough time for scrutiny. It is frankly impossible to conduct an in-depth, evidence-based review of a significant treaty within the 21-day CRaG deadline. Remember, this deadline is for Parliament to debate and vote on the treaty; the International Agreements Committee and its officials have even less time to produce their report for Members of the House to consider ahead of a debate. Your Lordships will appreciate that such a rapid timescale takes no account of what is involved in proper parliamentary scrutiny, in particular the evidence gathering.
Most treaties laid in Parliament do not require detailed scrutiny, because they are routine or technical, but the minority of significant treaties deserve more attention than the timetable under CRaG allows. The Government have accepted that some important treaties merit more time. Since EU exit, Governments have, by concession, allowed Parliament more time to consider free trade agreements. Parliament typically has about three to four months to conduct an inquiry into a free trade agreement because, crucially, the International Agreements Committee receives the treaty text and explanatory documents after the agreement has been signed, but before the CRaG clock starts ticking. The recent debate—in this Room—on the comprehensive economic and trade agreement with India was the outcome of such an in-depth inquiry.
But free trade agreements are not the only type of treaty that warrant this kind of enhanced scrutiny. Significant multilateral agreements, such as the Paris climate change agreement or the new World Health Organization agreement on pandemic preparation, is one other obvious category. Then there are bilateral treaties where there is a high degree of public interest; recent examples include the Rwanda asylum partnership agreement and the agreement with Mauritius on the Chagos Archipelago.
In the trade space, your Lordships may not be aware that the enhanced scrutiny procedures that I have described apply only to treaties formally classified as free trade agreements and not to other potentially important trade agreements, such as mini-deals on digital trade, technology or critical minerals. Importantly, they also do not apply to understandings or commitments not included in formal treaties that need ratification, such as memoranda of understanding or the very important understandings on tariffs reached by His Majesty’s Government with the United States of America.
For important treaties that are not FTAs, the only mechanism to secure more time is to ask the Government for an extension of the 21-day period. But the Government have shown themselves reluctant to grant extensions, even in cases where they accept that the public interest is high and there is no urgency to ratify. The Chagos Islands agreement was such a case. I know there are strongly held opinions in this House and elsewhere about that agreement, but whatever differences Members may have on its merits, I hope we can all agree that the treaty deserved more detailed scrutiny than the CRaG process allowed. The IAC had just over three weeks to produce a report in time for the scheduled debate.
Our report asked the Government to make a commitment to accept a reasoned request from the IAC for a single extension of the scrutiny period of up to 21 days, unless there are compelling operational reasons to the contrary. We thought that a modest, eminently reasonable approach, and I regret that the Government’s response did not even directly address the proposal. They said that they need the flexibility to decline an extension but declined to state the specific circumstances in which that might be necessary. Since the committee’s proposal would not prevent the Government declining where there is clear reason to do so, I urge them to reconsider the committee’s request. I invite the Minister to take that away, if nothing else.
A second major problem with CRaG is that scrutiny is triggered by the form of an international agreement, rather than its substance. Some treaties are excluded from scrutiny entirely if they are not subject to ratification, or, the Government may choose—it often is a choice—to use a non-legally binding instrument to achieve their aims. Our report highlights research by the Commons Library which shows that, in relation to the expulsion of illegal migrants, the Home Office frequently chooses non-binding arrangements with third countries rather than treaties subject to CRaG scrutiny—as, indeed, we saw with the first stage of the Rwanda scheme; we pointed that out and the Government then reached a treaty. Even where a treaty is ratified and subject to CRaG, amendments to that treaty might be excluded from scrutiny. Everything depends on the process the Government choose to adopt, rather than the importance of the measures. This in itself creates an obvious scrutiny gap.
The third, and perhaps most fundamental, issue is that even when CRaG applies, the role of Parliament is very weak. The power of this House could be described, at best, as the power to ask the Government to think again about ratification. The Commons at least has the power to delay ratification, but that is more theoretical than real, as the Government have a tendency to refuse time for debate on treaties in the other House, and, without a debate, that recommendation to delay ratification cannot take binding effect.
The weakness of Parliament’s role in relation to treaties is in stark contrast to the position in most other countries. The vast majority of other countries require legislative consent for at least some treaties. This includes many countries with dualist constitutional systems similar to the UK’s, where treaties are not automatically part of domestic law. I do not know how many times I have heard it said that because we are dualist we do not need parliamentary scrutiny. That is completely untrue. Internationally, the UK is an outlier in relation to treaty scrutiny. During our debate on the India CETA, a number of noble Lords powerfully made the argument that the benefit of being able to say, “That will not wash in Westminster”, was of great value in trade negotiations.
At the risk of pre-empting my noble friend Lady Chapman’s reply, I will say a few words about the arguments that Governments of both parties have traditionally advanced to defend the status quo. First, it is said that the light-touch approach of CRaG is justified because Parliament gets to scrutinise treaty-implementing legislation. But scrutiny of implementing measures is not an effective substitute. Parliament needs to be able to look at a treaty as a whole, and the policy reasons underpinning it, but the policy is locked in by the time Parliament looks at implementing measures. Moreover, legislation may not even be required for a specific treaty and, when it is, the legislation is often limited to specific aspects.
Secondly, the Government say they need flexibility to strike deals in the national interest and that CRaG provides an appropriate balance between this flexibility and accountability to Parliament. That is patently not the case. The reality is that the CRaG Act gives the Government so much discretion at different stages of the process that the balance is skewed overwhelmingly in the Government’s favour. Paragraph 46 of our report lists the various ways in which the current framework allows the Government to avoid or limit scrutiny, including by choosing the form of an agreement and deciding whether to extend the time for scrutiny.
We therefore concluded that there is an accountability gap and that reform of the current scrutiny framework is needed. To address problems in the short term, we proposed a set of practical and operational measures to make the current framework under the CRaG Act more effective. I welcome the Government’s willingness to accept many of these recommendations, and I urge the Minister to make it a priority to put them into practice.
However, such operational changes cannot fix the fundamental defects that I have described and the imbalance of power between Parliament and the Executive. I believe that there is a powerful case for legislative reform to address this and I call on the Government and my noble friend to engage with the IAC and with Parliament more widely to bring treaty scrutiny into the 21st century.
At the conclusion of the recent debate on the India agreement, I tried to capture this problem by urging that the scrutiny of treaties should not be a second-class citizen when it comes to parliamentary scrutiny. The point I was trying to make was better and more eloquently made by the great Walter Bagehot, who argued in The English Constitution that, because treaties can have as much impact as domestic laws, it is illogical to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies to every word of the law while not consulting them even on the essence of the treaty.
While CRaG has made some inroads on the deficiency, our report and the evidence we received shows that it is a miserly and inadequate response to this accountability gap. I hope, therefore, in this final act as outgoing chair—as I finally pass the baton to the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston, who I am glad is in his place—I can persuade your Lordships to encourage my noble friend the Minister and her colleagues to take a courageous and bold approach to reducing the accountability gap. I beg to move.
Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)
My Lords, we have already sung the praises of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and I am delighted to do so again in relation to this excellent report and his chairmanship of this committee over the past few years. I also commend the team who put a huge amount of effort into creating the report, which I think people have found enormously useful. It is very powerfully written.
It is 100% clear that the current process of treaty scrutiny falls far below what is expected in a democracy and what is seen to operate in other countries, such as Australia. I am embarrassed to quote Bagehot. I have taken him from the other side, because he is clear in my view that the prerogative of treaty making lies with the Executive, which I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, was referring to. He is correct that the work of making an agreement with another country or multinational body is indeed the work of the Executive. However, these agreements are central to the policy-making and laws of this country, and it is also the prerogative of Parliament—I think he is quite clear about that—to scrutinise the work of the Executive post the treaty’s creation and before it can be properly ratified.
The issue we have is not with the Executive’s role, but with the absurdly short time—which is very clearly demonstrated in this report and has been mentioned by numerous similar committees over many years—given to us to properly assess the validity of any agreements that we as a nation enter into. In my mind, effective scrutiny ensures a better thought-through process. It can actually aid negotiations, and publicise and bring popular support and awareness to the treaties themselves—an issue which I think noble Lords and the Government will acknowledge as vital if they are to be used properly by businesses and people at large.
I am not naive enough to suggest that the Government will change the CRaG process any time soon. In my time as a Minister, the officials—around whom much is designed, I am afraid to say—were equally forceful in their position. But can the Minister assure us that the Government will make as much additional effort as possible to ensure that we have as much transparency and warning as possible for treaties that do not gain the extended CRaG timeline, as FTAs do?
I have been extremely grateful for the engagement the Minister has given me personally on this matter. I met today the FCDO chief legal officer, who was also extremely helpful in trying to ensure that there is an elasticity around the interpretation of concepts such as transparency and pipeline. However, it would be good to have some details on that and some firmer commitments in terms of where we can get extensions and how the other parts of the process can fit together.
My second request is for the Minister to write to me with answers to the following two questions, unless she has them to hand. I am interested in finding out how many treaties we have signed but not yet ratified. This is not unimportant, since it will help us to understand the flow of work for the IAC and to see how we are progressing on executing the broad international agreements plans. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, has already referred to the fact that we are aware of, and indeed in many instances encourage, other kinds of non-binding agreements entered into by Ministers with other countries and bodies. They can be very useful tools for engagement. How many of these types of agreements are there? What sectors do they cover? What has been the effect, positive or negative? I think this is a very serious issue and I am sure the Minister is curious about the answers to this question.
Treaties and agreements are central to our foreign policy—indeed, trade and defence is diplomacy—but we are unsure about the efficacy of our overall plan. Indeed, do we have one? Do we have a foreign or trade policy other than simply to try to do as much as possible? I recommend that the Government develop a plan as rapidly as possible. I do not believe we had such a plan under the previous Government. I mention this because the situation with the WTO and, indeed, our relationship with the USA over the situation in Iran only emphasise the problems we face without a proper idea of where we are heading and why. To this end, the IAC is planning on writing a report that focuses on the changing world order—sadly not for the better, in my view—and in particular on how our trade instruments, which we have just mentioned, both binding and non-binding, and the various treaties and agreements we use, make us as a nation stronger and richer. I hope the Government will support this report and take note of whatever we produce.
I worry that we are entering a phase of global affairs where international law is seen as some sort of woke, left-wing agenda to hinder a nation’s ability to self-govern, and that on principle we should ignore findings or rulings we dislike and withdraw from the international trade system where it suits us. In my mind, this is very dangerous. We are a trading nation and we need to fit within a global order in order to prosper. The nature of treaty scrutiny fits entirely within this. Parliament has to be in a position to endorse the actions taken on our behalf by the Government, and I ask the Minister to take our findings in the report we are presenting today very seriously. If the Government do not, it will lead to further erosion of the systems and structures that, in my view, have allowed us to dominate international trade and have kept us safe from conflict for 70 years. As Hobbes, the philosopher, wrote, a world without enforceable laws is a miserable and unpredictable one, where the arts and industry cannot flourish. That is why I commend this report to the Committee.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I am loath to repeat what has been said before, but I want to thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for this report and for outlining its principles very clearly, which are, to encompass them in just one sentence, that the current legal framework in which we operate is not good enough and does not work in the interests of our people, Parliament has to work to ensure that it is fit for purpose and we need to make sure that that change is ahead of us. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for his work and for his clear explanation.
The matter before us is that the Government’s response to what has been put before them is. “Well, we’ll have a look at absolutely anything you want us to, but what we will not do is enter into a statutory change”. In fact, somewhere within the response there is the wonderful phrase that we hear so often, “Parliamentary time is not available”. The reason for this work is primarily contained in a single sentence in paragraph 39:
“Treaties are now not just about high policy affecting relations between states, but deal with a huge range of issues directly touching on matters of domestic law and people’s daily lives”.
It is that function, which is charged by the CRaG legislation, that is so poor in the way it can be interpreted to provide an answer to that single point inside the report.
I would like to ask the Minister how co-ordination works between the FCDO and those who provide the background work on developing the treaties and other matters that come before us. It seems to me that most of what we hear comes from either the Department for Business or the Home Office, and that these proposed treaties coming before us are both devised and run by those departments. I would like to understand better the relationship between the FCDO and the implementing departments that are responsible for the development of the treaties before us, so that we can seek better engagement. At the moment, it looks to me as if the Government’s response is, “Keep taking the paracetamol because there’s no need to bother the doctor”. In other words, the Government are basically saying, “Make do with what you’ve got because we can’t make a firm diagnosis and make the change that is required”. That is not something we wish to hear, and nor does it benefit the purposes of the treaties and their impact on the human lives of so many of our people.
On that, I will address the issue of the devolved Parliaments, which the committee has taken in its stride in trying to understand how they deal with these matters. Given that so many of the treaties affect the devolved Parliaments’ working relationships and working activities, as well as the legislation they apply—on education, health, transportation, roads, planning, the provision of social services, agriculture and much more—it is, at the moment, very difficult for the Assembly and the other devolved Parliaments to respond in the given time. Imagine it: we have 21 days and we give it to them and say, “Why don’t you tell us what you think?” By the time we get an answer back and their committees have sat, we have well exceeded that time. So I want to hear from the Minister what more the Government can do to encourage and assist the Assembly and the other devolved Parliaments so that they can deal with these matters properly.
The third bundle of activity, which has already been referred to, concerns the new way of doing free trade agreements, treaty agreements and so on—what the Government call “NBIs”, or “non-binding instruments”, in their response—which seem to be coming before us in a huge way at present. In their response, the Government give an explanation and say that they will do more of them if they can; we have also heard that in evidence from witnesses on the government side. If that is going to be the practice of the future, who will decide how these matters must be dealt with? The Government say that they will
“treat it like all other significant policy commitments”.
So the Government will decide whether it is a “significant policy commitment” and will then provide
“appropriate and timely information to Parliament”.
Information is not scrutiny, though. That is what this debate and this report are about: looking for appropriate scrutiny of what is happening, so that things can be improved in order to better the lives of the people of this country.
I am, therefore, pleased to support the recommendations in this report and ask the Government whether they intend to take the bold steps stated in the report, even though they have indicated that they cannot find the time.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, your Lordships’ Institutional Agreements Committee, on which I have the honour to serve, is a relatively newly established committee, with a mandate that in its vagueness perhaps reflects its novelty. It is a good step that we should be debating today the committee’s own report on its early years, so well introduced by our recently rotated chair, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the incoming chair, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston.
The first point to make is, as all the evidence we took records, that our Parliament is an outlier—probably better described as a backmarker—among democratic parliaments attempting to scrutinise their agreements with third countries, behind the US Congress and the European Parliament. That is not a place that we should accept as Britain navigates its way through increasingly choppy international waters.
For all the territory that we have traversed since the committee was set up, I record with gratitude that we have been given much help, in particular by the Department for Business and the FCDO. Even so, gaps and weaknesses have been revealed in our task of helping to apply the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, which is our basic duty. Those gaps and weaknesses could be remedied by modest changes. None of those that I will put emphasis on would require primary legislation. Here are three examples that I hope the Minister will reflect carefully on and respond to.
First, and by a long way foremost, is the need to address the choke point imposed by the limit of 21 working days for the committee to take evidence, report to the House and hold a debate on an agreement that the Government consider is covered by the CRaG procedures. I note, incidentally, that the choice of whether or not an agreement falls within the scope of CRaG procedures is entirely a matter for the Government. They have many other forms of agreement—memorandums of understanding being the favourite—by which they can evade those procedures, and they frequently do. It would be a great help if the Government would publish a text, setting out clearly the criteria that they use to make their choice as to whether the CRaG procedures need to apply.
Of more significance is the need to introduce more flexibility into the application of the 21-day limit. This hampers the taking of evidence by the committee and the drafting of its report. It is with some shame that I admit that, on one occasion recently, the committee was compelled to send forward to the House a report on which it had been unable to take any evidence at all. There is an easy remedy, put forward by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, which I strongly endorse. The Government should agree that, as a general rule, they would grant one—I repeat, one—extension of a second 21-day period when the committee submitted a reasoned argument for so doing. The Government would retain the right to refuse such a request if they could demonstrate that doing so was in the national interest. The committee has shown plenty of flexibility on its side, when, for example, it agreed that the UK-France one-in, one-out agreement needed immediate application, without any of the committee procedures being engaged.
The second example is the rather bizarre fact that the Government accept the need for a CRaG process when an agreement is bilateral, but not when it is plurilateral or multilateral, even if it imposes binding legal obligations on the UK. More and more agreements fall into the latter two categories. A recent example was the decision by the Government—a very welcome decision in the committee’s view—in their trade strategy to join the World Trade Organization’s interim dispute settlement procedure. This requires the UK to accept a ruling in a dispute between it and another country in the interim procedure.
In fact, the committee welcomed this step, but it did not welcome being cut out of the process of approval. Further examples could arise later this year if a pandemic convention is successfully negotiated on a multilateral or plurilateral basis, or if a WTO arrangement covering e-commerce is agreed, as we hope it will be. So, this distinction between bilateral and multilateral legally binding instruments makes no sense at all and certainly does not contribute to parliamentary scrutiny.
Thirdly, as more international agreements with binding legal obligations with the UK are negotiated by departments other than the Department for Business and Trade or the FCDO in the lead, there is a crying need for better co-ordination in briefing the International Agreements Committee and in ensuring that it can effectively carry out its scrutiny responsibilities, on which the noble Lord, Lord German, made some relevant remarks. This could easily be achieved by circulating guidance to all such departments and ensuring that they apply the procedures meticulously and in a similar fashion.
If the three points that I have put forward were addressed, we would have a far better system of parliamentary scrutiny, without any need for primary legislation or any loss of royal prerogative.
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the committee and its chairman on the report. I hesitate to participate in this debate since I have limited expertise in foreign affairs, and still less on the scrutiny of foreign treaties, but I was puzzled by the report’s focus on the scrutiny of treaties after they have been negotiated. By then, surely, it is too late to influence the substantive content of any treaty. Parliamentarians cannot revise a treaty and would reject it only if it were demonstrably malign. All Parliament can do is accept or reject a treaty.
Surely it would be more valuable to scrutinise the Government’s negotiating mandate at the start of negotiations. We do not do so because Governments rarely, if ever, publish the mandate they have given our negotiators. By contrast, the EU often does publish its mandate. As a result, I know more about the aims of the EU in the current reset negotiations than I do about my own Government’s. For instance, I know that the EU intends to secure a—I quote from the title of the mandate it gave its negotiators—
“financial contribution from the UK towards reducing economic and social disparities between the regions of the Union”.
That is in addition to cash payments the EU is demanding towards its administrative costs in each of the sectors now being negotiated.
This is an issue on which I am in rare agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who said very pithily in the debate on these negotiations on 26 November:
“We also suffer from a degree of timidity in what we are putting forward, and the other side suffers from a bit of excessive ambition. I do not think we should be paying contributions into the EU budget, that it is right to try to charge us €10 billion to join SAFE, or that it is right to try to charge us for integration into the EU electricity market. These things are a common benefit—they suit both sides—so why should we pay?”.—[Official Report, 26/2/26; col. 777.]
If Parliament has an opportunity to express a view on issues such as this at the start, rather than when it is too late, that could surely strengthen the Government’s negotiating hand.
I have been struck by how many negotiations seem to have gone awry for the UK over the years. Most recently, the way the rationale for the Chagos deal has unravelled has been very disturbing. The incoherence of the Government’s approach to the reset negotiations suggests that a similar failure is in the making. But it is not just this Government’s negotiations: the withdrawal agreement started off just like the current reset negotiations, as I shall show in a moment.
There seem to be recurrent weaknesses in the way the FCDO negotiates, which might be alleviated if we had debates on the scrutiny of mandates rather than outcomes. I make it clear that any such weaknesses, even if they reflect the culture of the FCDO, are ultimately the responsibility of Ministers and Parliament. Ministers are responsible for the advice they take and the culture they tolerate. In my experience, officials do respond to clear guidance from Ministers. Parliament should, therefore, examine the FCDO culture that Ministers allow to prevail.
I will mention just a couple of weaknesses that seem to beset our approach to negotiations. Both perhaps reflect typical aspects of the British character. The first is a belief that making early concessions will generate good will and elicit corresponding concessions from the other side later. This naive belief makes the UK prey to the EU practice of demanding key concessions as a price for opening negotiations. The EU refused even to start reset negotiations unless we had first agreed—signed, sealed and delivered—to restrict the catch of fish from our waters for another 12 years. This supine Government committed us to that so that, even if the negotiations fail, we will have conceded it.
The EU employed the same gambit in the withdrawal negotiations, refusing to proceed unless the UK agreed that there should be no hard border in Ireland. Since the EU was threatening to erect a hard border, the UK had to accept whatever the EU deemed necessary to avoid it erecting one, in practice subjecting Northern Ireland to EU law and creating a border with Great Britain. My noble friend Lady May sadly signed up to that.
The second congenital or prevailing weakness is a very British aversion to rows, scenes and failure—or the prospect of failure. General de Gaulle in his memoirs said that when he was utterly dependent on Britain to arm and equip his Free French forces, he had only to threaten a row to equip another division. This aversion to rows, scenes and admitting failure results in the most egregious weakness of the British approach to negotiations: the failure to prepare, let alone deploy, what negotiators call their BATNA—their best alternative to a negotiated settlement. Sometimes, no deal can be better than a bad deal. It was Parliament, through the Burt-Benn Act, that deprived government of the option of exercising its BATNA, walking away from negotiations or threatening to do so—with very damaging consequences for the outcome of the withdrawal agreement negotiations.
Normally, I hope that parliamentarians would use the option of scrutiny at the beginning of negotiations to insist on the Government including a BATNA—a best alternative to a negotiated agreement—therefore stiffening our negotiators’ spines in future negotiations.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, it is very welcome that we have, in the space of a fortnight, two chances to debate committee reports from one of our most senior committees—I say that as a recent member of it. I find it is often the case that the House does not see the work going on in committees; we should see more of it, and it is good to do so today. I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith for his excellent introduction and, of course, for his chairmanship in the time that he was on this committee.
The problem at the heart of this debate is how we should balance the current right of the Government to negotiate treaties and to ratify them using the royal prerogative against the rights that Parliament has, or should have, in all other policy matters. In the past, treaties were largely concerned with war, peace and international policy more generally but, today, trade policy is growing in importance, not just because of its return to the UK, having previously been dealt with by the EU Commission and EU Parliament but, most importantly, because it is evident that modern trade deals increasingly bring with them changes to a wide range of domestic policies. As we know from recent experiences in what is agreed outside parliamentary sight in bilateral trade discussions and, as referred to already, as we have seen in treaties such as Rwanda and the Chagos Islands, it is often necessary to look at collateral changes that follow in primary legislation. This impacts directly on existing terms and processes.
In short, treaties, whatever form they take, are drivers of policy and are as important to the people of this country as changes foreshadowed in manifestos. As these treaties and trade deals shape who we are as a nation, it surely follows that Parliament should examine them to the same standards as primary legislation. Our report lays out why the current arrangements are not as comprehensive, and certainly not as complete, as they should be. Parliament should have a major role to play in this process, one that can and will aid the Executive as they set up the trade agreements and make the treaties that are so urgently needed if we are to secure growth and prosperity in the future. It is very disappointing that this Government—my Government—are following the lines set by the previous Administration and seem unwilling to improve trade treaty scrutiny. Previous speakers have stressed how bad the current arrangements are. I wonder why we cannot have a workaround—I will propose one later in my speech—which would give us time while new legislation is being proposed.
My suggestion goes back to the discussions that led to the Grimstone rule during what is now the Trade Act. I led the Opposition Front Bench in the debates on that Bill, which lasted over three years, and I proposed the rule when it became clear that we were having difficulty in finding a way to engage Parliament. There was then, as now, no appetite to amend the procedures under CRaG. I now suggest that some variation of the Grimstone rule might be needed here. That rule sets up a process under which, when treaties are being contemplated, the IAC gets information about the negotiating rounds, documents that describe the Government’s strategic approach and periodic reports, as well as sight of the draft before it is finally ratified. This works well and could easily be implemented for all treaties, because it gets around the problem we explained in the report: when it comes to the formal approval process under CRaG, the strict timetable and limited powers of the two Houses do not give Parliament the time and authority that it needs.
As we say in our report:
“the scrutiny process under the CRAG Act is a weak and insufficient mechanism for securing meaningful parliamentary accountability… Scrutiny of implementing legislation is no substitute for treaty scrutiny”.
A balance clearly has to be struck between the flexibility that the Government need to negotiate in the national interest and the transparency and scrutiny that the public interest requires. The CRaG Act does not get the balance right, because the Government have too much discretion to act in ways that lead to the evasion of detailed scrutiny, including by refusing to grant adequate time for Parliament to examine and debate treaties. There is therefore a strong case for legislating in this area, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. In the interim, perhaps we could introduce the Chapman rule.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for his fair-minded chairmanship, and intellectually able and collegiate steering of our committee. It was particularly welcome to me, as a refugee from the European Affairs Committee.
Others have discussed the report and its conclusions, the most striking being that there is a strong case for reforming, by law, the arrangements for effective parliamentary scrutiny of international treaties under the CRaG Act 2010. Indeed, the report suggests, as other noble Lords have mentioned, that the UK is an outlier from other countries where Parliament has more of a say over treaties that sometimes require legislative consent.
I believe that treaties should remain a royal prerogative power. We need not be swayed by the example of continental states, most of which are relatively new or have emerged from revolution, war or violent struggle. By contrast, the UK’s constitutional arrangements emerged over centuries; they brought stability and the potential for change, and ensured the accountability of the Government and Parliament to the electorate. This was demonstrated at the 2019 general election, when the central issue was whether Parliament should decide the terms of the treaty with the EU or the Government on behalf of the people’s wish expressed in the referendum. Our system allowed the will of the majority to be followed, where a more continental system would have allowed a parliament, out of touch with those wishes, to thwart it.
However, I share the view that effective parliamentary scrutiny of government treaties is necessary—particularly that afforded by Parliament as a whole and by both Chambers, as happened with the vitally important agreements of the 1920s and 1930s. I agree that more time is needed, and I am interested in my noble friend Lord Lilley’s proposal for a pre-negotiation mandate debate. Then, as now, treaties were deeply political, which was something to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, referred to when he mentioned the Chagos question. But does today’s consensus-centred approach of Select Committees tend to mask this central feature of their political nature? The expectation of an inquiry is that officials must do the lion’s share of the initial drafting: they should draft the papers, the terms of reference and the report; they should prepare the draft questions for members to put to witnesses; and they should take the lead in selecting witnesses.
The aim of consensus deprives the committee of its political adversarial dimension. The assumption is that a scientific inquiry based on evidence is being conducted, which is judged to be neutral because it comes from expert witnesses. But those chosen disproportionately reflect the consensus—the centre-left view of our public service, media, academe and establishment. A worthwhile consensus includes and expresses a diversity of views. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, could not have been more encouraging of a diversity of opinions, but the system weighs against their being expressed fully, as does time. By contrast, a debate in and out of Parliament allows for a diversity of opinion.
Perhaps a straightforward way to improve the system we have would be for greater input by members to encourage and reflect a variety of political views, and for specialist witnesses to be of different political persuasions. Instead of the expectation that hard-working officials initiate the draft terms of an inquiry or report and prepare the questions, members’ views should actively be sought and reflected before and during each stage to frame the terms, select witnesses and highlight important points. Minority reports should be permitted and welcomed. In the end, parliamentary scrutiny would be the winner. The House of Lords Select Committee would be doing what it should to make that scrutiny more effective. It would be scrutiny by Parliament on behalf of the electorate, who would have the final say.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My Lords, I need to respond to the rather surprising compliment from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. I can do so because I agree with a number of things that he said, in particular on the case for parliamentary scrutiny during negotiation and before a deal is struck. I am sure that we all agreed with his strictures on the negotiating stance of his noble friend Lord Frost. I join in the tribute to the committee and its outgoing chairman, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, under whom I served, and let us not forget the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, who stood in so well for him when he had to step aside. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, who was by far the most sympathetic Minister with whom we did business, and to the incoming chairman, who maintained the Grimstone tradition.
There is an accountability gap; the report proves it very satisfactorily and clearly by comparing our procedures with those of comparable countries, including those with dualist systems. They have more say than we do. However, there is also a gap relative to the past. We have much less say now than we did when we were in the EU. With our Ministers taking part in Council decisions on opening, handling and concluding negotiations, Parliament’s scrutiny reserve meant that Ministers could be and were summoned to answer our questions before casting their votes. I served on our EU committee and four of its sub-committees, and I can confirm that their scrutiny, unlike today’s, was real. Moreover, once the Lisbon treaty came into force in 2009, our Members of the European Parliament enjoyed the right to be kept immediately and fully informed at all stages of every treaty negotiation led by the Commission—on trade, investment, agriculture, fisheries; any subject where full EU competence applied. Of course, they also had the right to vote on the outcome—
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I was making the point that the European Parliament has the right to vote on the outcome of any treaty negotiation, of course: treaties require its positive consent. Its debates informed ours. My point is not just that there is an accountability gap relative to the European Parliament, but that our Government are now much less accountable to our Parliament than they were 16 years ago when CRaG was debated and agreed. So it really will not do for the Government to assert, as their reply to the committee does, that
“the CRaG Act strikes a careful balance between the power of the Executive to conclude and ratify treaties and the power of Parliament to scrutinise treaties subject to ratification”.
If CRaG got the balance right, by definition, the balance is wrong today. Or did careful Prime Minister Johnson correct, by Brexit, a mistake made by the careless Prime Minister Brown? I do not think so.
Two years ago, the Opposition Front Bench spokesman on trade in the other place stated that
“the CRaG process … is clearly not fit for purpose”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/3/24; col. 869.]
I agree. So let us not have any more of this “careful balance” nonsense now. I am not naive enough to expect that legislative time will be made available for major CRaG reform. I recognise that the Government’s response to the committee is not all nonsense; nor is it all just, “What we have, we hold”. The Government are prepared to discuss possible improvements in the way CRaG works. My plea to them is: be constructive about that process. Put a parliamentarian in charge of the process: that is, someone who has been a poacher. Do not leave it to the grim official gatekeeper/gamekeepers like me.
The status quo is acutely unsatisfactory and unbalanced, and five years of unbalance is long enough. As I said in our debate last week, our treaty negotiators will be more powerful if the ratification of the outcome of a negotiation is no longer known to be a foregone conclusion of farcical formality.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, page 8 of our report states baldly that
“governments since 2019 have not listened to Parliament”
in respect of treaty scrutiny at Westminster. So the question before us is, “Does there exist, as is stated in the report, an accountability gap?” Further, do the Government recognise that such a gap exists? If so, are they prepared to respond positively to meet that gap? In short, will they deal with it, with the aim of strengthening parliamentary oversight? Alas, the answer is, “Only marginally, if at all”. The Committee will be disappointed by the Government’s somewhat Panglossian reply to the report.
I recall being a young diplomat in about 1961 and hearing a joke doing the rounds among colleagues. It was a spoof draft for Ministers replying to the recommendations of a parliamentary committee: a model, all-purpose response. I still remember some parts of the suggested reply. “We are most grateful to the committee. We welcome and pay tribute to its hard work, which has made a valuable contribution to our consideration of the subject. We commend its expertise and wisdom and have examined with great care its conclusions. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and we aim to continue to work closely with the committee in a positive dialogue”.
As I read the preamble to the Government’s response, I detected echoes of that spoof from more than 60 years ago. It is of course true that the Government have made some limited advances, but, overall, when I read their response, I saw the echoes of that earlier spoof. The response states:
“The Government respects and values the work of the Committee … The Government has carefully considered the report … the Government is keen to work with the Committee … progress can be made in many areas by the Government and Committee engaging in more dialogue and by working together to improve working practices … The Government does not believe, however, that there is a strong case for more fundamental reform”.
It is very disappointing, but not wholly surprising.
I have made selective quotes, but, essentially, the Government have rejected the committee’s recommendations on the basis that the provisions of CRaG continue to strike “the right balance” between the Government and Parliament, albeit with very limited concessions, and that Parliament has all the tools necessary to do the job of scrutiny. Essentially, we leave by the door through which we entered, and the Government seem wedded to the status quo. I think it is unnecessary to examine each part of the recommendations. That has been done in a very legal and good way by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and other contributors. The only jarring bit has been an element of the rehashing of the EU debate with the magnificent obsession with the EU of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley.
I will make two final observations. The first is that I was somewhat heartened by the different spirit, the more positive spirit, of Secretary Kyle when he appeared before the committee. I only wish that we could nail that spirit to clear undertakings for the future. He recalled that he had been extremely frustrated as a Back-Bencher in respect of the Government and implied that he was sympathetic to the work of this committee. My final observation is that, if a firmer base is not established, this will be seen as another missed opportunity to fill what we see as the accountability gap, because Parliament and our committee are unlikely to have another chance to raise this issue in this Parliament. Hence, this may be the one and only opportunity in this Parliament to make the democratic advance in scrutiny advocated by the committee.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lord, I welcome this report and the reports from other committees, including the Constitution Committee, on the subject, but I rather regret that they are necessary. I was involved in the passage of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. I served on the Joint Committee on the draft Bill and, when the Bill was introduced, I managed to get an amendment accepted covering the provision of explanatory memoranda to Parliament.
With the benefit of hindsight, I realise I should have gone further, utilising the leverage of the wash-up to press for an amendment to provide for every significant treaty negotiated by government to be subject to approval by affirmative resolution by the House of Commons. That is what the Hansard Society has pressed for. What this report recommends—I think at paragraph 70—is crucial, and it is entirely feasible in legislative terms. Alex Horne, a former senior legal adviser to several parliamentary committees, has drafted a Bill to amend CRaG to achieve this.
This leads to the key points I wish to make. I very much welcome this report, but I do not extend that welcome to the Government’s response, which I fear is what is to be expected from the Executive. There is a clear executive view, whichever party is in power, which is at odds with a parliamentary view. Negotiating treaties, as my noble friend Lady Lawlor said, takes place under prerogative powers. Treaty-making always has been and should remain within the gift of His Majesty’s Government. It was wholly inappropriate during the Brexit negotiations for the House of Commons to try to wrest control of the process from Ministers. However, while treaty-making—that is, negotiating the terms of a treaty—should rest with the Executive, treaty approval should rest with Parliament. The provisions of CRaG were designed to give both Houses the opportunity to object to a treaty, and for the Commons, ultimately, to prevent its ratification.
The problem is that the Executive have difficulty accepting that Parliament should have the capacity to say no. They may pay lip service to the principle, but in practice they want Parliament to stay out of the process. They had and have the whip hand in the control of the timetable.
There is a clear difference between the executive and parliamentary views, encapsulated in the different definitions of power. Power can be defined in pluralist, elitist and institutional terms. The pluralist view is the traditional one, where A gets B to do that which B would otherwise not do. It can take two forms: the coercive and the persuasive. The Government clearly favour the latter, believing that Parliament should have a persuasive capacity only. That is clear from their response to this report. The emphasis is on scrutiny—in effect, on examining and commenting. The Government’s response does nothing to concede that Parliament should have the capacity to say no to what they have negotiated. They are prepared only to discuss ways in which Parliament may be better informed as an aid to enhancing scrutiny.
Parliament needs to be more assertive to ensure that the provisions of CRaG have teeth. Having the power to say no would provide the basis for achieving what my noble friend Lord Lilley has advocated. Committees examining treaties need to be complemented by the House having not just the processes but the political will to act on their recommendations. To achieve that, we need to provide that parliamentary approval is required for significant treaties, as defined in Alex Horne’s draft Bill. We have the reports of the various committees. We do not need any more. We need to act to ensure that Parliament is a watchdog with teeth and not simply a bark.
Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow that speech, which was a useful and authoritative view on this topic. I will attempt to sum up some of the issues, but I will first make a couple of observations.
First, since the change in the machinery of government in the last Parliament, the focus of the equivalent committee in the House of Commons has been very much dimmed. Now that it is a Business and Trade Committee, it is absorbed in a whole range of issues and cannot focus on trade as it did. Your Lordships’ committee has been carrying the lantern on this since that change.
I will not comment on many contributions. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for reminding me what I had been missing since I last heard him speak. On the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, when on a committee we have an opportunity to debate the terms of reference; there is a full opportunity for every member to affect and change them and to suggest or insist on—if they want to—particular witnesses. I feel that there is room to scrutinise.
We wait for an International Agreements Committee debate and then two come along within a week. It gives us a final chance to thank our now retired chairman for his work, as well as all my colleagues. This will be my last time speaking as an alumnus of the committee. It is an important committee and I am very encouraged that the new chair, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, is embracing many of the themes of this report.
It was clear from the evidence we received that the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 offers too little to the legislature while the Executive hold most, if not all, of the cards. If nothing else comes from this debate, I hope that the Minister will develop some empathy for the challenge this committee has in delivering useful information to the Executive. That is what we seek to do, along the lines that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested.
In truth, I felt that many of the recommendations in this report were modest. We are suggesting evolution rather than revolution, and clearly the Government’s response was disappointing, but I will come to that. I will just go through some of the issues that were raised.
First, the committee’s well-worked justification for flexibility of scrutiny time seems reasonable to me. Your Lordships heard that we recommended that the Government should normally agree to any reasoned IAC request for a single extension of the 21-day CRaG period for significant treaties and should refuse only where they can give operational reasons. Of course, there are sometimes justifiable operational reasons for something to be done within a certain time. To date, the Government have rarely used their power to extend the 21-day CRaG scrutiny period for significant treaties, despite IAC calls for automatic or reasoned extensions.
The quality of our reports is directly linked to the time that we have to make them, and the number and variety of witnesses that we can call and hear. Nothing about the amount of time that we have has significantly changed since Ponsonby. I remind your Lordships that we are talking about the 1920s, not the current noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. But here, as others have, we should credit the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for chivvying him. I was on the equivalent Front Bench pushing at the same time, and things have improved as a result of the modifications that the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, brought forward—we have had access to documentation prior to discussion of free trade agreements—but I remind noble Lords, as our retiring chairman said, that this covers only FTAs, not other significant treaties. They are equally—sometimes more—in need of extra time to get the input that the committee needs to give them proper consideration. We need to get that evidence and we need time to consider it, irrespective of whether the treaty is an FTA or a significant other treaty.
The excuse given is that scrutiny of implementing legislation is somehow a meaningful proxy for scrutiny of the original treaty. Even when there is such legislation, this is simply wrong. In that regard, I cite the Chagos treaty: the International Agreements Committee was unable to get the time we needed to give that treaty real scrutiny. We could not get witnesses; we just did not have time. Had we had time, we could have produced a much more comprehensive and useful report, which the noble Baroness and her colleagues might have used to avoid some of the problems that have appeared in the paving legislation following that treaty. The committee is a utility that the Government can use to look in advance at the sort of problems that might arise in paving legislation, before that legislation is actually framed.
In looking at the longer-term legislative reform of CRaG for significant treaties, particularly trade agreements, I am clear that there should be a requirement for positive parliamentary consent before ratification, rather than relying on the current and never-used power to delay. I note in passing that even the theoretical power of delay relies on the Commons getting time in the House to have that debate, which we know is not a guarantee; indeed, it has not happened in significant cases.
We have heard about treaty explanatory memorandums, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Norton, because I did not know about that piece of work, which he just told us about. Treaty explanatory memorandums should be upgraded and they should clearly explain why the Government believe that the treaty should be ratified, including its impacts and policy rationale. These should also be extended to encompass the roles of the devolved authorities—a point that my noble friend made.
As we have heard, there has also been an increasing creativity when it comes to making agreements that are not treaties under CRaG, thus avoiding proper process altogether. These are primarily through a memorandum of understanding, but also through manipulating the actual process itself. This takes, in essence, a huge body of important work out of scrutiny at all. An example of that is the agreement on pharmaceutical policy with the United States of America. It is an agreement and it has far-reaching powers over our NHS, but it received absolutely no scrutiny whatever because it is not within CRaG. That is a very good example of when important things are pushed through without the scrutiny that they need. We have to move from the Executive-dominated system to one where Parliament can shape things along the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley—mandates are something that we discussed a lot when I was on that committee—and properly scrutinise them when they come to us.
Given the importance of this, the Government’s response was all the more disappointing. The response to our report is, in essence, cursory, and I thought the spoofing of it by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, was uncanny in its accuracy. The only thing it did not add was consultations, which I think is the other issue. This response is fobbing off what we wrote—I am afraid to have to say that—and it fails to address the core findings of the inadequate scrutiny time, poor information-sharing and excessive executive discretion. At no point do the Government respond to the core criticisms levelled by the IAC and experts such as the Hansard Society that demonstrate how the process tilts far too much towards government lagging behind international standards, as was made. We should not be surprised.
Similar reports making similar criticisms have received about the same length of shrift from the Government of the day since 2011 or 2014: each has found a way of rejecting mandatory votes; rejected central repositories for non-binding instruments or broader reforms, such as a debate on mandates; and sought to prioritise so-called agility over enhanced scrutiny. I should be downhearted about this Government’s engagement with this report—and I am—but it seems to be a law of nature that any Government, of whatever stripe, will seek to avoid the purview of any part of the legislature. Perhaps this is the time for a Government to kick against what seems to be ingrained DNA in the process.
I say to the Minister that the issues laid out in this report are important. Parliamentary scrutiny should be there to help government work and it should be there for the process of democratic scrutiny. I hope that she will rethink the Government’s response and embrace the spirit, if not the letter, of this report.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, like others, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for so ably introducing this debate and setting out the findings of his committee. It is indeed a thought-provoking and timely report, and the committee is right that Parliament should be given a full opportunity to scrutinise the terms of the Government’s treaties with other nations. I also particularly enjoyed the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. If I was not so afraid of the results, I would be tempted to look back through Hansard at the number of times that I as a Minister might have used some of those phrases in reports before the House. I suspect the results would not be good, so I probably will not.
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, outlined, the current position is that His Majesty’s Government make treaties under the royal prerogative, and foreign policy more generally is the responsibility of the King’s Ministers. Of course, Members of Parliament may seek to bind the Secretary of State to recognise a state, as with the Palestinian Statehood (Recognition) Bill, and parliamentary committees may seek to recognise states, as the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee did in 2023 when it declared that Taiwan is already an independent country under the name “Republic of China” and it possesses all the qualifications for statehood. I probably agree with the second statement rather than the first.
Even though I profoundly disagree with the current incumbents, it is, in my view, Ministers who ought to decide these matters. We have to protect the role of the Government to ensure that Ministers are able to respond to the challenges and give leadership on the world stage. Again, although I believe that the current crop does not do that, they should have the right to do so once elected. Changing that fundamental principle by shifting power from the Government acting under the prerogative to Parliament would, in my view, be unworkable. We agree with the Government that there is not a strong case for more fundamental reform of parliamentary scrutiny.
Parliament may of course scrutinise, challenge and deny the Government the necessary implementing legislation—as indeed we are seeking to do at the moment on a treaty of which I will not remind the Minister lest she roll her eyes again—but it may not overrule His Majesty’s Government in their exercise of the prerogative in signing a treaty. By that, I do not mean to say that Parliament’s sovereignty is limited—the Crown is of course sovereign in Parliament—but there is, in practice, no mechanism available to Parliament to veto a treaty. I hope that the Committee will bear with me for a second as I develop that point.
The introduction to the committee’s report gives a useful background to the Ponsonby rule of 1924, which was referred to earlier, but its description of the rule is incomplete. The committee is correct to say that the Ponsonby rule requires the Government
“to lay treaties before the House after signature for a period of 21 days”,
but has neglected to recognise that, as reported in Hansard on 1 April 1924, Arthur Ponsonby went on to say:
“as the Government cannot take upon itself to decide what may be considered important or unimportant, if there is a formal demand for discussion forwarded through the usual channels from the Opposition or any other party, time will be found for the discussion of the Treaty in question”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/4/1924; cols. 2004-05.]
The laying of treaties before the House is just one part of the Ponsonby rule, and it is unfortunate that the committee failed to reflect that in its report. I know that I have previously explained this point; I looked at it in detail for our debates on the Diego Garcia Bill.
While I am on that point, I also note that the committee dubiously claims that:
“until recent times Parliament on the whole paid little attention to treaties laid before it by the Government”.
Given the amount of parliamentary time devoted to debates on the treaty of Rome, the Maastricht treaty and the Lisbon treaty in the past, I find that claim slightly vague.
When the aforementioned Diego Garcia base treaty was laid before the House of Commons, a request for a substantive debate was made through the usual channels by the Opposition, but on that occasion the request was denied. That decision by this Government was in clear breach of the commitment by Arthur Ponsonby on behalf of the Labour Government at the time, albeit over a century ago.
Where the Government refuse to grant time for a debate on a substantive Motion in the House of Commons, as they have done in this case, the provisions in Section 20(3) to (6) of the CRaG Act, which set out the process by which the House of Commons may prevent the ratification of a treaty, become, in essence, worthless.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I was developing a point about the Government’s refusal, under the Ponsonby rule, to grant a debate in the House of Commons on the Diego Garcia Bill. Their refusal to do that prevented the ratification of the treaty, making the CRaG Act, in essence, worthless in that respect.
Of course, this principle was not just outlined by Sir Arthur Ponsonby so long ago; it was also repeated in the House of Commons by the then Europe Minister, Chris Bryant MP, a member of the current Government. At the time, he said:
“If Members—whether Front Benchers or Back Benchers—sought to debate a motion, the Government would ensure that there was a debate within the time”.
He went on:
“I hope that I have reassured the House that the Commons would always have the right of veto, should it choose to implement it”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/1/10; cols. 216-18.]
Following the passage of the CRaG Act, we have learned that these assurances were empty words, in a sense, and that the Government have ditched a Labour principle that lasted almost a century.
I have tabled a Written Question on this point; perhaps the Minister might be kind enough to answer it today. Do the Government still consider themselves bound by the Ponsonby rule in full? If they have decided to abandon it, that may be defensible, but what is not defensible is the lack of transparency around this apparent, fairly major change in government policy—if, indeed, that is what has happened. I hope that the Minister will clarify that in her remarks at the end.
Turning to some of the wider points made by the committee, there may well be a case for extending the period in Part 2; I agree with Members who spoke on that matter. Greater transparency around decisions to extend that period would be extremely useful. The example of the Australian and New Zealand practice of publishing a national interest analysis alongside a treaty is also convincing, and I hope that Ministers will look at that proposal closely.
The New Zealand approach to sequencing, which the committee highlighted in its report, is also a very sensible proposal. We agree with the committee that sequencing is important, but I gently ask whether a rule is needed on this. Does Parliament not already have the necessary procedural tools at its disposal to ensure proper sequencing in respect of treaty ratification if the House of Commons, in particular, chooses to use those powers?
Finally, I again thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the rest of the committee for this extremely useful report on this important topic, and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak on behalf of the Government in response to this debate. I am well aware of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper nature of the response that I am about to give. I remember saying something very similar to what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, shared with us earlier. I probably said it to the noble Lord opposite, regarding some implementing legislation around Brexit, and I definitely said it in the other place when we were debating various approaches to the Brexit negotiations between 2016 and 2019. It is important that we all approach this in the spirit of openness and candour. I very much enjoyed what my good noble friend Lord Anderson had to say; it was almost as though he was reading from my script.
Having said all that, I have in my mind what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said; I always enjoy his speeches. He said that he did not anticipate a surprising reaction from the Government today, but that he was looking for empathy for the arguments made. He will get that. It is one thing to complain about a process while in opposition, or even to read the excellent report conducted by the committee; it is very different to hear the arguments made in the way that we have this afternoon. I admit that when I first saw this debate in my diary I thought, “Well, that’s an afternoon”, but it has been a really interesting and engaging opportunity. All noble Lords here are people I have found myself debating on various sides of both Chambers over quite a few years now. There is a band of—mostly—brothers who are interested in this topic. I will take forward with empathy the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Fox.
The Government’s position today is what it is, but that does not mean that it can never change and things cannot evolve over time; they often do. Some of that is in the hands of those who want to see change and depends on how effective they are at corralling the argument and drawing others to their cause. Let us see how noble Lords here get on in the next few years.
I am grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith for tabling this debate and to all members of the committee who have taken part. I am particularly grateful to my noble friend for his work as chair until January this year. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, to his role. It was good to meet him and discuss some of these issues in anticipation of this debate, and I very much look forward to working with him as we go forward.
As many noble Lords have said, treaties are a cornerstone of the international system. By turning aspirations and commitments into legally binding obligations, they provide the certainty that states, institutions and individuals need for stability, security and prosperity. Scrutiny is, as noble Lords have said, a vital part of the process. The Government—this is where I get into the speech made by my noble friend Lord Anderson—respect and value the committee’s role. The committee’s report raised a number of key issues. The Government’s response—I completely hear how disappointed some members of the committee have been in it—was clear, if somewhat disappointing to some. We want to address the issues where possible. We think some progress can be made without legislation.
I was asked about the number of treaties that are signed but not ratified right now. I do not know the answer to that. I would like to know the answer to that. One thing that we could do to assist the committee in the future is to be clearer about the pipeline of agreements that are coming so that it can anticipate better. I think that would be a helpful thing that the Government could and should do, so we are taking some steps in response. We are committed to ensuring that the committee has better sight of forthcoming treaties. The FCDO’s treaty unit is working with committee secretariat staff on a more robust system to ensure that the secretariat has a clearer picture of the pipeline of treaties to be laid in Parliament. We hope that this will help the committee in planning its work.
We have also committed to updating the template used for Explanatory Memorandums, which we are now doing in consultation with the committee secretariat. That should help on the devolved Administrations issue as well. This Government have a very clear desire to improve the way that we work with our devolved Administrations and Parliaments. That template might assist, in a small way, in making sure that that happens more effectively. It should help departments focus on the information most useful for scrutiny, such as a clear articulation of the UK’s national interest in becoming a party to a treaty. The updated guidance will also encourage departments to explain any implications of a treaty for devolved functions and the consultation carried out. It will also encourage departments to provide advanced information about treaties that the committee is likely to be interested in. This includes sharing the text of such treaties with the secretariat after signature, unless policy considerations prevent it. Actions such as these should help the committee to make better use of the 21-sitting-day scrutiny period. These actions reflect the evolution of treaty working practices. They add to earlier arrangements relating to trade agreements—the Grimstone commitments—instigated under my noble friend Lady Hayter’s time as chair, but clearly my noble friend Lord Stevenson also had an important role to play in that.
The noble Lord, Lord German, asked about cross-Whitehall and how the FCDO works with other departments on their treaties. My most recent experience is the biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction treaty. That policy area was led by my friends in Defra. They hold the policy expertise but, because it is a treaty, we took the parliamentary lead. There are cross-Whitehall processes, there are write-rounds; lots of people will have an opinion about whether we should do something like that. In that case, it was relatively straightforward because it had a long lead-in time, there was good awareness of the issues around it and widespread support. I do not have a huge amount of experience of how that would work when it would be more contentious, but I would anticipate that, if there were a serious objection to the UK entering into some sort of negotiation around a treaty, that process would be used to make sure that those issues were resolved before the United Kingdom took any steps towards becoming a signatory.
The noble Lord, Lord Fox, said that implementing legislation is not a substitute for scrutiny. This is an important point, and I think he is right. It is not. When there is implementing legislation, noble Lords often do not feel that they have had adequate opportunity to take part in a debate prior to that; or perhaps they did, but some time has elapsed. Often, during implementing legislation, you find yourself debating whether you should do the treaty in the first place and having to say that actually we have already voted on that. It can make it slightly confusing for those trying to participate and to shape what happens.
This is a really interesting point. I do not think that implementing legislation is a substitute, as it can help to tease out some of the misgivings around a particular treaty. This is not an irrelevant point to make, but I do not think that legislation would ever be seen entirely as a substitute for scrutiny. We understand the appetite for changing scrutiny procedures. The procedures specified under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010—this goes to another point made by my noble friend Lord Anderson—strike a balance between the critical role in Parliament in scrutinising treaties and the Executive’s right to negotiate for the United Kingdom internationally.
However, there is clearly a strong sense among many parliamentarians that this balance is not right. I can commit to thinking about this matter some more; I cannot commit to changing it, but I hear where noble Lords are coming from. Even though this is not a priority for the Government to change immediately, Governments should not ignore these strong feelings when they come from their fellow parliamentarians. It is good to commit to considering this further, although I must be straightforward with noble Lords this afternoon that the Government are not in a position of wanting to revisit this issue or make any legislative change.
As it is, the CRaG Act gives Parliament the power to vote against ratifying treaties, and Parliament can of course use other mechanisms, such as Questions, to hold the Government to account. The statutory framework allows the Government to speak clearly, with a single voice, on behalf of the United Kingdom—this is important; former Ministers have pointed to it relatively recently as something that they have found to be of value, and I would tend to agree with that—and retains flexibility to enable the UK to act nimbly. In a world that is becoming more complex and fast-moving, we should not underestimate the importance of this. I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said about grim official gatekeepers or gamekeepers; that was a bit harsh, if I may say so, but I heard the noble Lord’s argument and his desire for change.
Noble Lords had a lot to say about debates and votes. The Government accommodate committees’ requests for debate during the scrutiny period where they can. In the case of the 100-year partnership treaty with Ukraine, for example, the Government extended the scrutiny period to enable a debate to be held. In answer to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, I do not know why the other place declined to offer the debate that was sought on the British Indian Ocean Territory treaty. However, requiring an affirmative vote on treaties would risk limiting the Government’s flexibility to negotiate treaties effectively. I note what noble Lords have said on this matter and expect that it will continue, as it should, to be a subject of interest and consternation to noble Lords. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who called the process miserly and inadequate; it sounds like it would have been him, as it was a very eloquent way of putting things. On the other side of it, is it appropriate and flexible? That is really the nub of what we are trying to resolve.
On the 21-day scrutiny period, which several noble Lords spoke about, the Government will of course properly consider requests for an extension to the scrutiny period on a case-by-case basis. This is slightly different from the requests made by the committee. I am happy to take this away. Sometimes deadlines need to be agreed by either side in a treaty and we need to move at pace to fulfil international obligations, but it is a fair challenge. We set out in our written response how we will approach these requests. We will consider carefully other factors raised by the committee and the length of extension it requests. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord German, about whether 21 days is enough for devolved Administrations to consider these things.
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was particularly concerned about international comparisons. The UK approach is broadly in line with countries with similar parliamentary systems. The UK Parliament has the same length of time to scrutinise a treaty as the Parliament of Canada, and more than those of Australia and New Zealand. The EU’s scrutiny arrangements will be different because it is a multinational organisation with 27 countries, so one would expect them to take a very different form.
I differ in substance on non-legally binding instruments. The noble Lord, Lord Johnson, asked a fascinating question about how many of these things there are. I do not even know how many I have signed, and I have been a Foreign Office Minister for almost two years. They are an incredibly useful diplomatic tool. They are not legally binding because they do not contain anything particularly contentious in terms of policy. They are about shared history and values, respecting the rights of women, agreeing to work together on supporting indigenous people to save the rainforest, the sorts of things that Parliament would not want us to be constantly presenting to it. Nevertheless, how many there are is a fascinating question. We may have to decline to give the noble Lord an answer on the grounds that it would take too long to find out, but a department-by-department inquiry might be made. I will think about it and work out how we could give a more helpful answer.
Non-legally binding instruments can contain important policy content and should be treated in the same way as other expressions and statements of existing government policy. They are not about new policy. Where they raise questions of public importance, the Government may need to bring them to the attention of Parliament. There is a question about the process for that and whose judgment it is. There have been elaborate sifting committee mechanisms to do this. I am not sure that that is what Parliament really wants to do, but if it is, it should say so. It could be done in a variety of ways. We often use Written Ministerial Statements for these kinds of instruments. As I say, they are not binding and they have a very different status and standing with states and organisations.
To conclude, this debate has demonstrated a shared belief in the critical role of Parliament in scrutinising international treaties. It has highlighted a range of views on how that scrutiny should work in practice, although I would not want to say that that was an evenly balanced—
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, I am sorry that I did not manage to conclude what was left of my speech before the Division Bells rang, slightly earlier than we expected. There is an important debate on media to follow, so I will not take too much longer.
The Government believe that the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 continues to provide a suitable and proportionate framework. However, the FCDO’s treaty unit will continue to work with the committee and its secretariat to ensure that our ways of working best deliver the balance between efficient executive function and accountability. I will consider further the issue of multilateral and plurilateral agreements. We very much welcome the committee’s continued engagement and I once again thank my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith for tabling this debate.
Lord Callanan (Con)
Before the noble Baroness sits down, do the Government still consider themselves bound by the Ponsonby rule?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I answered that in saying that I did not know why the debate in the other place, which the noble Lord thought the answer to that question hinged on, did not take place. I thank noble Lords for their contributions.
Lord Goldsmith (Lab)
My Lords, I have a few things to say, though I recognise that there is another debate to follow. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed. This has been another debate where a lot of thoughtful things have been said, most of which I agreed with. I actually agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that there is merit in the negotiating mandate being the subject of debate, and that has happened. I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, was not right that two things were missing from the report; it touches on the negotiating mandate in paragraph 55(a) and sets out the Ponsonby rule fully in paragraph 30.
I again thank all the members of the committee who participated in making the report, but I particularly thank the officials. I have made this point before, but they do an extraordinary amount of work in a very short time. If I may, though it is invidious, I will slightly embarrass her by particularly thanking and singling out Cathy Adams, who is leaving the committee and your Lordships’ service as international legal adviser. She has been an extraordinarily valuable member of staff and I thank her personally as well as on behalf of the committee.
I listened very carefully to what my noble friend said. I listened more carefully to what she said than to what she read out, if she does not mind my saying so, as there were hints of what my noble friend Lord Anderson of Swansea said, as she recognised, in her responses. I know that work is going on; I have heard that and we are thankful for it, but there is more to do. I suggest that she rereads this debate in those long hours when she has nothing else to do. I recognise that that is a tall order, but it is important, as everyone in this debate has recognised, as treaties affect the lives of people every day, to spend time on them in the way that we spend time elaborately looking at primary legislation. We do not do this for treaties, but we should. I am sure she will keep that in mind and direct her colleagues’ attention to it.
I ask her also to understand what goes into the process of writing one of these reports. I was a bit surprised, talking to officials on a previous occasion, that they did not really understand why we needed to get the evidence that we do. I know the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, thinks we should not, but I would take issue with that. It is important to have an evidence basis for the work done by the committee. That takes time to bring together, and it is one of the reasons why the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was quite right to underline the need for additional time.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
I did not say we should not take evidence, but simply that we should have a greater diversity of expert witnesses.
Lord Goldsmith (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness. I think we have much more diversity than she is giving us credit for, but she has perhaps not been a member of the committee for quite as long as I have.
I am also grateful to my noble friend the Minister for recognising that the defence of, “Do not worry, there is implementing legislation”, is not an answer to the concerns raised by the committee. With those comments, and the kindly meant suggestion that the Minister comes back to this debate, I beg to move.
Media Literacy (Communications and Digital Committee Report)
Baroness Keeley
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Communications and Digital Committee Media literacy (3rd Report, HL Paper 163).
Baroness Keeley (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate on the report of the Communications and Digital Committee’s inquiry on media literacy. In doing so, I will focus particularly on national leadership, the responsibilities of technology platforms and delivery in schools. This inquiry was the first undertaken after I took over as chair of the committee in early 2025, and I place on record my thanks to all the members of the committee, our witnesses and our excellent committee team, who worked hard on the inquiry, the report and the communications around the publication.
Media literacy is fundamental to a healthy democracy. An early inquiry by the House of Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee concluded in its report that:
“In the digital world, our belief in what we see, hear and read is being distorted to the point at which we no longer know who or what to trust”.
There is even more urgency now because rapid technological change, particularly the rise of social media and generative AI, has transformed how information is produced, distributed and consumed. One of the most striking consequences has been the growing dominance of online platforms and social media as primary news sources. Ofcom data from 2024 found that 71% of people consume news content via online providers, overtaking television news at 70%. This is accompanied by a steady decline in news consumption by TV, radio and newspapers. This shift changes what people see and how they see it. Online platform recommender algorithms tend to prioritise content based on keeping the user engaged rather than focusing on accuracy or public interest.
In a world of polarising views and declining interest in traditional news, it is more important than ever that children and adults have the skills to think critically about the content they access and create. It is encouraging that the UK has improved in international rankings for media literacy since our report was written. In the Open Society Institute’s 2026 European media literacy index, the UK ranked 10th, having previously ranked 13th. However, we should not be complacent about that improvement nor assume that the positive trajectory will continue without sustained effort. It was clear from the evidence we received that we are not currently doing enough in the UK, either in schools or outside them, to improve media literacy. A key concern for the committee was that the Government may not be dedicating sufficient attention or resource to this issue. We heard that, despite the aims of the previous Government’s 2021-24 media literacy strategy, the UK’s media literacy sector remains fragmented, underfunded and underevaluated.
This may in part reflect how responsibilities for media literacy are divided between the Government and Ofcom. Following the introduction of new duties under the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom now has a statutory duty to publish a media literacy strategy. Until this morning, the Government did not have an explicit up-to-date media literacy strategy and their activity on this appeared to be folded into wider work on digital inclusion and online safety. In their response to our report the Government said they would publish a media literacy vision statement. The new media literacy action plan published today as part of the Government’s Protecting What Matters social cohesion strategy appears to be the main vehicle for that vision. It is a welcome step towards greater clarity and co-ordination.
However, important questions remain about the scale of ambition, the resources attached to the plan and the extent to which it responds to the specific concerns raised by the committee, so I ask my noble friend the Minister what resources and delivery mechanisms will be put in place to ensure that the plan translates into tangible action and measurable improvements in media literacy.
The action plan refers to strengthening community-based provision, including through libraries and other trusted spaces, which we welcome. But without discrete long-term funding lines dedicated to media literacy, there remains a risk that initiatives are short term and piecemeal. Action 20 in the plan, to provide funding for local projects that support media literacy under the digital inclusion innovation fund, is a telling example. The Government awarded funding to over 80 projects but only one explicitly references media literacy, although the action plan does identify two further digital skills projects that partly cover it. Moreover, I understand that this funding must be used by the end of March 2026.
The committee recommended that:
“The Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund should include significant long-term investment in discrete media literacy programmes”.
Clearly, that has not happened yet, with at best three out of 80 projects covering media literacy. Can my noble friend the Minister clarify when the funding provided in the digital inclusion innovation fund runs out and update us on when we might see significant long-term investment in discrete media literacy programmes, rather than it being an add-on to broader digital inclusion work?
There is also a question over whether the action plan provides the sustained direction and cross-government co-ordination necessary to close the gaps that our inquiry identified. The committee concluded that, although Ofcom may have statutory duties on media literacy, it is not the right body to deliver a nationwide media literacy programme. We were clear that only the Government can fill the current “leadership vacuum” on media literacy delivery. I therefore ask my noble friend the Minister how the Government will ensure that the action plan published today is delivered in a way that complements Ofcom’s statutory strategy and avoids the duplication or confusion of roles. Can he reassure us that the two bodies are working together effectively?
We also call for the Government to nominate a single Minister to take responsibility for its media literacy work. In their response, the Government explained that Kanishka Narayan MP has clear “ministerial responsibility” for online
“media literacy coordination and strategy in government”,
while my noble friend Lady Lloyd has responsibility for media literacy insofar as it relates to the Government’s work on digital inclusion. The media literacy action plan also mentions the DCMS Minister, Ian Murray MP, and DfE Minister, Olivia Bailey MP. Can my noble friend the Minister reassure us that the Government’s media literacy work benefits from coherent and unified ministerial engagement, with clear co-ordination and accountability?
I turn now to the responsibilities of tech platforms. The committee felt strongly that technology companies must do more. We considered that tech platforms have a responsibility to help their users to assess what they see on the services and to understand why they are seeing it, where it has come from and whether it can be trusted. However, at present, the platforms face no formal requirements to support media literacy.
Ofcom has developed a set of best practice design principles for media literacy, to which some platforms have signed up, although these recommendations are advisory rather than legally enforceable. There is also a troubling lack of transparency, since only platforms hold the data that would demonstrate what impact any media literacy interventions would have on user behaviour.
The Protecting What Matters strategy talks about increasing transparency around how the platforms operate and giving independent researchers greater access to platform data. That is welcome, but the media literacy action plan will need to spell out in detail how and on what timetable those commitments will be delivered. At present, it makes almost no reference to the role of platforms in supporting media literacy.
Our report called for the Government to establish stronger requirements on technology platforms to implement and evaluate media literacy interventions and to ensure that Ofcom is empowered to take robust action to hold the platforms to account. Can my noble friend the Minister tell us how the media literacy action plan will strengthen Ofcom’s ability to evaluate platforms’ media literacy interventions? What concrete steps will be taken to ensure meaningful data access for regulators and independent researchers? I also welcome his view on whether Ofcom’s current best practice approach remains adequate to ensure that the platforms are truly playing their part in supporting media literacy.
Given the scale of the impact that tech platforms have had on our media and information environment, the committee felt that funding for media literacy programmes
“should substantially come from the technology sector”
itself. However, the Government rejected our call for a levy on platforms to fund media literacy initiatives. Will the Minister say what is the Government’s view on how the gap in funding for large-scale, long-term media literacy interventions will be addressed, if not by a levy?
Finally, I turn to the curriculum and the committee’s central theme: the need to embed media literacy throughout the education system. Children and young people need to engage with this topic repeatedly throughout their time in school, starting from an early age. Yet we found that, at its worst, the teaching of media literacy in schools is being relegated to one-off lessons or even an annual school assembly. That is clearly not good enough.
According to Professor Lee Edwards of the LSE, the Department for Education has in the past shown little interest in treating media literacy as a valued subject. It is therefore welcome to see that the media literacy action plan has the support of the Minister for Early Education and that it includes several actions for the Department for Education. We also welcome that the Government took up the recommendations of the Curriculum and Assessment Review on the need to enhance the coverage of media literacy in primary and secondary curricula.
The Guardian Foundation observed that,
“the key to success is to make sure teachers and schools are properly supported and ensure media literacy does not become an additional burden on already stretched educators”.
Media literacy demands specialist knowledge and confidence from teachers, particularly as the media landscape continues to evolve, so investment in initial teacher education and continuing professional development will be essential.
The need for improved training to enable teachers to teach media literacy effectively was a consistent theme in our evidence. We heard that,
“30% of teachers cite a lack of relevant training as a barrier to delivering effective media literacy”.
Although the action plan recognises the need for teacher training, it refers loosely to “support” for teachers “in line with” the recommendations of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, along with training focused on,
“teaching media literacy skills related to counter-extremism and misogyny”.
Media literacy goes further than those two important areas.
Will the Minister give us further detail on how the Government will ensure that media literacy is incorporated effectively into teacher training and continuing professional development plans to improve teacher training on media literacy? Will he also provide an update on the timeline for delivering the changes set out in the Curriculum and Assessment Review?
Today’s media literacy action plan is a timely opportunity to address the concerns set out in our report, particularly around leadership, funding and delivery in schools. The question is whether the Government will now match their stated ambition with the necessary resources and leadership. I beg to move.
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
My Lords, before we start, I ask noble Lords to ensure that they stick to the five minutes’ speaking time. Although the time allowance is advisory, the Grand Committee may sit only until around 7.45 pm. We need to conclude the debate before then, and a vote is expected in the Chamber, so I ask noble Lords to stick to their time and end at five minutes.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, I will try to be mild, obedient, good and kind. Let me say how delighted I am to speak in this debate. I applaud the Communications and Digital Committee’s report on media literacy, and the splendid way in which the noble Baroness introduced today’s discussion. She had so many questions for the Minister that he will be pleased that I have decided to withdraw all my questions because they were all covered by her speech, which was so rigorous and thoughtful. This is a serious topic which discusses the depth and breadth of how we sustain a democracy today. The report has been written with diligence, professionalism and foresight. Committee members from all parts of the House have prepared a document which well merits scrutiny and, I hope, action.
The report makes clear that a failure to prioritise media literacy presents a threat not merely to individuals but to the functioning of democracy. New technologies and social media algorithms have dramatically transformed the wider information environment, and many citizens are poorly equipped to navigate it. As the report says, less than one-third of adults are confident that they can identify AI-generated content—an alarming statistic when you consider the pace at which generative AI tools are advancing. This is not a marginal concern; it affects trust, safety and political discussion.
I am sure that members of the committee will have seen the speech by the outgoing DG of the BBC to the Royal Television Society on the participative society. He says that the media sector is witnessing,
“an all-out assault on trustworthy information … journalism is now completely or partially blocked in over 75% of the world … Press freedom is at its lowest point in history”.
He goes on to say that “The Economist research”—I declare an interest as a trustee of the Economist—
“from 180 countries over 80 years showed the … connection between low press freedom and democratic decay”
is very serious.
“Information … warfare is a growing security threat. Russia, China, and Iran are investing billions in propaganda”,
while the World Service budget is £350 million. Maybe the Government should take that responsibility.
Misinformation and disinformation are rampant”,
according to the European Broadcasting Union. That is very serious situation indeed. However, BBC has prepared a constructive response. It wants to provide media literacy. It wants to,
“build local services, deploying cutting edge technologies to increase verification, as well as strengthening local journalism”,
and expanding the World Service.
Much has been said about the importance of young people and education. I want to refer to the English-Speaking Union, which started in 1918 and has become a magnificent organisation dedicated to teaching young people about scrutiny, fact-checking, analysing media, data, sources, propaganda and stereotypes. It is now the largest debating organisation in this country, and I feel that if a partner is needed, not simply from government, people could go very far to find better than what the English-Speaking Union provides.
I always like practical examples of what I am talking about. I do not like just to moan about the Government. I will give a great plug for one of my favourite magazines, The Week. It is the ultimate media literacy training magazine. It is a summary of news stories and opinion columns published by other papers, so it is not an echo chamber. Some are based on articles from overseas, often first published in a foreign language. Last week, its piece on Tehran quoted the Daily Mail, UnHerd and the FT; the piece on Dubai quoted the Sun, the Guardian and the Economist. The review of Rose Wylie’s exhibition at the RA quoted the FT, the Times and the Telegraph—they may be more similar in their categories.
There is a great deal to be done, and the matter is urgent. Let me say again how much I applaud the work of the committee. I look forward to the action that the Government will take to follow up its many recommendations as well as the excellent questions asked by the noble Baroness.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, when our committee published its report on media literacy last year, we used words such as “crisis” and “leadership vacuum”. They were not chosen lightly. One in four UK adults finds it difficult to distinguish true from false information online, one in three believed a fake news story was real and 42% of all crimes are now scam related. United Kingdom has slipped from 10th to 13th place in the European Media Literacy Index. The question before us is not whether the problem is serious—that is beyond doubt—but whether the Government’s response is adequate and whether progress made so far justifies confidence that it will be. When I was putting together my short but perfectly formed contribution, it was before we received the Minister’s letter of plans and actions, so I want to deal with that in a moment.
I start where credit is genuinely due. As our chair mentioned, something has moved on the curriculum. The Curriculum and Assessment Review, published last November, identified media literacy as a priority. The Government accepted the recommendation to make citizenship education compulsory in primary schools, with financial media literacy embedded within it. The schools White Paper published last month recommits to embedding media literacy across the curriculum, with revised programmes of study expected by spring 2027 and teaching from September 2028.
These are welcome steps and I do not dismiss them, but I must be candid with the Committee that warm words and future promises are not the same as delivery. Our report called for media literacy to be anchored in a core subject such as English instead of computing. We called for it to begin in early years, with age-appropriate progression through every key stage. The Government have indicated a direction of travel, but we do not yet have the detail, resourcing or accountability mechanisms to ensure that, when 2028 arrives, what is taught in classrooms across the country is consistent and sufficient. Teacher training remains a glaring gap; without equipping teachers, we are building on sand.
On funding, our report was direct. Long-term, stable media literacy provision cannot rest on short-term government grants or the good will of technology platforms. We recommended a levy on large technology companies to create a sustainable and independently administered fund. Canada’s MediaSmarts is already co-funded by Meta, TikTok and Google. The Online Safety Act already provides for a fee levy on platforms for Ofcom’s regulatory work. Extending that model to media literacy is legally and practically achievable. The Government have not yet responded to this recommendation and I urge the Minister to address it directly as, while we wait, Meta has already suspended third-party fact checking in the United States. Platform priorities tend to shift and voluntary commitments erode. The sector cannot continue to depend on good will.
On governance, our report found that media literacy sits scattered across DCMS, DSIT and the Home Office and efforts are therefore fragmented, underfunded and undervalued. We called for a named Minister with clear accountability. This too has not been acted on. I want to be constructive, for I do not expect wholesale Whitehall reorganisation, but media literacy needs a champion at ministerial level who wakes up every morning for it. Without that co-ordination, which we need, it will not happen. Ofcom has repeatedly said that it cannot do this alone. It is a convenor and catalyst, not a curriculum authority or funding body. It should not be left holding a responsibility that the Government should fully discharge.
I am running out of time. A start has been made. We need a named Minister, a levy on platforms, a clear curriculum commitment with resources to match and a serious effort to reach adults who are being left behind. The democratic health of this country depends on citizens who can think critically about what they read and share. This is not an aspiration, but an urgent necessity. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)
My Lords, I am proud to be a member of the Communications and Digital Committee, which produced this report. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for focusing and steering us towards the important conclusions we reached. Following the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, I will focus on the significance of trusted news sources and how digital users can use them to cut a path to truth through the jungle of misinformation on the internet. The spread of AI has created as many problems as solutions. It is a blight on our society. Anyone can create an AI deepfake image at home in a few seconds. This has meant that misinformation and disinformation are everywhere and growing by the second.
The problem has only been compounded by the use of AI systems as the main source of news for so many people. I have been worried by an impressive new study by European public service broadcasters, which found that there were issues with 45% of AI news summaries. For example, when using satirical source material, AI delivered it as the truth. It found the responses were often one-sided and did not provide the context for the user to understand the issue properly. Gemini even added words to direct quotes. The AI assistant struggled with fast-moving news stories and intricate timelines involving multiple actors. This report and many others highlight the unreliability of so many AI news sources. Now is the time to ensure that political energy is focused on promoting our trusted providers of information and directing users towards them.
I urge the Government to support the CMA’s strategic market status investigation into Google search. It is important that when an AI overview appears at the top of the search, it declares its sources of information and gives links to the websites that provided the trusted source of information. I also urge the Government to support the PSBs with magnified discoverability as they start to move into partnerships with video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
A week or so ago, the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, said in Oral Questions that the Government are considering Ofcom’s recommendation for PSB material on video-sharing platforms to be given more prominence and fair terms; can the Minister build on this answer? I, too, am glad to see in today’s government report on media literacy that the Government want to place an obligation on the BBC to support media literacy nationwide. The corporation is at the forefront of this battle for truth. As the report points out, the BBC’s Bitesize assistant is an important aid for young people.
To build on this, there is an initiative called the Other Side of the Story to help develop young people’s critical skills, which is a partnership between BBC Education and BBC News. It helps people respond to misinformation and fake news, telling participants to double-check what they are reading, as fake news is often opinion dressed up as fact. The course warns that echo chambers which develop on social media are dangerous if users are searching for objective news. They are advised to break out of these echo chambers by looking at other people’s points of view and the opinions of those with whom they agree. However, action 4 in the Government’s report, to support BBC media literacy, will have no effect if it is yet another obligation to deliver services without funding that extra responsibility. Can the Minister reassure us that those media literacy duties will be fully funded by the Government?
Local media is another source of trusted news, recognised by action 3 of the Government’s report. The Communications and Digital Committee took interesting evidence from the Guardian Foundation. I am very persuaded by the effectiveness of its Media Literacy Ambassador programme; set up in 2023 by a group of colleges in Derby, it harnessed the power of peer pressure. Young people are trained up to be ambassadors in how to spot fake news and develop critical faculties and they train up their peers. Last year this meant nearly 1,500 young people trained up over 5,000 other students. Unfortunately, DSIT funded this excellent scheme for only 18 months, until the end of 2024, and now it has stopped. I therefore call on the Minister to re-establish support for such a powerful programme.
The Government have recognised in action 3 that involving students and local media in news stories relevant to their local area is an effective way of drawing people to an understanding of trusted sources. The problem is that, as many noble Lords know, there has been a collapse in local media. Can the Minister say whether extra funds will be available to support action 3 and bring the local media into the community?
I am glad the Government have finally recognised in today’s report the importance of media literacy for the future of our young people and our country. These are warm words indeed. I will be watching closely to see how these words are turned into actions.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, I contribute to this debate with a little temerity. Having only recently joined the Communications and Digital Committee, I was not present to hear any of the evidence or representations received prior to the preparation of what is undoubtedly a very comprehensive report. That being said, I congratulate those who were present and the committee on a very useful contribution to government and wider thinking on what is undoubtedly a major topic of the 21st century. The fact is that the creative industries contributed £124 billion in gross value to our economy in 2023 and supported 2.4 million jobs, while the AI sector itself contributed £11.8 billion to our economy in 2024 and now employs around 86,000 people.
The growing strength of both industries underlies the emphasis placed by the Government in their AI Opportunities Action Plan on resolving the uncertainty around intellectual property and reforming the UK text and data mining regime—TDM—which they have said is
“hindering innovation and undermining our broader ambitions for AI, as well as the growth of our creative industries”.
Their preferred approach is to adopt a commercial exception in the case of TDM, with an opt-out mechanism and associated transparency obligations. This would align the UK’s approach with that of the European Union, although, as the report sets out, it could provide risks in the protection of the creative industries.
What is needed now more than ever is smart regulation that protects creators and rights holders but is also proportionate, practical and supportive of growth. The Government must work further and faster to bring this much-needed certainty for AI and creative industries alike by publishing their approach to future changes to copyright law. They must seek to adopt an approach that strengthens the current gold standard protections afforded to creators and safeguards their livelihoods while providing the guardrails and clarity sought by AI companies to enable them to innovate and harness the potential of AI to drive economic growth.
There is also a wider need for us as legislators to try to find faster and more adaptable ways of keeping up with the speed of innovators and entrepreneurs. It is a difficult challenge, but one that I have been advocating for a long time. While we consider more immediate priorities, we should also seriously look at codifying the many laws and regulations already in place to see where adaptation could fit them to handle the challenges the report identifies and provide the protection and redress that our new technological age demands.
The report is also right to highlight the need for transparency from larger AI developers, which it recommends should be given statutory weight. However, this must not come at the cost of placing disproportionate burdens on smaller businesses that would probably see them relocate abroad and undermine the UK’s potential to become an innovation-friendly environment for AI start-ups. Again, this can be achieved only by those smart regulations I have referred to, which proportionately balance the needs of the creative industries while encouraging investment in emerging technologies.
More fundamental, however, is the need to improve the UK’s capability to build responsibly trained AI systems by investing in sovereign AI. The Government have committed £2 billion towards strengthening the UK’s potential for AI sovereignty through the Sovereign AI Unit, new compute infrastructure and AI growth zones. It is essential that the UK builds domestic models with far greater transparency around training data and development processes rather than relying excessively on opaque overseas systems that are arguably harmful to not only our national interests but our future success in these fields. Not only will this protect those national interests in an increasingly uncertain technological world, but it will unlock growth and encourage future investment in the industry.
Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)
My Lords, I too served on the Select Committee that produced this excellent and timely report. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Keeley on her leadership and commend our recommendations to the Minister. Media literacy skills are key to protecting our democracy and the well-being of our society by ensuring that citizens can recognise misinformation and disinformation. Trust in news and institutions is dangerously low, yet audiences have access to ever-increasing volumes of content, whether accurate or spurious.
The Government have a responsibility to ensure that their citizens, young and old, have the skills to think critically about the content they consume and create, both online and offline. As our report stated, it is not enough just to outsource media literacy to the regulator, Ofcom, which is tasked with implementing the important Online Safety Act. The Government must lead by appointing a senior Minister to oversee delivery across Whitehall by co-ordinating cross-departmental activity within education, public services and local government. The new working group, although welcome, is not enough.
The online world touches every aspect of our lives and, with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, we must be better prepared to understand how we are affected by what we read. It is not just news, but how we access public services such as health; our employment, entertainment and relationships are all impacted. That is why the committee called for a public awareness campaign to encourage media literacy, and I am pleased that the Government have listened. However, this alone will not counter all the harms that our society is experiencing online, which bleed into the real world, corroding trust, polarising communities, undermining democracy and coarsening public discourse.
The increasing misogyny and violence against women and girls, and the tragedy of young men having their lives ruined by toxic influencers, can be blamed in part on material perpetrated online. There must be tools to build resilience and give people the chance to use technology for good outcomes, rather than to live as victims of the all-powerful online platforms, which need to show some social responsibility. I know the Government have rejected our recommendation for a media levy on tech companies to help fund independent media literacy initiatives, but the tech companies should play a bigger and better role in enabling their consumers to have a safer experience online.
I was pleased to see that the recently published action plan, Protecting What Matters: Towards a More Confident, Cohesive and Resilient United Kingdom, recognises the need to strengthen digital and media literacy
“so people can engage critically with online content and access reliable information”.
I warmly welcome today’s publication of the Government’s media literacy action plan, which addresses many of my concerns.
The findings of the independent review of the school curriculum are an important first step. Media literacy is not just an add-on; it is not enough to cover it only in an English class or the occasional assembly. It needs to be embedded across the curriculum and it needs to start early. So many subjects are accessed online that critical thinking is required throughout, including in sciences and history as well as citizenship. Can the Minister give some assurance that teachers will be actively supported to provide this new level of media literacy? Our report called for updated teacher training and continuous professional development to ensure that teachers feel better equipped to deliver lessons. I regret that the new curriculum will not be implemented in full until September 2028.
The Government’s recently announced consultation on children’s social media use to ensure healthy online experiences is welcome. I hope its conclusions will further boost the commitment made to ensure that media literacy is fundamental to both individual empowerment and democratic resilience, because adults also need support, not just as parents and carers to help their children navigate the internet safely but as citizens and consumers. The shocking level of online fraud revealed by Lloyds last week showed that someone in the UK lost money to a fraudulent seller on Facebook or Instagram every six minutes. The public want to see social media platforms do more to protect them from scams and I welcome the Government’s recognition in the action plan that they need to do more to inform the public.
Media literacy is as fundamental to modern life as reading and writing. Young people must engage positively but cautiously in this digital world. Society needs resilience to fight the determined efforts of bad actors to undermine our values. The Government must lead this battle.
Baroness Fleet (Con)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, on her leadership in producing this report by the Communications and Digital Committee, on which I serve. I declare my interest as a long-time journalist, including as editor of the Evening Standard for seven years.
In the time available, I will highlight one key element of the media literacy report, which is fundamental to the future of media literacy—news. Where do we get our news from and can we rely on it? How can young people best be taught to analyse news information, and especially to identify misinformation and disinformation? TikTok and YouTube are the most-used news sources for 12 to 15 year-olds, but where can the truth be found?
The majority of Britons still turn to the BBC for news. For generations, the BBC was trusted to present news accurately and impartially. I fear that that is no longer the case. There are of course many examples every day of great and brave journalism on the BBC, but all the good is washed away by outrightly bad journalism characterised by distortion, bias and inaccuracy. When the BBC’s failings are exposed, their executives are begrudging to admit their errors.
There are numerous recent examples of the failings of the BBC that have had far-reaching consequences—the Trump edit, for example, in a recent “Panorama”—yet when the BBC’s most senior executives were told about the distortion of Trump’s speech, they hoped that no one would notice. A whistleblower exposed the cover-up; the BBC finally acknowledged its error and apologised. Trump has escalated his complaint to a $10 billion legal battle.
Why was no action taken once it was discovered, eight months before it was publicly exposed? Because the most senior executive, DG Tim Davie, and his head of news, Deborah Turness, saw nothing wrong in the edit. Does this portray sloppy editing, as they suggested, or blatant bias?
The BBC’s recent pronouncement on Holocaust Day that 6 million people had been murdered by the Nazis instead of 6 million Jews shows how deep institutionalised antisemitism is at the BBC. Remember too Bob Vylan’s vile antisemitic chants at Glastonbury. The DG was present and did nothing to stop the broadcast. How did these grave errors occur?
Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television, told MPs in November that the BBC has
“a systemic problem which the organisation is unwilling to admit to and therefore cannot fix”.
He went on to say that until the BBC
“cleans house and addresses issues with biased reporting, poor due diligence, and open antisemitism … it will continue to face a crisis of credibility”.
Danny Cohen’s views are shared by many former and current employees. A dossier compiled by the former staffer, Michael Prescott, for the BBC’s editorial standards and guidelines committee presented damning evidence of malfeasance. Davie and Turness had to resign. Their removal does not solve the problem but just highlights the state of the BBC’s news division. This is central to our whole media literacy report. The challenge will be to root out the bad apples and train a new generation to appreciate accuracy, impartiality and outstanding broadcasting.
The answer is definitely not a new DG who is a former executive of Google, as has already been referenced today. Trusted journalism that represents views across the political spectrum must be at the heart of the BBC, with appropriately qualified leadership. I note that trusted journalism has nothing to do with funding; it is down to judgment. If the BBC cannot be relied upon to produce accurate and balanced news, which is essential to media literacy, levels of trust will fall further. A BBC that is not trusted is not sustainable. With the charter review on the horizon, it is more important than ever that the BBC gets its house in order.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing this important debate and the committee on an excellent report. As ever, I declare my interest as a teacher.
The report talks about thinking critically about the content that we create and consume both online and offline, because there is a problem: when we talk about media literacy, we instantly think of AI and deepfakes, but offline is important as well. Most people are aware of the ability of AI to produce remarkably realistic media. In fact, there are plenty of people who have randomly filmed remarkable events—perhaps their cat biting a shark—only to have it dismissed as AI. The critical point to understand is that unless we witness an event at first hand, everything that we look at has been edited by other people. Some examples are more obvious than others.
I was at boarding school in the 1980s during the miners’ strike. We got to see all the main national newspapers and would read at least the front page of each of them. There were different stories in the Mirror to those in the Sun, which would usually have a picture of Arthur Scargill doing Hitler salutes on the front page. But we have usually read the papers that reflect our beliefs and have had them reinforced by what we read long before algorithms.
This has been going on since mankind first learned to communicate. There is a theory that Harold was not actually hit in the eye with an arrow; it is just a clumsy darn on the “Bayeux Tapestry”. Richard III was not, in fact, the “poisonous bunch-backed toad” of Shakespeare; his scoliosis was painted in later. There are other great examples of fake news pre-internet. The Cottingley fairies became famous in 1917 when 16 year-old and 9 year-old cousins photographed themselves playing with the fairies at the bottom of the garden. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used these photos to prove that fairies not only exist but reproduce sexually, because one had a belly button. Mercifully, he died before one of the girls admitted that the fairies were cut out from a picture book, the belly button was a pin holding the paper to a plant, and they were translucent as the result of a slow shutter speed and the wind blowing the paper fairies around.
Picture editors have always had great power. One told me that they would always pick the best available shot of Princess Diana and the worst of the then Duchess of York. The iconic photo of the naked Vietnamese girl Phan Thi Kim Phúc running towards the camera with her back covered in burning napalm is less dramatic when you see the full uncropped negative, with the photographer walking next to her casually reloading his camera. The much-sanctified BBC always accompanies a story of the House of Lords with a picture of us in ermine. The Guardian, surprisingly, has us in suits.
How do we teach media literacy in schools to equip our young people to be critical consumers? Might I once again suggest a solution that I have suggested before, this time to a different Minister? In response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, the Government said:
“The secondary curriculum will both mirror and be a graduation of this core content, encompassing the vital threads of government, law and democracy, climate education, financial and media literacy”.
But where do we fit this into our crowded and knowledge-rich curriculum? Religious studies has to be taught to the age of 18 in maintained schools. I say stop: rather than embedding it across the curriculum, we could teach religious studies, government, law and democracy, climate education and financial and media literacy as a subject under the umbrella of citizenship, instead of just religious studies, with as much weight given to it as maths and English. If it was well planned and well taught, our students could become engaged and informed citizens. It could be fun to study and—equally importantly—to teach. Enthusiastic, well-informed teachers are good teachers.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register: as an adviser on emerging technologies, not least AI, to Endava plc, the Crown Estate, Submer Ltd and Simmons and Simmons LLP. It is a pleasure and an honour to take part in this debate, as it was to be a member of your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee, so ably led by the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, who opened this debate with erudition and eloquence, setting out all the key recommendations of our report’s findings. In many ways our report could be summarised in one phrase: critical thinking. It is important to so many of the issues currently facing all of us, not least young people, and is vital to our continued flourishing and humanity.
There are at least three reasons why media literacy matters today. The first is democracy. Trust is in crisis and collapsing under a barrage of misinformation and disinformation. We highlighted that in the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee report in 2020, and it has gone only one way since then. The second reason is economic. We have an epidemic of fraud, mostly perpetrated on platforms, yet, in the Government’s recent fraud strategy, platforms are not included in APP reimbursement; I ask the Minister why. The third reason is our very being in society. When AI is all around us, media literacy must flow like a golden thread through us all and every interaction that we have. Those are three reasons.
Three groups are to be congratulated and are set out in our report, including librarians and community groups for everything they do, often in spite of, rather than alongside support. Can the Minister outline what support librarians and community groups are going to get through this new plan? Similarly, Becky Francis has already been rightly highlighted for her curriculum review and all of the good points that were made in that in terms of media literacy. To that end, when will the statutory provisions be brought forward that can enable the media literacy provisions set out in Becky Francis’s review? When we talk about Ofcom, all too often, in so many areas, more and more gets put on Ofcom, with media literacy the latest to be put at its door. Will the Minister consider speaking to Ofcom about looking at its definition of media literacy, which currently does not include the phrase “critical thinking”? It is critical that that changes.
I also ask the Minister what is happening with the Government’s media literacy working group set up last May. How often has it met? What impact and output has it had? Then there is the Digital Inclusion Action Committee. What action has it taken, how many meetings has it had and what is its impact? We have already heard mention of the Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund. It is hurtling towards the end of the current funding period at the end of this month. What is happening with funding at the end of this period and what will be done to assess and analyse the projects that have been funded?
If we want safer lives, secure lives and successful lives, we need media literacy—ML will enable us to live with the LLM. Our report talks about the need for government intervention. Their plan, published today, talks about the need for effective regulation. It is quite right; I agree. I would add that we need not only effective regulation, but right-sized regulation. It is good for citizen, consumer, creator, innovator and investor. Right-sized regulation is good for all of us, as all history, not least recent history, shows us. When will we see the statutory requirements to enable the Francis review provisions on media literacy to come forward? When will we see further legislation on online harms and how we already need to address the shortcomings of the Online Safety Act? It was so long in the making but is already deficient with so many of the current technology challenges.
When will we see more Government action on media literacy? When will we see an AI Bill brought forward? There was one line in the last King’s Speech about an AI Bill being brought forward in 2024, yet it did not appear. A consultation was due last autumn. We are in the spring of 2026 but, still, there is no consultation. Now, we hear that there is unlikely to be any AI-specific legislation in the upcoming King’s Speech, likely this May. In conclusion, we need legislation; we need it now for all our futures. Ultimately, it is our data and our decisions. We challenge and we choose—if we get this right together—our inclusive digital futures.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Keeley on the comprehensive way that she introduced our committee’s report on media literacy, of which committee I am lucky to be a member. I also welcome the Government’s media literacy action plan that was published today. The committee’s report covers considerable ground but, in my time today, I want to focus on media literacy in schools. In doing so, I must remind the Committee of my interests, especially chairing the board of trustees at E-ACT and my work with Pearson Education.
Last year, I carried out research into how we might teach media literacy to young people. As part of that work, I met a Cambridge professor who described the rise of disinformation as a war between autocracy and democracy. This may sound dramatic, but it captures why I have devoted considerable time to this issue. There has always been the disinformation of propaganda and the misinformation of gossip and tittle-tattle, but what we face now is fundamentally different. These age-old problems are massively amplified by AI creating credible fake content. We saw Cambridge Analytica’s interference in the Brexit referendum. We see foreign interference in elections through disinformation bots on social media. Technology has transformed the scale and sophistication of the threat to our democracy.
In my research, I also met the Guardian Foundation, the Financial Times, the Economist, the BBC and others. Collectively, they offer a considerable body of support material for teachers but with piecemeal take-up while we await the proper place in the curriculum for media literacy. I have also spoken to examination boards and, crucially, to young people. What has emerged is growing awareness of the importance of doing more on media literacy, now reflected in the curriculum and assessment review’s commitment to strengthen media literacy in English, citizenship and PSHE. This is welcome, but I dread a knowledge-rich approach that simply teaches young people about how the media works without the practical experience of creating media content and developing genuine critical thinking. The disinformation we face, particularly AI-generated content, requires much better critical thinking skills, yet our current system of teaching to the test with its high-stakes accountability actively works against developing thinking skills. We teach model answers to predicted questions and mark schemes, but not how to think independently and critically. We must free teachers across all subjects to teach thinking, not just to drill test responses.
I also urge the DfE to explore using project-based qualifications to teach media literacy effectively. The FPQ, HPQ and EPQ offer a ready-made framework. Why not incentivise young people to learn about the media by creating journalistic content across the media types and assessing it using these existing qualifications with their accompanying UCAS credits? This combines practical creation with critical thinking in an authentic context. I hope the new curriculum finds space for this approach, especially at key stages 3 and 4 when young people are most actively engaging with social media and most vulnerable to misinformation and AI hallucination.
Media literacy is a democratic necessity. If citizens cannot evaluate information critically, the foundations of informed debate and democratic decision-making are weakened. The Government’s action plan today is welcome, but on education we cannot wait until 2028 for curriculum implementation. We must make progress now in anticipation of lowering the voting age to 16 and as AI becomes embedded in our lives. The committee has done a good report that has elicited a good plan from the Government, but we now need implementation at pace and at a scale that this democratic emergency demands.
Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and her committee for this remarkably informed and necessary report. I say so as a former schoolteacher and teacher of religious studies, a former ITV and BBC political journalist and now chairman of a major London university and a professor of leadership at a business school in the US.
The issues contained in this report absolutely matter. I agree with the report’s statement that media literacy is a vital life skill and with the response of the Government that media literacy and digital inclusion go hand in hand as individuals need the skills and confidence to engage safely, critically and effectively in the digital world.
But there is one category of citizen excluded from consideration by this report and the Government: people in prison. Currently, there are around 90,000 men and women—it is largely men and a few thousand women, because they do not misbehave as much—in our prison system. This morning, I made my third visit in eight days to the same prison in south London where I and my network of 35 visitors have a regular commitment. In the 120 visits I have made in the last 10 years to prisoners in the south of England, I have seen a whole cohort of people whom we have a major responsibility for but no commitment to around media literacy. In fact, there is no mention of them in this report or the Government’s response. Whether we like it or not, the truth is that all those in prison, with a few exceptions, will come out of prison at some point and they will be ignorant of media literacy and incapable of understanding exactly what is proposed in the committee’s brilliant assessment or even the Government’s response. They are media literacy denied.
Of course, that assumes that they are denied phones, iPads, laptops and everything else in the digital world to contain their corrupting, bad behaviour and make sure that they are reformed. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, pointed out, and as was further emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, 42% of crime is scam crime, which is not committed by people in prison but by people outside. Excluding those in prison from access to media literacy and media availability is destructive, divisive, discriminatory and unhelpful.
Ministers in the Ministry of Justice will say that, for prisoners to leave our system, which is not very good, and be excellent citizens, they will need employment, which requires education, and positive relationships. Being digitally excluded makes it harder for them to achieve any of those three outcomes. No wonder that, in so many ways, we have such a huge repeat offending rate—currently it is around 60% to 65%—and we are paying more to keep people back in prison than it would cost to send a great child to Eton or any other elite private school.
We must realise, as I hope the Government do, that if there is to be an integrated strategy between departments then it is about time we woke up to the fact that those in prison deserve media education, often for a long period of time, which can be best deployed through access to ring-fenced digital systems. That is perfectly capable in today’s world; there does not need to be mass availability of everything. To pretend that young men, and some young women, in prisons are incapable of intelligent engagement is not to understand the kind of characters they are. We must realise that they deserve the same level of inclusion that we seek for everybody else.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, as a recently joined member of the Communications and Digital Committee, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Keeley on her leadership, other committee members on the report and their contributions today, and other noble Lords who have supported the issue over many years and shared their wisdom and expertise in this debate. The Government’s choice to publish their media literacy action plan as the first step in their strategy to develop a safe, informed digital nation today is a positive response to all that mutual work and an important step in achieving a more aligned and cross-departmental approach to this crucial issue. Unfortunately, alongside the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I spotted it only this afternoon so it somewhat impeded my speech. Much has already been said and I do not wish to repeat the well-made points already made. I will therefore focus on issues that have not been touched on and put some questions to the Minister.
I declare an interest as a previous chair of Goldsmiths, University of London, and current chair of Camden Council’s STEAM project, which brings together all the primary and secondary schools and youth services in the borough, working with local employers such as Google and the Roundhouse and anchor institutions such as the Crick to progress young people from all backgrounds in high-skill sectors. Because of that, I look at these developments from the point of view of those we are seeking to support—the students, young people and adults—and those seeking to support them. I very much agree with the local implementation recommendations, but strongly believe that we need to create branding, visibility and resourcing; that needs to be brought together and accessed simply and in similar ways across the country.
Focusing on education, the emphasis on media literacy in the curriculum is very welcome, but, as has been said, it is one of the changes on which schools will have to work in short order. Some of the others include the change in modernised qualifications, putting creativity and arts back in the curriculum and the enrichment agenda. In policy terms, we tend to take each issue separately, so it is good to see digital literacy and media literacy being taken hand in hand, but it is vital that one key centre brings all of the support and access to resources for media literacy together in one easily navigated place; my noble friend Lady Keeley mentioned this in her introduction.
In this instance, it seems that the National Centre for Computing Education is there to support digital and AI, but, as has been said, the emphasis on media literacy across English, history and citizenship, which is absolutely vital, is missing. We need, therefore, to think about the resourcing for that. In addition, within computing and digital, it is vital that there is, as my noble friend just said, an emphasis on learning about the morals and ethics of how productions are made.
As regards voting age, youth services, which have been touched on, need to be able to access the same kinds of resources to support their work. Can the Minister confirm that—or at least ask whether—youth services will be able to access those if a centre for media literacy is set up?
Post-16 education seems to me to be a missing area. It is not really touched on. In terms of media literacy, the emphasis is on pre-16 education. The Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, which looked at A-levels, T-levels and the new V-levels, seems to be silent on these issues. I ask the Minister to ask his colleagues in the DfE and DWP whether they can say why that is and what their plans might be.
Further education and universities also seem to be missing. Local collaborations and partnerships could be utilised to support schools and youth services in preparing and supporting young people on media literacy. Again, I ask whether that could be explored further, with further information made available.
Finally, in terms of those offering support, the BBC has identified itself as key. We hope that this issue will be part of its charter priorities. Other public service broadcasters and platforms need to be able to co-ordinate that, too. It is essential to have one place for all of their combined partnerships to be brought together.
Lord Freyberg (CB)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and the Communications and Digital Committee on their timely report, which is clear-eyed about the scale of the challenge before us.
The report makes a compelling case for media literacy being no longer a specialist skill but a fundamental requirement for democratic participation. The concern is urgent. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, less than one-third of adults are confident that they can identify AI-generated content. Further, a 2024 Ofcom survey found that 52% of UK adults now use social media as a news source. That combination of mass dependence on social platforms and mass difficulty in evaluating what appears on them is precisely the vulnerability that the committee is right to address.
The report highlighted that provision has been uneven and fragile. As the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, said, media literacy in schools has at times been limited to a one-off or an annual assembly, or confined to optional subjects, making provision a postcode lottery. Outside school, it has fallen largely to underfunded third-sector organisations with no long-term strategic vision. The committee was right to conclude that only the Government can drive real progress.
The curriculum and assessment review, published in November 2025, and today’s media literacy action plan, recommended strengthening media literacy in English and citizenship and introducing a statutory requirement at primary level. Updated RSHE guidance, taking effect from September 2026, will address AI, deepfakes and online misogyny. These are welcome steps, but they must be matched with proper teacher training. I am glad that there has been a recognition of this in the action plan. Teachers have been clear that media literacy must be statutory and curriculum-aligned, not a tick-box exercise.
In speaking today, I want to focus on one aspect of media literacy that is sometimes overlooked: visual literacy. Much of today’s communication is no longer primarily textual; it is visual, multimodal and increasingly generated or altered by artificial intelligence, with around 5 billion constructed images shared every day. If media literacy is about understanding messages, visual literacy—the ability to interpret, question and evaluate images—is now one of its core components. As Alison Cole of the Cultural Policy Unit has argued, it should be regarded as a cornerstone of media literacy itself.
There is already practical evidence of what this can look like. Art UK’s Superpower of Looking programme is active in nearly 3,000 schools, developing children’s visual literacy through engagement with works of art. Oxford University’s Picture This initiative is evaluating such approaches in building visual literacy and the oracy skills that feature prominently in the curriculum review. The Government should ensure that visual literacy is explicitly embedded in the reformed curriculum, not left to individual schools or voluntary programmes. Nor is visual literacy merely a school concern. Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency published a report earlier this year arguing that it has become essential national infrastructure in an age of deepfakes and algorithmically amplified disinformation.
The skill of careful, critical observation is equally transferable in professional life: the New York Police Department has used art to improve officers’ capacity for unbiased visual assessment. We should treat visual literacy as the civic competency that it is. This matters because the current regulatory framework has not kept pace with how information is now communicated online. There are no general obligations on social media platforms to identify sources of content, verify factual information or label AI-generated images. Clearer labelling, particularly where content is presented as factual or depicts a real person, would be a practical step towards restoring transparency, provided it distinguishes deceptive uses of AI from legitimate creative work. Denmark has already legislated to give its citizens rights over their own digital likeness, and the United States is actively considering similar federal protections. The UK should be engaging with those developments rather than waiting.
The report gives us a clear direction. The task now is to act on it, by embedding visual literacy in our schools, improving transparency around AI-generated content and developing legal frameworks that address real harms without stifling creativity.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I apologise for intervening in the gap, but I very much wanted to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and her committee and speak to a report that is both is both timely and very necessary. In doing so, I declare my AI interests as in the register.
We are faced with a landscape of algorithmic manipulation, proliferating deepfakes, a torrent of disinformation and, of course, online fraud. The committee is right: a failure to prioritise media literacy is a threat not just to individuals but to social cohesion and democracy itself. In the era of generative AI, media literacy is, as the committee makes clear, a requirement for modern citizenship. Our current approach is indeed fragmented and underresourced and lacks strategic vision. Ofcom’s own evidence, highlighted by the committee, shows little improvement in core skills over six years. In that context, the Government’s claim in their response that they and Ofcom have met the mounting scale of the challenge is simply not credible.
Like my noble friend Lord Storey, I welcome the completed curriculum and assessment review, which commits the Government to publishing revised national curriculum content by spring 2027. However, as the committee recommends, media literacy should be embedded across the curriculum and teachers should receive sustained support. This should arrive earlier.
As the committee urges, we need media literacy to be prioritised across government, not bolted on at the margins. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that one of the key tests of the effectiveness of the new media literacy action plan will be whether that takes place.
The Government cannot simply continue to outsource their responsibility in this area to the regulator. Although I welcome Ofcom’s new three-year media literacy strategy and its tougher use of behavioural audits under the Online Safety Act, which the Government rightly highlight, it is, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, deeply disappointing that, more than 20 years on, Ofcom still has not brought its definition of media literacy up to date by explicitly recognising critical thinking—although I detect slightly different language in the media literacy action plan. Ofcom should, as the committee says, set minimum standards for platforms’ media literacy activity and be empowered to hold them to account.
You cannot build media literacy on foundations that do not exist. As the committee and many stakeholders argue, we must treat connectivity as an essential utility and invest accordingly. The vision from our Benches is empowered citizenship: not a nanny state that tells people what to think but a literate state that gives people the tools to think for themselves. That is, in essence, the spirit of the committee’s report.
I urge the Minister to treat this report not as suggestions but as an urgent road map. We need, as the committee sets out, a unified strategy, a robust and critical definition of media literacy and the digital infrastructure to underpin it all.
Finally, I say in closing that I believe the BBC is not the problem; it is part of the answer. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, this has been an encouraging debate, although the Government’s response to our report was a little last-minute, as has been said. My noble friend Lord Storey did not even know that we now have a Minister to cover this. That was not his fault: rather, it was a matter of the delivery of the action plan.
My skin in the game goes back even further. I was on the Puttnam committee that gave pre-legislative scrutiny to the Communications Act 2003—the Act that created Ofcom—and one of the responsibilities we wrote into Ofcom’s mandate was education on media literacy. I think it is fair to say that Ofcom had other things to do in the first 20 years of its life: nevertheless, media literacy was something important, and the technical, social and economic changes that have taken place since 2003 have only increased its importance.
When I was not embroiled in student politics, I was at UCL studying economic and social history. One of the things that always stuck in my mind was the famous Lord Sherbrooke quote after the 1867 Reform Act that we must now set about educating our masters—the realisation that an extended electorate was safer if it was an educated electorate.
We have almost the same problem now in reverse. We have a technology that can inform that electorate and a real need for the electorate to understand the various parts of the technology that gives them information now. In my more pessimistic moments, I think that the threat to stable government, democracy and the workings of liberal democracy—in a broader sense, not a party-political sense—are probably under more threat now than they have been in my lifetime. We have to equip our societies to see, assess and respond to those threats as a matter of real urgency.
We now have three Ministers leading on this area according to the information received today. I always hated the term junior Ministers, but that is what they are; they are not heads of their departments. I agree with much of what has been said. There is a need for cross-government co-operation on this, and I have had some experience of that. That ability to get cross-departmental co-operation needs real leadership from the centre, so I hope it does not do too much damage to his reputation to suggest that as well as the three Ministers announced today, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Darren Jones, who serves as Minister to the Prime Minister and has a fairly blank menu to fill in, could do a real service by making sure that there is the kind of co-operation that has been advocated for today with cross-departmental working. Perhaps only a Cabinet Minister with direct access to the Prime Minister would be able to achieve that.
I was hoping that we would have unanimity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and others have said, on the importance of the BBC in delivering this capability to our society. I hope that as part of the charter review responsibility for media literacy is given in part to the BBC, which can use its tremendous skills to deliver it.
Interestingly, as many of us do, I mentioned to my son John that I was speaking on this debate. He said, “Oh, you should look at ‘Crash Course’ on YouTube”. I said, “What’s ‘Crash Course’?” He said, “‘Crash Course’ is an American programme on media literacy”, so looked at it and it is very good. I am not suggesting that we start from scratch on this. Although we quite often criticise our American cousins for various aspects of their media, at local level and at this individual level, they are showing that media literacy can be taught and understood. I am not that defeatist on this.
I have wandered on; I am sorry. We have a battle on our hands and the technology is complex. The BBC is something not to be destroyed but defended. It has extended its responsibilities. The majority of the Committee would keep to that, I think. However, I still fear that the power of big tech is influencing government in a worrying way. Perhaps it is for Parliament to take the actions that will make sure that our society is protected from what is, as I say, probably one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the printing press.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for introducing this debate. I thank her and her fellow members of your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee for their hard work in producing this report on media literacy.
The opening sentence of the report puts it starkly:
“Social cohesion is at risk and democracy itself is threatened by inadequate media literacy”.
In looking at the annunciator and keeping a close eye on the time throughout this debate, I noticed that, at the moment, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, is making a Statement on social cohesion in the Chamber. In some ways, it is unfortunate that we have such a clash, because I know that the noble Lords who have spoken in this debate would have made useful contributions. Perhaps that makes the point about this being an activity that engages many government departments; I am sure that the Minister will ensure that the comments made in this debate are shared with the noble Baroness and his colleagues across government.
The way in which we all consume and interact with the news is changing rapidly. However, although that has opened up a world of choice, it has also created, as noble Lords have said, personalised echo chambers where complex algorithms, rather than thoughtful and experienced news editors, are increasingly determining what we see. We cannot rely on what we read or trust that what is before our eyes is trustworthy and balanced. Artificial intelligence is playing an increasing and uncertain role.
The media we consume are becoming vastly different between the generations and between people of different political persuasions; in many ways, the public forum is becoming a smaller and more segregated space. Children especially now operate in a world that seems alien to their parents and teachers—or, at least, a world with which these conscientious adults are struggling to keep up—which is why my colleagues on these Benches have sought to shield children under the age of 16 from the harmful effects of social media, protecting children from pornographic, violent and extremist content until they are adults and able to engage on a different basis.
We on these Benches welcome many of the recommendations in this thoughtful and detailed report. For instance, we welcome the recommendations on updating Ofcom’s definition of media literacy, as noble Lords have remarked, to make more explicit reference to critical thinking; and on addressing the need for more joined-up thinking across government departments so that we can look at this issue as needs be.
As noble Lords know, I have long argued that Governments do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to media literacy education. Teaching people to have a healthy scepticism and an independence of thought around the sources and material in front of them does not require new subjects or new curricula. The report of your Lordships’ committee concludes that media literacy ought to be
“integrated within a number of subjects”.
I welcome that conclusion. Subjects such as history, English literature and the history of art have long taught students to interrogate sources in front of them; to ask who created them, for which audiences and for what purpose and to be curious about what has been omitted.
Promoting greater media literacy does not have to mean specific lessons on critical thinking but, rather, encouraging critical thinking at every point in the classroom in history, art, science, English literature, English language and more. Sadly, very few of our state schools offer history of art at GCSE or A-level. Can the Minister say what the Government plan to do to work with brilliant organisations such as Art History Link-Up and the Courtauld Institute, which are working to reverse that? Also, what will they do to follow up on the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, about initiatives such as the Superpower of Looking, which do so much to promote visual literacy—as important a skill for the digital generation as it was for analogue ones.
The Government also propose to reduce the number of exams by 10%. Exams should not be a memory game, of course, but a test of how well students engage analytically with ideas and sources. Perhaps the Minister will elaborate on the changes the Government are pursuing with regard to exams and assessments, and how these can be used to improve critical thinking skills. An important element of promoting critical thinking is protecting freedom of speech and expression, allowing diversity of thought and encouraging students to challenge accepted nostra.
We should be teaching students to disagree well, just as we try to in your Lordships’ House. To that end, I agree with the comments that my noble friend Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone made about the importance of debating. Organisations such as the English-Speaking Union do tremendous work in promoting debating in and outside schools. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Cambridge Union, which has a long-running schools debating competition that tries to spread debating in schools. I commend the work that the Government are doing on oracy in strengthening this important work. The noble Baroness, Lady Caine of Kentish Town, is right that this is about strengthening access to the arts in and outside schools. It is through arts institutions such as the Roundhouse, which she mentioned, that we engage people of all backgrounds in that sort of critical thinking.
I was glad that libraries were mentioned throughout the debate and in the Government’s response. At a reception held by Libraries Connected and CILIP here in Parliament last week, I was pleased to meet professionals from four library services, in Newcastle, Northumberland, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire—not, I am sure, chosen alphabetically—which have been working to try new ways of tackling digital exclusion and boosting media literacy in their areas. These include pop-up demonstrations, bookable sessions providing an introduction to AI, and one-to-one support.
However, as the report notes, library services
“are already overstretched and under-resourced”,
so it is important that we equip local authorities to invest in a resource that is already there and can play such a valuable part in delivering this agenda. Perhaps the Minister will say whether he agrees with the very sensible suggestion from Libraries Connected that there should be public library representation on any external bodies that are set up to scrutinise the Government’s work on the new media literacy action plan.
I welcome the announcement earlier this month that the Government will publish a new strategy for our public libraries. As noble Lords know, I commissioned an independent review of public libraries in the last Parliament, which was very well conducted by my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton. I hope that the new strategy will build on the insightful thoughts she gave in that review and, crucially, the engagement she had with public library professionals from across the country.
The report highlights the importance of local media, which we know is trusted far more than national and international media. To that end, I echo the points noble Lords made about copyright and AI, which is threatening the very existence of trusted news journalism. As my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond noted, the Government are moving painfully slowly in the face of rapidly changing technology. I echo the points made about the importance of the BBC and public service broadcasters in this regard, particularly at a moment when we look at the BBC’s royal charter. I echo the comments of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, about ensuring the prominence of our public service broadcast content in a crowded media field.
I am grateful to all noble Lords for their thoughts, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Leong) (Lab)
My Lords, in view of the limited time that we have, I shall try to speak as quickly as I can to allow the committee’s chair to sum up. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed such thoughtful and compelling insights this afternoon. I thank my noble friend Lady Keeley for securing this timely debate.
The quality of the discussion reflects something on which I believe the Grand Committee is united: media literacy is now a foundational skill. It underpins people’s ability to navigate the digital world with confidence, resilience and independence. Media literacy brings clear benefits to individuals and to society as a whole. It gives people the confidence to understand the information they encounter, recognise what is trustworthy and make choices that support their well-being. It helps parents guide their children with clarity and reassurance. It empowers young people to explore ideas safely and participate in learning and creativity. It supports adults of all ages to feel more capable and in control as they navigate an increasingly digital environment.
A media-literate society is also harder to mislead. It is better able to engage constructively in public debate and more confident in using new technologies. In short, it contributes to a more resilient, more connected society in which everybody can take part. Our ambition is therefore very clear. We want every person in the United Kingdom to benefit from strong media literacy skills and to feel informed, confident and able to participate fully in the digital world.
Achieving that ambition requires a whole-of-society effort. The Government have an important leadership role, but lasting progress depends on co-ordinated action across our public systems, including health and education, and on close co-operation with regulators, civic society, industry, communities, families and other related or interested stakeholders. When each part of society contributes, we create a digital environment that supports opportunity, strengthens trust and helps people thrive.
The Communications and Digital Committee’s report highlighted both the importance of media literacy and the need for stronger co-ordination in how it is delivered. Since the report was published, and since the Government set out their response, we have focused on strengthening delivery and learning across the system. This work is now being taken forward through the cross-government media literacy action plan, which brings departments, regulators and partners together behind shared priorities and sets the direction for the coming years.
Within this plan, we have established a clearer framework for delivery. It is grounded in evidence, aligned with Ofcom’s statutory responsibilities and focused on the areas where media literacy can make the greatest practical difference. This reflects a deliberate shift from strategy to action, ensuring that our commitments translate into support that reaches people and communities across the country.
Alongside this, the Online Safety Act provides an important foundation. It establishes the regulatory protections that people rightly expect when they go online, while also strengthening the wider environment in which media literacy can develop. The Act updated Ofcom’s media literacy duties. Ofcom already had a statutory responsibility to promote media literacy, but the Act introduces more targeted responsibilities. These include helping the public understand harmful online content and behaviour, including misinformation and disinformation, and addressing risks faced by groups who are more likely to experience harm, including women and girls.
The Act also requires Ofcom to publish a media literacy strategy. The first of these was issued in October 2024, as some noble Lords mentioned, and has already begun to shape practical delivery. Ofcom is now taking forward a range of initiatives under that strategy. These include training for teachers, targeted support for older adults, work focused on elections and AI-generated content and the development of a place-based approach that strengthens local delivery through trusted community organisations. We are also working closely with Ofcom to ensure that our approach complements the regulator’s role and supports co-ordination across the wider system. I am grateful for the thoughtful contributions we have heard today.
I will now turn to points raised by several noble Lords in response to the themes that have emerged across the debate. Due to the pressure of time, if I have not responded to all questions, I will get my officials to go through Hansard and ensure that every question is answered, with a copy placed in the Library.
My noble friend Lady Keeley spoke about the importance of leadership and co-ordination. I want to be clear that the Government have strengthened their approach in response to that challenge. Strong cross-government working underpins our approach. Media literacy has been embedded across key policy areas, rather than treated in isolation. The media literacy action plan brings departments, Ofcom and partners across society into a single, co-ordinated effort shaped by evidence and the practical experience of those delivering the work on the ground.
This is the first time that the Government have taken such a comprehensive approach to media literacy. The plan has been shaped through collaboration across government and is informed by lessons from civil society organisations and international partners. Our aim is simple: to meet people where they are, through the places and institutions they trust, and to build on what we know makes a real difference.
In practice, this means raising awareness of media literacy and improving access to reliable information, preparing children and young people for a digital future, strengthening support in communities for those most at risk and ensuring that government action complements Ofcom’s statutory responsibilities. Funding for the local media strategy will be announced very soon. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is currently considering whether the BBC’s contribution to media literacy should be more clearly reflected in the public purposes. Taken together, this creates a more joined-up and effective approach, and we will continue to support effective co-ordination and delivery across government.
By 2029, the action plan aims to make a tangible difference by improving critical engagement with online content and access to trusted information through education, libraries and local services. We will keep progress under review and publish updates on GOV.UK so that families, educators, communities and parliamentarians can see how delivery is progressing and how our approach evolves as new risks and opportunities emerge.
My noble friend Lady Keeley also asked how the Government will ensure that media literacy receives sufficient focus within wider digital inclusion work. Media literacy is a core part of our work on digital inclusion. It helps people build the skills and confidence to use online services safely and effectively. Consistent evaluation of the media literacy programme is crucial. The media literacy action plan includes action to encourage the use of the Ofcom evaluation toolkit to ensure consistent, high-quality education. The digital inclusion innovation fund was designed to build an evidence base for effective digital inclusion interventions. The project will conclude by March 2026. Lessons from the fund will inform future support to help more people get online with confidence.
Several noble Lords asked about social cohesion. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)
My Lords, there is a Division in the House, so the Committee will adjourn for 10 minutes. There was a medical emergency in the Chamber earlier, which is why everything is out of sync. We have a hard finish at 8 pm, so if noble Lords vote swiftly come back, we might start before the 10 minutes is up so that we can complete.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, before we were interrupted, several noble Lords had asked about social cohesion. On 9 March, MHCLG published the Protecting What Matters strategy—which the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, mentioned and which was the subject of the Statement during dinner break business this evening—a cross-government package of measures to support integration, strengthen social cohesion and counter extremism.
Media literacy is referenced as a supporting element within that wider plan. That is why it is embedded in the digital inclusion action plan and supported through the £11.9 million Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund and its associated committee, chaired by my noble friend Lady Armstrong. This funding backs innovative projects delivered through trusted local settings, particularly reaching vulnerable and excluded groups.
We agree with my noble friend that technology platforms also have an important role to play. That is why companies such as Google, through Be Internet Legends, and Meta, through Get Digital, are already reaching millions of people. Ofcom’s strategy rightly places collaboration with platforms at its heart, including through media literacy by design. The Government welcome Ofcom’s consultation on how platforms, broadcasters and streaming services can go further, with recommendations expected in spring 2026.
The Government also recognise the importance of sustainable funding for media literacy. However, we do not believe a separate levy is the right approach. Media literacy is already supported through programmes linked to wider priorities such as online safety and digital inclusion, alongside Ofcom’s role. This avoids duplicating the Online Safety Act levy or placing additional burdens on businesses.
Several noble Lords asked about having a specific Minister responsible for media literacy. I spend most of my time at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and I can assure noble Lords that my colleague in the other place, Minister Narayan, holds ministerial responsibility for online media literacy, providing strategic leadership and championing join-up and delivery across government. I also assure noble Lords that he has regular conversations with the Technology Secretary on a daily basis to ensure that media literacy is at the heart of the Government’s agenda.
The committee also reminded us that, although media literacy is a vital life skill, many adults remain unaware of its value or how it relates to their daily lives. This is why the Government are using their voice to raise awareness and guide people towards trusted support. In February, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology launched the “You Won’t Know until You Ask” campaign, which supports parents and carers of children aged between eight and 14 and focuses on something very simple: encouraging conversations about what children see online. Many parents want to have these conversations but are unsure where to start. The message of the campaign is straightforward and reassuring. Parents do not need specialist knowledge. They simply need to ask. The campaign is currently running across Yorkshire and the Midlands. By testing it regionally, we can learn what works best and how to reach families effectively.
Alongside this campaign, we have launched the new “Kids Online Safety Hub”, developed with the Department for Education. The hub offers practical guidance to help parents ask open questions, build trust with their children and encourage critical thinking, which several noble Lords mentioned this evening. It also connects families with trusted advice and support. The campaign and the hub are grounded in evidence and shaped by expert input and testing with parents. Early engagement has been encouraging, particularly through schools and trusted community networks.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for drawing attention to the independent curriculum and assessment review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis. As noble Lords know, a consultation is currently happening; we hope to be able to publish its findings by spring 2027, with implementation in 2028. The review was clear that media literacy is a vital skill for young people in a rapidly changing digital world. The Government have welcomed the review and are taking steps to progress its recommendations. As part of that, we are committed to strengthening media literacy in the updated national curriculum. We want all children to leave school with the knowledge, understanding and skills to enable them to use technology creatively and purposefully while becoming discerning consumers of information.
Several noble Lords asked how far media literacy will be embedded in the curriculum and what support teachers will receive to deliver it effectively. Regulation alone cannot equip young people for the digital world they experience every day. Children and young people need the ability to think critically about the information they encounter—I agree with all noble Lords on this. They need to understand how platforms, algorithms and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, shape what they see and how content spreads. Media literacy will be embedded across subjects more clearly so that people learn to recognise misinformation and disinformation, including AI-generated content, and understand how messages are constructed across different media. Changes to the English curriculum at GCSE will support pupils to question what they read, recognise persuasive techniques and identify emotionally charged language.
We are also strengthening citizenship education so that children begin developing these skills early, with age-appropriate learning continuing throughout secondary school. Updated programmes of study will be consulted on this year, with a new national curriculum following in 2027 and teaching beginning from 2028, as I mentioned earlier. We have already taken steps in this direction.
In the interests of time, I will touch on a couple more points and then conclude. The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, spoke powerfully about the changing nature of how information is created and consumed. I am grateful to him for highlighting the growing importance of visual literacy. As images, video and AI-generated content increasingly shape the information people encounter online, the Government recognise the need for individuals to be able to interpret, question and assess not only what they read but what they see. We will continue to consider how media literacy, including visual literacy, can be strengthened and kept up to date as technologies and online behaviour evolve.
Several noble Lords asked about democracy. More than two millennia ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides—please forgive my pronunciation—warned how falsehood can erode democratic life, so this is nothing new: it goes back 2,000 years. Today, misinformation and deliberate disinformation spread swiftly online, often outpacing accurate information and eroding trust in institutions and the democratic process. The Government are responding with measures such as the Online Safety Act, which assigns greater responsibilities to technology platforms to tackle harmful and misleading content online. However, regulation by itself is not sufficient. Enhancing media literacy and critical thinking, which is so often mentioned, is crucial for citizens to evaluate information responsibly and to preserve trust in democratic debate and the integrity of our elections.
Finally, we are closely monitoring international developments on digital replicas and engaging with stakeholders on the implications for the United Kingdom. These issues will be considered further in our forthcoming report on copyright and AI.
This debate has shown the strength of feeling across the Committee about the value of media literacy and the importance of getting this right. The question before us is no longer whether we act but how quickly and effectively we deliver. For the first time, the media literacy action plan provides a single map for the work ahead. It brings together education, regulation, trusted information and local delivery in a way that is practical, evidence-led and focused on improving people’s outcomes across the country.
Our ambition is clear: for everyone, whatever their age or background, to have the confidence and skills to navigate the online world safely and thoughtfully. I am grateful to all noble Lords for their insight and the generosity shown in their contributions. The perspectives they have shared this afternoon will continue to inform our work. A more media-literate society is not simply better informed; it is more resilient, more confident and more connected. That is the future we are working towards, and I look forward to continuing that work with noble Lords across the Committee.
Baroness Keeley (Lab)
I thank my noble friend the Minister and all noble Lords who have spoken in this wide-ranging debate, with some excellent questions. I thank the Minister for saying that he will later answer any questions to which we have not had an answer.
With a subject as wide-ranging as media literacy, it is difficult to cover everything. I take on board the points noble Lords made about post-16 youth services being an important area, as well as people in prisons. We had quite a rush towards the end of our inquiry to fit in with the timing of the Francis review. Given what happened in that review and that we now have the media literacy action plan, we were probably right to go with that timing, rather than taking longer. It is always difficult.
I welcome the emphasis on critical thinking and thinking independently, which was one of the key things to come out strongly in the debate, as well as the discussion on visual literacy, which we cannot forget. The need for Ofcom to update its definition came up again and again, so we should perhaps keep on that. On the subject of libraries, which were mentioned, we must remember that so many libraries are now run by volunteers, so let us not think that they can take on extra responsibilities without the funding that goes with that. I end by welcoming the wide support for the committee and its report.