Online Safety Bill (Seventh sitting)
Baroness Keeley ExcerptsThursday 9th June 2022
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Online Safety Act 2023 View all Online Safety Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 9 June 2022 - (9 Jun 2022)
Kirsty Blackman
I absolutely agree. I certainly do not think I am suggesting that the bigger platforms such as Twitter and Facebook will reduce their reporting mechanisms as a result of how the Bill is written. However, it is possible that newer or smaller platforms, or anything that starts after this legislation comes, could limit the ability to report on the basis of these clauses.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Good morning, Ms Rees.
It is important that users of online services are empowered to report harmful content, so that it can be removed. It is also important for users to have access to complaints procedures when wrong moderation decisions have been made. Reporting and complaint mechanisms are integral to ensuring that users are safe and that free speech is upheld, and we support these provisions in the Bill.
Clauses 17 and 18, and clauses 27 and 28, are two parts of the same process: content reporting by individual users, and the handling of content reported as a complaint. However, it is vital that these clauses create a system that works. That is the key point that Labour Members are trying to make, because the wild west system that we have at the moment does not work.
It is welcome that the Government have proposed a system that goes beyond the users of the platform and introduces a duty on companies. However, companies have previously failed to invest enough money in their complaints systems for the scale at which they are operating in the UK. The duties in the Bill are an important reminder to companies that they are part of a wider society that goes beyond their narrow shareholder interest.
One example of why this change is so necessary, and why Labour Members are broadly supportive of the additional duties, is the awful practice of image abuse. With no access to sites on which their intimate photographs are being circulated, victims of image abuse have very few if any routes to having the images removed. Again, the practice of image abuse has increased during the pandemic, including through revenge porn, which the Minister referred to. The revenge porn helpline reported that its case load more than doubled between 2019 and 2020.
These clauses should mean that people can easily report content that they consider to be either illegal, or harmful to children, if it is hosted on a site likely to be accessed by children, or, if it is hosted on a category 1 platform, harmful to adults. However, the Minister needs to clarify how these service complaints systems will be judged and what the performance metrics will be. For instance, how will Ofcom enforce against a complaint?
In many sectors of the economy, even with long-standing systems of regulation, companies can have tens of millions of customers reporting content, but that does not mean that any meaningful action can take place. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North has just told us how often she reports on various platforms, but what action has taken place? Many advocacy groups of people affected by crimes such as revenge porn will want to hear, in clear terms, what will happen to material that has been complained about. I hope the Minister can offer that clarity today.
Transparency in reporting will be vital to analysing trends and emerging types of harm. It is welcome that in schedule 8, which we will come to later, transparency reporting duties apply to the complaints process. It is important that as much information as possible is made public about what is going on in companies’ complaints and reporting systems. As well as the raw number of complaints, reporting should include what is being reported or complained about, as the Joint Committee on the draft Bill recommended last year. Again, what happens to the reported material will be an important metric on which to judge companies.
Finally, I will mention the lack of arrangements for children. We have tabled new clause 3, which has been grouped for discussion with other new clauses at the end of proceedings, but it is relevant to mention it now briefly. The Children’s Commissioner highlighted in her oral evidence to the Committee how children had lost faith in complaints systems. That needs to be changed. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has also warned that complaints mechanisms are not always appropriate for children and that a very low proportion of children have ever reported content. A child specific user advocacy body could represent the interests of child users and support Ofcom’s regulatory decisions. That would represent an important strengthening of protections for users, and I hope the Government will support it when the time comes.
Jane Stevenson (Wolverhampton North East) (Con)
I rise briefly to talk about content reporting. I share the frustrations of the hon. Member for Aberdeen North. The way I read the Bill was that it would allow users and affected persons, rather than “or” affected persons, to report content. I hope the Minister can clarify that that means affected persons who might not be users of a platform. That is really important.
Will the Minister also clarify the use of human judgment in these decisions? Many algorithms are not taking down some content at the moment, so I would be grateful if he clarified that there is a need for platforms to provide a genuine human judgment on whether content is harmful.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 78, in clause 28, page 28, line 28, leave out “affected” and replace with “any other”
This amendment allows those who do not fit the definition of “affected person” to make a complaint about search content which they consider to be illegal.
Amendment 79, in clause 28, page 28, line 30, leave out “affected” and replace with “any other”
This amendment allows those who do not fit the definition of “affected person” to make a complaint about search content which they consider not to comply with sections 24, 27 or 29.
Clause 28 stand part.
New clause 1—Report on redress for individual complaints—
“(1) The Secretary of State must publish a report assessing options for dealing with appeals about complaints made under—
(a) section 18; and
(b) section 28
(2) The report must—
(a) provide a general update on the fulfilment of duties about complaints procedures which apply in relation to all regulated user-to-user services and regulated search services;
(b) assess which body should be responsible for a system to deal with appeals in cases where a complainant considers that a complaint has not been satisfactorily dealt with; and
(c) provide options for how the system should be funded, including consideration of whether an annual surcharge could be imposed on user-to-user services and search services.
(3) The report must be laid before Parliament within six months of the commencement of this Act.”
Barbara Keeley
I will speak to new clause 1. Although duties about complaints procedures are welcome, it has been pointed out that service providers’ user complaints processes are often obscure and difficult to navigate—that is the world we are in at the moment. The lack of any external complaints option for individuals who seek redress is worrying.
The Minister has just talked about the super-complaints mechanism—which we will come to later in proceedings—to allow eligible entities to make complaints to Ofcom about a single regulated service if that complaint is of particular importance or affects a particularly large number of service users or members of the public. Those conditions are constraints on the super-complaints process, however.
An individual who felt that they had been failed by a service’s complaints system would have no source of redress. Without redress for individual complaints once internal mechanisms have been exhausted, victims of online abuse could be left with no further options, consumer protections could be compromised, and freedom of expression could be impinged upon for people who felt that their content had been unfairly removed.
Various solutions have been proposed. The Joint Committee recommended the introduction of an online safety ombudsman to consider complaints for which recourse to internal routes of redress had not resulted in resolution and the failure to address risk had led to significant and demonstrable harm. Such a mechanism would give people an additional body through which to appeal decisions after they had come to the end of a service provider’s internal process. Of course, we as hon. Members are all familiar with the ombudsman services that we already have.
Concerns have been raised about the level of complaints such an ombudsman could receive. However, as the Joint Committee noted, complaints would be received only once the service’s internal complaints procedure had been exhausted, as is the case for complaints to Ofcom about the BBC. The new clause seeks to ensure that we find the best possible solution to the problem. There needs to be a last resort for users who have suffered serious harm on services. It is only through the introduction of an external redress mechanism that service providers can truly be held to account for their decisions as they impact on individuals.
Dame Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
I rise to contribute to the stand part debate on clauses 18 and 28. It was interesting, though, to hear the debate on clause 17, because it is right to ask how the complaints services will be judged. Will they work in practice? When we start to look at how to ensure that the legislation works in all eventualities, we need to ensure that we have some backstops for when the system does not work as it should.
It is welcome that there will be clear duties on providers to have operational complaints procedures—complaints procedures that work in practice. As we all know, many of them do not at the moment. As a result, we have a loss of faith in the system, and that is not going to be changed overnight by a piece of legislation. For years, people have been reporting things—in some cases, very serious criminal activity—that have not been acted on. Consumers—people who use these platforms—are not going to change their mind overnight and suddenly start trusting these organisations to take their complaints seriously. With that in mind, I hope that the Minister listened to the points I made on Second Reading about how to give extra support to victims of crimes or people who have experienced things that should not have happened online, and will look at putting in place the right level of support.
The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South talked about the idea of an ombudsman; it may well be that one should be in place to deal with situations where complaints are not dealt with through the normal processes. I am also quite taken by some of the evidence we received about third-party complaints processes by other organisations. We heard a bit about the revenge porn helpline, which was set up a few years ago when we first recognised in law that revenge pornography was a crime. The Bill creates a lot more victims of crime and recognises them as victims, but we are not yet hearing clearly how the support systems will adequately help that massively increased number of victims to get the help they need.
I will probably talk in more detail about this issue when we reach clause 70, which provides an opportunity to look at the—unfortunately—probably vast fines that Ofcom will be imposing on organisations and how we might earmark some of that money specifically for victim support, whether by funding an ombudsman or helping amazing organisations such as the revenge porn helpline to expand their services.
We must address this issue now, in this Bill. If we do not, all those fines will go immediately into the coffers of the Treasury without passing “Go”, and we will not be able to take some of that money to help those victims directly. I am sure the Government absolutely intend to use some of the money to help victims, but that decision would be at the mercy of the Treasury. Perhaps we do not want that; perhaps we want to make it cleaner and easier and have the money put straight into a fund that can be used directly for people who have been victims of crime or injustice or things that fall foul of the Bill.
I hope that the Minister will listen to that and use this opportunity, as we do in other areas, to directly passport fines for specific victim support. He will know that there are other examples of that that he can look at.
Chris Philp
Let me develop the point before I give way. Our first line of defence is Ofcom enforcing the clause, but we have a couple of layers of additional defence. One of those is the super-complaints mechanism, which I have mentioned before. If a particular group of people, represented by a body such as the NSPCC, feel that their legitimate complaints are being infringed systemically by the social media platform, and that Ofcom is failing to take the appropriate action, they can raise that as a super-complaint to ensure that the matter is dealt with.
Chris Philp
I should give way to the hon. Member for Aberdeen North first, and then I will come to the shadow Minister.
Chris Philp
A later clause gives Ofcom the ability to levy the fees and charges it sees as necessary and appropriate to ensure that it can deliver the duties. Ofcom will have the power to set those fees at a level to enable it to do its job properly, as Parliament would wish it to do.
Barbara Keeley
This is the point about individual redress again: by talking about super-complaints, the Minister seems to be agreeing that it is not there. As I said earlier, for super-complaints to be made to Ofcom, the issue has to be of particular importance or to impact a particularly large number of users, but that does not help the individual. We know how much individuals are damaged; there must be a system of external redress. The point about internal complaints systems is that we know that they are not very good, and we require a big culture change to change them, but unless there is some mechanism thereafter, I cannot see how we are giving the individual any redress—it is certainly not through the super-complaints procedure.
Chris Philp
As I said explicitly a few moments ago, the hon. Lady is right to point out the fact that the super-complaints process is to address systemic issues. She is right to say that, and I think I made it clear a moment or two ago.
Whether there should be an external ombudsman to enforce individual complaints, rather than just Ofcom enforcing against systemic complaints, is a question worth addressing. In some parts of our economy, we have ombudsmen who deal with individual complaints, financial services being an obvious example. The Committee has asked the question, why no ombudsman here? The answer, in essence, is a matter of scale and of how we can best fix the issue. The volume of individual complaints generated about social media platforms is just vast. Facebook in the UK alone has tens of millions of users—I might get this number wrong, but I think it is 30 million or 40 million users.
Chris Philp
Yes. My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. If there is a systemic problem and a platform fails to act appropriately not just in one case, but in a number of them, we have, as she has just described, the super-complaints process in clauses 140 to 142. Even under the Bill as drafted, without any changes, if a platform turns out to be systemically ignoring reasonable complaints made by the public and particular groups of users, the super-complainants will be able to do exactly as she describes. There is a mechanism to catch this—it operates not at individual level, but at the level of groups of users, via the super-complaint mechanism—so I honestly feel that the issue has been addressed.
When the numbers are so large, I think that the super-complaint mechanism is the right way to push Ofcom if it does not notice. Obviously, the first line of defence is that companies comply with the Bill. The second line of defence is that if they fail to do so, Ofcom will jump on them. The third line of defence is that if Ofcom somehow does not notice, a super-complaint group—such as the NSPCC, acting for children—will make a super-complaint to Ofcom. We have three lines of defence, and I submit to the Committee that they are entirely appropriate.
Barbara Keeley
The Minister said that the Opposition had not tabled an amendment to bring in an ombudsman.
Barbara Keeley
On this clause. What we have done, however—we are debating it now—is to table a new clause to require a report on redress for individual complaints. The Minister talks about clause 149 and a process that will kick in between two and five years away, but we have a horrendous problem at the moment. I and various others have described the situation as the wild west, and very many people—thousands, if not millions, of individuals—are being failed very badly. I do not see why he is resisting our proposal for a report within six months of the commencement of the Act, which would enable us to start to see at that stage, not two to five years down the road, how these systems—he is putting a lot of faith in them—were turning out. I think that is a very sound idea, and it would help us to move forward.
Chris Philp
The third line of defence—the super-complaint process—is available immediately, as I set out a moment ago. In relation to new clause 1, which the hon. Lady mentioned a moment ago, I think six months is very soon for a Bill of this magnitude. The two-to-five-year timetable under the existing review mechanism in clause 149 is appropriate.
Although we are not debating clause 149, I hope, Ms Rees, that you will forgive me for speaking about it for a moment. If Members turn to pages 125 and 126 and look at the matters covered by the review, they will see that they are extraordinarily comprehensive. In effect, the review covers the implementation of all aspects of the Bill, including the need to minimise the harms to individuals and the enforcement and information-gathering powers. It covers everything that Committee members would want to be reviewed. No doubt as we go through the Bill we will have, as we often do in Bill Committee proceedings, a number of occasions on which somebody tables an amendment to require a review of x, y or z. This is the second such occasion so far, I think, and there may be others. It is much better to have a comprehensive review, as the Bill does via the provisions in clause 149.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 18 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 19
Duties about freedom of expression and privacy
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Chris Philp
Clause 19, on user-to-user services, and its associated clause 29, which relates to search services, specify a number of duties in relation to freedom of expression and privacy. In carrying out their safety duties, in-scope companies will be required by clause 19(2) to have regard to the importance of protecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy.
Let me pause for a moment on this issue. There has been some external commentary about the Bill’s impact on freedom of expression. We have already seen, via our discussion of a previous clause, that there is nothing in the Bill that compels the censorship of speech that is legal and not harmful to children. I put on the record again the fact that nothing in the Bill requires the censorship of legal speech that poses no harm to children.
We are going even further than that. As far as I am aware, for the first time ever there will be a duty on social media companies, via clause 19(2), to have regard to freedom of speech. There is currently no legal duty at all on platforms to have regard to freedom of speech. The clause establishes, for the first time, an obligation to have regard to freedom of speech. It is critical that not only Committee members but others more widely who consider the Bill should bear that carefully in mind. Besides that, the clause speaks to the right to privacy. Existing laws already speak to that, but the clause puts it in this Bill as well. Both duties are extremely important.
In addition, category 1 service providers—the really big ones—will need proactively to assess the impact of their policies on freedom of expression and privacy. I hope all Committee members will strongly welcome the important provisions I have outlined.
Barbara Keeley
As the Minister says, clauses 19 and 29 are designed to provide a set of balancing provisions that will require companies to have regard to freedom of expression and privacy when they implement their safety duties. However, it is important that companies cannot use privacy and free expression as a basis to argue that they can comply with regulation in less substantive ways. That is a fear here.
Category 1 providers will need to undertake an impact assessment to determine the impact of their product and safety decisions on freedom of expression, but it is unclear whether that applies only in respect of content that is harmful to adults. Unlike with the risk assessments for the illegal content and child safety duties set out in part 3, chapter 2, these clauses do not set expectations about whether risk assessments are of a suitable and sufficient quality. It is also not clear what powers Ofcom has at its disposal to challenge any assessments that it considers insufficient or that reach an inappropriate or unreasonable assessment of how to balance fundamental rights. I would appreciate it if the Minister could touch on that when he responds.
The assumption underlying these clauses is that privacy and free expression may need to act as a constraint on safety measures, but I believe that that is seen quite broadly as simplistic and potentially problematic. To give one example, a company could argue that end-to-end encryption is important for free expression, and privacy could justify any adverse impact on users’ safety. The subjects of child abuse images, which could more easily be shared because of such a decision, would see their safety and privacy rights weakened. Such an argument fails to take account of the broader nuance of the issues at stake. Impacts on privacy and freedom of expression should therefore be considered across a range of groups rather than assuming an overarching right that applies equally to all users.
Similarly, it will be important that Ofcom understands and delivers its functions in relation to these clauses in a way that reflects the complexity and nuance of the interplay of fundamental rights. It is important to recognise that positive and negative implications for privacy and freedom of expression may be associated with any compliance decision. I think the Minister implied that freedom of speech was a constant positive, but it can also have negative connotations.
Kirsty Blackman
I am pleased that the clause is in the Bill, and I think it is a good one to include. Can the Minister reaffirm what he said on Tuesday about child sexual abuse, and the fact that the right to privacy does not trump the ability—particularly with artificial intelligence—to search for child sexual abuse images?
Barbara Keeley
Record-keeping and review duties on in-scope services make up an important function of the regulatory regime that we are discussing today. Platforms will need to report all harms identified and the action taken in response to this, in line with regulation. The requirements to keep records of the action taken in response to harm will be vital in supporting the regulator to make effective decisions about regulatory breaches and whether company responses are sufficient. That will be particularly important to monitor platforms’ responses through risk assessments—an area where some charities are concerned that we will see under-reporting of harms to evade regulation.
Evidence of under-reporting can be seen in the various transparency reports that are currently being published voluntarily by sites, where we are not presented with the full picture and scale of harm and the action taken to address that harm is thus obscured.
As with other risk assessments, the provisions in clauses 20 and 30 could be strengthened through a requirement on in-scope services to publish their risk assessments. We have made that point many times. Greater transparency would allow researchers and civil society to track harms and hold services to account.
The Chair
I call Kirsty Blackman to move amendment 22. [Interruption.] Sorry—my bad, as they say. I call Barbara Keeley to move amendment 22.
Barbara Keeley
I beg to move amendment 22, in clause 31, page 31, line 17, leave out subsection (3).
This amendment removes the condition that applies a child use test to a service or part of a service.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Clause stand part.
Clause 32 stand part.
That schedule 3 be the Third schedule to the Bill.
Clause 33 stand part.
Barbara Keeley
The purpose of the amendment is to remove the child use test from the children’s access assessment and to make sure that any service likely to be accessed by children is within the scope of the child safety duty. The amendment is supported by the NSPCC and other children’s charities.
Children require protection wherever they are online. I am sure that every Committee member believes that. The age-appropriate design code from the Information Commissioner’s Office requires all services that are likely to be accessed by children to provide high levels of data protection and privacy. Currently, the Bill will regulate only user-to-user and search services that have a significant number of child users or services for which children form a significant part of their user base. It will therefore not apply to all services that fall within the scope of the ICO’s code, creating a patchwork of regulation that could risk uncertainty, legal battles and unnecessary complexity. It might also create a perverse incentive for online services to stall the introduction of their child safety measures until Ofcom has the capacity to investigate and reach a determination on the categorisation of their sites.
The inclusion of a children’s access assessment in the Bill may result in lower standards of protection, with highly problematic services such as Telegram and OnlyFans able to claim that they are excluded from the child safety duties because children do not account for a significant proportion of their user base. However, evidence has shown that children have been able to access those platforms.
Other services will remain out of the scope of the Bill as currently drafted. They include harmful blogs that promote life-threatening behaviours, such as pro-anorexia sites with provider-generated rather than user-generated content; some of the most popular games among children that do not feature user-generated content but are linked to increasing gambling addiction among children, and through which some families have lost thousands of pounds; and other services with user-generated content that is harmful but does not affect an appreciable number of children. That risks dozens, hundreds or even thousands of children falling unprotected.
Parents have the reasonable expectation that, under the new regime introduced by the Bill, children will be protected wherever they are online. They cannot be expected to be aware of exemptions or distinctions between categories of service. They simply want their children to be protected and their rights upheld wherever they are.
As I say, children have the right to be protected from harmful content and activity by any platform that gives them access. That is why the child user condition in clause 31 should be deleted from the Bill. As I have said, the current drafting could leave problematic platforms out of scope if they were to claim that they did not have a significant number of child users. It should be assumed that platforms are within the scope of the child safety duties unless they can provide evidence that children cannot access their sites, for example through age verification tools.
Although clause 33 provides Ofcom with the power to determine that a platform is likely to be accessed by children, this will necessitate Ofcom acting on a company-by-company basis to bring problematic sites back into scope of the child safety duties. That will take considerable time, and it will delay children receiving protection. It would be simpler to remove the child user condition from clause 31, as I have argued.
Chris Philp
I am concerned to ensure that children are appropriately protected, as the hon. Lady sets out. Let me make a couple of points in that area before I address that point.
The hon. Lady asked another question earlier, about video content. She gave the example of TikTok videos being viewed or accessed not directly on TikTok but via some third-party means, such as a WhatsApp message. First, it is worth emphasising again that in order to count as a user, a person does not have to be registered and can simply be viewing the content. Secondly, if someone is viewing something through another service, such as WhatsApp—the hon. Lady used the example of browsing the internet on another site—the duty will bite at the level of WhatsApp, and it will have to consider the content that it is providing access to. As I said, someone does not have to be registered with a service in order to count as a user of that service.
On amendment 22, there is a drafting deficiency, if I may put it politely—this is a point of drafting rather than of principle. The amendment would simply delete subsection (3), but there would still be references to the “child user condition”—for example, the one that appears on the same page of the Bill at line 11. If the amendment were adopted as drafted, it would end up leaving references to “child user condition” in the Bill without defining what it meant, because we would have deleted the definition.
Barbara Keeley
Is the Minister coming on to say that he is accepting what we are saying here?
Chris Philp
No, is the short answer. I was just mentioning in passing that there is that drafting issue.
On the principle, it is worth being very clear that, when it comes to content or matters that are illegal, that applies to all platforms, regardless of size, where children are at all at risk. In schedule 6, we set out a number of matters—child sexual exploitation and abuse, for example—as priority offences that all platforms have to protect children from proactively, regardless of scale.
Barbara Keeley
The Minister has not addressed the points I raised. I specifically raised—he has not touched on this—harmful pro-anorexia blogs, which we know are dangerous but are not in scope, and games that children access that increase gambling addiction. He says that there is separate legislation for gambling addiction, but families have lost thousands of pounds through children playing games linked to gambling addiction. There are a number of other services that do not affect an appreciable number of children, and the drafting causes them to be out of scope.
Online Safety Bill (Sixth sitting)
Baroness Keeley ExcerptsTuesday 7th June 2022
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Online Safety Act 2023 View all Online Safety Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 7 June 2022 - (7 Jun 2022)
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 28, in clause 10, page 9, line 18, at end insert—
“(ba) matters relating to CSEA content including—
(i) the level of illegal images blocked at the upload stage and number and rates of livestreams of CSEA in public and private channels terminated; and
(ii) the number and rates of images and videos detected and removed by different tools, strategies and/or interventions.”
This amendment requires the children’s risk assessment to consider matters relating to CSEA content.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
As this is the first time I have spoken in the Committee, may I say that it is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Rees? I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd that we are committed to improving the Bill, despite the fact that we have some reservations, which we share with many organisations, about some of the structure of the Bill and some of its provisions. As my hon. Friend has detailed, there are particular improvements to be made to strengthen the protection of children online, and I think the Committee’s debate on this section is proving fruitful.
Amendment 28 is a good example of where we must go further if we are to achieve the goal of the Bill and protect children from harm online. The amendment seeks to require regulated services to assess their level of risk based, in part, on the frequency with which they are blocking, detecting and removing child sexual exploitation and abuse content from their platforms. By doing so, we will be able to ascertain the reality of their overall risk and the effectiveness of their existing response.
The addition of livestreamed child sexual exploitation and abuse content not only acknowledges first-generation CSEA content, but recognises that livestreamed CSEA content happens on both public and private channels, and that they require different methods of detection.
Furthermore, amendment 28 details the practical information needed to assess whether the action being taken by a regulated service is adequate in countering the production and dissemination of CSEA content, in particular first-generation CSEA content. Separating the rates of terminated livestreams of CSEA in public and private channels is important, because those rates may vary widely depending on how CSEA content is generated. By specifying tools, strategies and interventions, the amendment would ensure that the systems in place to detect and report CSEA are adequate, and that is why we would like it to be part of the Bill.
Chris Philp
The Government support the spirit of amendments 17 and 28, which seek to achieve critical objectives, but the Bill as drafted delivers those objectives. In relation to amendment 17 and cross-platform risk, clause 8 already sets out harms and risks—including CSEA risks—that arise by means of the service. That means through the service to other services, as well as on the service itself, so that is covered.
Amendment 28 calls for the risk assessments expressly to cover illegal child sexual exploitation content, but clause 8 already requires that to happen. Clause 8(5) states that the risk assessment must cover the
“risk of individuals who are users of the service encountering…each kind of priority illegal content”.
If we follow through the definition of priority illegal content, we find all those CSEA offences listed in schedule 6. The objective of amendment 28 is categorically delivered by clause 8(5)(b), referencing onwards to schedule 6.
Barbara Keeley
I beg to move amendment 15, in clause10, page 8, line 41, at end insert—
“(4A) A duty for the children’s risk assessment to be approved by either—
(a) the board of the entity; or, if the organisation does not have a board structure,
(b) a named individual who the provider considers to be a senior manager of the entity, who may reasonably be expected to be in a position to ensure compliance with the children’s risk assessment duties, and reports directly into the most senior employee of the entity.”
This amendment seeks to ensure that regulated companies’ boards or senior staff have responsibility for children’s risk assessments.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 11, in clause 10, page 9, line 2, at end insert—
“(5A) A duty to publish the children’s risk assessment and proactively supply this to OFCOM.”
This amendment creates a duty to publish the children’s risk assessment and supply it to Ofcom.
Amendment 27, in clause 10, page 9, line 25, after “facilitating” insert “the production of illegal content and”
This amendment requires the children’s risk assessment to consider the production of illegal content.
Clause 10 stand part.
Amendment 16, in clause 25, page 25, line 10, at end insert—
‘”(3A) A duty for the children’s risk assessment to be approved by either—
(a) the board of the entity; or, if the organisation does not have a board structure,
(b) a named individual who the provider considers to be a senior manager of the entity, who may reasonably be expected to be in a position to ensure compliance with the children’s risk assessment duties, and reports directly into the most senior employee of the entity.”
This amendment seeks to ensure that regulated companies’ boards or senior staff have responsibility for children’s risk assessments.
Amendment 13, in clause 25, page 25, line 13, at end insert—
“(4A) A duty to publish the children’s risk assessment and proactively supply this to OFCOM.”
This amendment creates a duty to publish the children’s risk assessment and supply it to Ofcom.
Amendment 32, in clause 25, page 25, line 31, after “facilitating” insert “the production of illegal content and”
This amendment requires the children’s risk assessment to consider risks relating to the production of illegal content.
Clause 25 stand part.
Barbara Keeley
I will speak to other amendments in this group as well as amendment 15. The success of the Bill’s regulatory framework relies on regulated companies carefully risk-assessing their platforms. Once risks have been identified, the platform can concentrate on developing and implementing appropriate mitigations. However, up to now, boards and top executives have not taken the risk to children seriously. Services have either not considered producing risk assessments or, if they have done so, they have been of limited efficacy and failed to identify and respond to harms to children.
In evidence to the Joint Committee, Frances Haugen explained that many of the corporate structures involved are flat, and accountability for decision making can be obscure. At Meta, that means teams will focus only on delivering against key commercial metrics, not on safety. Children’s charities have also noted that corporate structures in the large technology platforms reward employees who move fast and break things. Those companies place incentives on increasing return on investment rather than child safety. An effective risk assessment and risk mitigation plan can impact on profit, which is why we have seen so little movement from companies to take the measures themselves without the duty being placed on them by legislation.
It is welcome that clause 10 introduces a duty to risk-assess user-to-user services that are likely to be accessed by children. But, as my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd said this morning, it will become an empty, tick-box exercise if the Bill does not also introduce the requirement for boards to review and approve the risk assessments.
The Joint Committee scrutinising the draft Bill recommended that the risk assessment be approved at board level. The Government rejected that recommendation on the grounds thar Ofcom could include that in its guidance on producing risk assessments. As with much of the Bill, it is difficult to blindly accept promised safeguards when we have not seen the various codes of practice and guidance materials. The amendments would make sure that decisions about and awareness of child safety went right to the top of regulated companies. The requirement to have the board or a senior manager approve the risk assessment will hardwire the safety duties into decision making and create accountability and responsibility at the most senior level of the organisation. That should trickle down the organisation and help embed a culture of compliance across it. Unless there is a commitment to child safety at the highest level of the organisation, we will not see the shift in attitude that is urgently needed to keep children safe, and which I believe every member of the Committee subscribes to.
On amendments 11 and 13, it is welcome that we have risk assessments for children included in the Bill, but the effectiveness of that duty will be undermined unless the risk assessments can be available for scrutiny by the public and charities. In the current version of the Bill, risk assessments will only be made available to the regulator, which we debated on an earlier clause. Companies will be incentivised to play down the likelihood of currently emerging risks because of the implications of having to mitigate against them, which may run counter to their business interests. Unless the risk assessments are published, there will be no way to hold regulated companies to account, nor will there be any way for companies to learn from one another’s best practice, which is a very desirable aim.
The current situation shows that companies are unwilling to share risk assessments even when requested. In October 2021, following the whistleblower disclosures made by Frances Haugen, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children led a global coalition of 60 child protection organisations that urged Meta to publish its risk assessments, including its data privacy impact assessments, which are a legal requirement under data protection law. Meta refused to share any of its risk assessments, even in relation to child sexual abuse and grooming. The company argued that risk assessments were live documents and it would not be appropriate for it to share them with any organisation other than the Information Commissioner’s Office, to whom it has a legal duty to disclose. As a result, civil society organisations and the charities that I talked about continue to be in the dark about whether and how Meta has appropriately identified online risk to children.
Making risk assessments public would support the smooth running of the regime and ensure its broader effectiveness. Civil society and other interested groups would be able to assess and identify any areas where a company might not be meeting its safety duties and make full, effective use of the proposed super-complaints mechanism. It will also help civil society organisations to hold the regulated companies and the regulator, Ofcom, to account.
As we have seen from evidence sessions, civil society organisations are often at the forefront of understanding and monitoring the harms that are occurring to users. They have an in depth understanding of what mitigations may be appropriate and they may be able to support the regulator to identify any obvious omissions. The success of the systemic risk assessment process will be significantly underpinned by and reliant upon the regulator’s being able to rapidly and effectively identify new and emerging harms, and it is highly likely that the regulator will want to draw on civil society expertise to ensure that it has highly effective early warning functions in place.
However, civil society organisations will be hampered in that role if they remain unable to determine what, if anything, companies are doing to respond to online threats. If Ofcom is unable to rapidly identify new and emerging harms, the resulting delays could mean entire regulatory cycles where harms were not captured in risk profiles or company risk assessments, and an inevitable lag between harms being identified and companies being required to act upon them. It is therefore clear that there is a significant public value to publishing risk assessments.
Amendments 27 and 32 are almost identical to the suggested amendments to clause 8 that we discussed earlier. As my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd said in our discussion about amendments 25, 26 and 30, the duty to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment could be significantly strengthened by preventing the creation of illegal content, not only preventing individuals from encountering it. I know the Minister responded to that point, but the Opposition did not think that response was fully satisfactory. This is just as important for children’s risk assessments as it is for illegal content risk assessments.
Online platforms are not just where abusive material is published. Sex offenders use mainstream web platforms and services as tools to commit child sexual abuse. This can be seen particularly in the livestreaming of child sexual exploitation. Sex offenders pay to direct and watch child sexual abuse in real time. The Philippines is a known hotspot for such abuse and the UK has been identified by police leads as the third-largest consumer of livestreamed abuse in the world. What a very sad statistic that our society is the third-largest consumer of livestreamed abuse in the world.
Ruby is a survivor of online sexual exploitation in the Philippines, although Ruby is not her real name; she recently addressed a group of MPs about her experiences. She told Members how she was trafficked into sexual exploitation aged 16 after being tricked and lied to about the employment opportunities she thought she would be getting. She was forced to perform for paying customers online. Her story is harrowing. She said:
“I blamed myself for being trapped. I felt disgusted by every action I was forced to do, just to satisfy customers online. I lost my self-esteem and I felt very weak. I became so desperate to escape that I would shout whenever I heard a police siren go by, hoping somebody would hear me. One time after I did this, a woman in the house threatened me with a knife.”
Eventually, Ruby was found by the Philippine authorities and, after a four-year trial, the people who imprisoned her and five other girls were convicted. She said it took many years to heal from the experience, and at one point she nearly took her own life.
It should be obvious that if we are to truly improve child protection online we need to address the production of new child abuse material. In the Bill, we have a chance to address not only what illegal content is seen online, but how online platforms are used to perpetrate abuse. It should not be a case of waiting until the harm is done before taking action.
Chris Philp
As the hon. Lady said, we discussed in the groupings for clauses 8 and 9 quite a few of the broad principles relating to children, but I will none the less touch on some of those points again because they are important.
On amendment 27, under clause 8 there is already an obligation on platforms to put in place systems and processes to reduce the risk that their services will be used to facilitate the presence of illegal content. As that includes the risk of illegal content being present, including that produced via the service’s functionality, the terrible example that the hon. Lady gave is already covered by the Bill. She is quite right to raise that example, because it is terrible when such content involving children is produced, but such cases are expressly covered in the Bill as drafted, particularly in clause 8.
Amendment 31 covers a similar point in relation to search. As I said for the previous grouping, search does not facilitate the production of content; it helps people to find it. Clearly, there is already an obligation on search firms to stop people using search engines to find illegal content, so the relevant functionality in search is already covered by the Bill.
Amendments 15 and 16 would expressly require board member sign-off for risk assessments. I have two points to make on that. First, the duties set out in clause 10(6)(h) in relation to children’s risk assessments already require the governance structures to be properly considered, so governance is directly addressed. Secondly, subsection (2) states that the risk assessment has to be “suitable and sufficient”, so it cannot be done in a perfunctory or slipshod way. Again, Ofcom must be satisfied that those governance arrangements are appropriate. We could invent all the governance arrangements in the world, but the outcome needs to be delivered and, in this case, to protect children.
Beyond governance, the most important things are the sanctions and enforcement powers that Ofcom can use if those companies do not protect children. As the hon. Lady said in her speech, we know that those companies are not doing enough to protect children and are allowing all kinds of terrible things to happen. If those companies continue to allow those things to happen, the enforcement powers will be engaged, and they will be fined up to 10% of their global revenue. If they do not sort it out, they will find that their services are disconnected. Those are the real teeth that will ensure that those companies comply.
Barbara Keeley
I know that the Minister listened to Frances Haugen and to the members of charities. The charities and civil society organisations that are so concerned about this point do not accept that the Bill addresses it. I cannot see how his point addresses what I said about board-level acceptance of that role in children’s risk assessments. We need to change the culture of those organisations so that they become different from how they were described to us. He, like us, was sat there when we heard from the big platform providers, and they are not doing enough. He has had meetings with Frances Haugen; he knows what they are doing. It is good and welcome that the regulator will have the powers that he mentions, but that is just not enough.
Chris Philp
I agree with the hon. Lady that, as I said a second ago, those platforms are not doing enough to protect children. There is no question about that at all, and I think there is unanimity across the House that they are not doing enough to protect children.
I do not think the governance point is a panacea. Frankly, I think the boards of these companies are aware of what is going on. When these big questions arise, they go all the way up to Mark Zuckerberg. It is not as if Mark Zuckerberg and the directors of companies such as Meta are unaware of these risks; they are extremely aware of them, as Frances Haugen’s testimony made clear.
We do address the governance point. As I say, the risk assessments do need to explain how governance matters are deployed to consider these things—that is in clause 10(6)(h). But for me, it is the sanctions—the powers that Ofcom will have to fine these companies billions of pounds and ultimately to disconnect their service if they do not protect our children—that will deliver the result that we need.
Barbara Keeley
The Minister is talking about companies of such scale that even fines of billions will not hurt them. I refer him to the following wording in the amendments:
“a named individual who the provider considers to be a senior manager of the entity, who may reasonably be expected to be in a position to ensure compliance with the children’s risk assessment duties”.
That is the minimum we should be asking. We should be asking these platforms, which are doing so much damage and have had to be dragged to the table to do anything at all, to be prepared to appoint somebody who is responsible. The Minister tries to gloss over things by saying, “Oh well, they must be aware of it.” The named individual would have to be aware of it. I hope he understands the importance of his role and the Committee’s role in making this happen. We could make this happen.
Chris Philp
As I say, clause 10 already references the governance arrangements, but my strong view is that the only thing that will make these companies sit up and take notice—the only thing that will make them actually protect children in a way they are currently not doing—is the threat of billions of pounds of fines and, if they do not comply even after being fined at that level, the threat of their service being disconnected. Ultimately, that is the sanction that will make these companies protect our children.
Barbara Keeley
All I have to add is the obvious point—I am sure that we are going to keep running into this—that people should not have to look to a transcript to see what the Minister’s and Parliament’s intention was. It is clear what the Opposition’s intention is—to protect children. I cannot see why the Minister will not specify who in an organisation should be responsible. It should not be a question of ploughing through transcripts of what we have talked about here in Committee; it should be obvious. We have the chance here to do something different and better. The regulator could specify a senior level.
Chris Philp
Clearly, we are legislating here to cover, as I think we said this morning, 25,000 different companies. They all have different organisational structures, different personnel and so on. To anticipate the appropriate level of decision making in each of those companies and put it in the Bill in black and white, in a very prescriptive manner, might not adequately reflect the range of people involved.
Barbara Keeley
I beg to move amendment 72, in clause 10, page 9, line 24, after “characteristic” insert “or characteristics”.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 73, in clause 10, page 9, line 24, after “group” insert “or groups”.
Amendment 85, in clause 12, page 12, line 22, leave out subsection (d) and insert—
“(d) the level of risk of harm to adults presented by priority content that is harmful to adults which particularly affects individuals with certain characteristics or members of certain groups;”.
This amendment would recognise the intersectionality of harms.
Amendment 74, in clause 12, page 12, line 24, after “characteristic” insert “or characteristics”.
Amendment 75, in clause 12, page 12, line 24, after “group” insert “or groups”.
Amendment 71, in clause 83, page 72, line 12, at end insert—
“(1A) For each of the above risks, OFCOM shall identify and assess the level of risk of harm which particularly affects people with certain characteristics or membership of a group or groups.”
This amendment requires Ofcom as part of its risk register to assess risks of harm particularly affecting people with certain characteristics or membership of a group or groups.
Barbara Keeley
May I say—this might be a point of order—how my constituency name is pronounced? I get a million different versions, but it is Worsley, as in “worse”. It is an unfortunate name for a great place.
I will speak to all the amendments in the group together, because they relate to how levels of risk are assessed in relation to certain characteristics. The amendments are important because small changes to the descriptions of risk assessment will help to close a significant gap in protection.
Clauses 10 and 12 introduce a duty on regulated companies to assess harms to adults and children who might have an innate vulnerability arising from being a member of a particular group or having a certain characteristic. However, Ofcom is not required to assess harms to people other than children who have that increased innate vulnerability. Amendment 71 would require Ofcom to assess risks of harm particularly affecting people with certain characteristics or membership of a group or groups as part of its risk register. That would reduce the regulatory burden if companies had Ofcom’s risk assessment to base their work on.
Getting this right is important. The risk management regime introduced by the Bill should not assume that all people are at the same risk of harm—they are clearly not. Differences in innate vulnerability increase the incidence and impact of harm, such as by increasing the likelihood of encountering content or of that content being harmful, or heightening the impact of the harm.
It is right that the Bill emphasises the vulnerability of children, but there are other, larger groups with innate vulnerability to online harm. As we know, that often reflects structural inequalities in society.
For example, women will be harmed in circumstances where men might not be, and they could suffer some harms that have a more serious impact than they might for men. A similar point can be made for people with other characteristics. Vulnerability is then compounded by intersectional issues—people might belong to more than one high-risk group—and I will come to that in a moment.
The initial Ofcom risk assessment introduced by clause 83 is not required to consider the heightened risks to different groups of people, but companies are required to assess that risk in their own risk assessments for children and adults. They need to be given direction by an assessment by Ofcom, which amendment 71 would require.
Amendments 72 to 75 address the lack of recognition in these clauses of intersectionality issues. They are small amendments in the spirit of the Bill’s risk management regime. As drafted, the Bill refers to a singular “group” or “characteristic” for companies to assess for risk. However, some people are subject to increased risks of harm arising from being members of more than one group. Companies’ risk assessments for children and adults should reflect intersectionality, and not just characteristics taken individually. Including the plural of “group” and “characteristic” in appropriate places would achieve that.
Kirsty Blackman
I will first speak to our amendment 85, which, like the Labour amendment, seeks to ensure that the Bill is crystal clear in addressing intersectionality. We need only consider the abuse faced by groups of MPs to understand why that is necessary. Female MPs are attacked online much more regularly than male MPs, and the situation is compounded if they have another minority characteristic. For instance, if they are gay or black, they are even more likely to be attacked. In fact, the MP who is most likely to be attacked is black and female. There are very few black female MPs, so it is not because of sheer numbers that they are at such increased risk of attack. Those with a minority characteristic are at higher risk of online harm, but the risk facing those with more than one minority characteristic is substantially higher, and that is what the amendment seeks to address.
I have spoken specifically about people being attacked on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms, but people in certain groups face an additional significant risk. If a young gay woman does not have a community around her, or if a young trans person does not know anybody else who is trans, they are much more likely to use the internet to reach out, to try to find people who are like them, to try to understand. If they are not accepted by their family, school or workplace, they are much more likely to go online to find a community and support—to find what is out there in terms of assistance—but using the internet as a vulnerable, at-risk person puts them at much more significant risk. This goes back to my earlier arguments about people requiring anonymity to protect themselves when using the internet to find their way through a difficult situation in which they have no role models.
It should not be difficult for the Government to accept this amendment. They should consider it carefully and understand that all of us on the Opposition Benches are making a really reasonable proposal. This is not about saying that someone with only one protected characteristic is not at risk; it is about recognising the intersectionality of risk and the fact that the risk faced by those who fit into more than one minority group is much higher than that faced by those who fit into just one. This is not about taking anything away from the Bill; it is about strengthening it and ensuring that organisations listen.
We have heard that a number of companies are not providing the protection that Members across the House would like them to provide against child sexual abuse. The governing structures, risk assessments, rules and moderation at those sites are better at ensuring that the providers make money than they are at providing protection. When regulated providers assess risk, it is not too much to ask them to consider not just people with one protected characteristic but those with multiple protected characteristics.
As MPs, we work on that basis every day. Across Scotland and the UK, we support our constituents as individuals and as groups. When protected characteristics intersect, we find ourselves standing in Parliament, shouting strongly on behalf of those affected and giving them our strongest backing, because we know that that intersection of harms is the point at which people are most vulnerable, in both the real and the online world. Will the Minister consider widening the provision so that it takes intersectionality into account and not only covers people with one protected characteristic but includes an over and above duty? I genuinely do not think it is too much for us to ask providers, particularly the biggest ones, to make this change.
Barbara Keeley
I have nothing to add. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 10 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 11
Safety duties protecting children
The Chair
We now come to amendment 95, tabled by the hon. Member for Upper Bann, who is not on the Committee. Does anyone wish to move the amendment? If not, we will move on.
Barbara Keeley
I beg to move amendment 29, in clause 11, page 10, line 20, at end insert—
“(c) prevent the sexual or physical abuse of a child by means of that service.”
This amendment establishes a duty to prevent the sexual or physical abuse of a child by means of a service.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 33, in clause 26, page 26, line 18, at end insert—
“(c) prevent the sexual or physical abuse of a child by means of that service.”
This amendment establishes a duty to prevent the sexual or physical abuse of a child by means of a service.
Barbara Keeley
The purpose of this clause is to ensure that children at risk of online harms are given protections from harmful, age-inappropriate content through specific children’s safety duties for user-to-user services likely to be accessed by children.
It is welcome that the Bill contains strong provisions to ensure that service providers act upon and mitigate the risks identified in the required risk assessment, and to introduce protective systems and processes to address what children encounter. This amendment aims to ensure that online platforms are proactive in their attempts to mitigate the opportunity for sex offenders to abuse children.
As we have argued with other amendments, there are missed opportunities in the Bill to be preventive in tackling the harm that is created. The sad reality is that online platforms create an opportunity for offenders to identify, contact and abuse children, and to do so in real time through livestreaming. We know there has been a significant increase in online sexual exploitation during the pandemic. With sex offenders unable to travel or have physical contact with children, online abuse increased significantly.
In 2021, UK law enforcement received a record 97,727 industry reports relating to online child abuse, a 29% increase on the previous year, which is shocking. An NSPCC freedom of information request to police forces in England and Wales last year showed that online grooming offences reached record levels in 2020-21, with the number of sexual communications with a child offences in England and Wales increasing by almost 70% in three years. There has been a deeply troubling trend in internet-facilitated abuse towards more serious sexual offences against children, and the average age of children in child abuse images, particularly girls, is trending to younger ages.
In-person contact abuse moved online because of the opportunity there for sex offenders to continue exploiting children. Sadly, they can do so with little fear of the consequences, because detection and disruption of livestreamed abuse is so low. The duty to protect children from sexual offenders abusing them in real time and livestreaming their exploitation cannot be limited to one part of the internet and tech sector. While much of the abuse might take place on the user-to-user services, it is vital that protections against such abuse are strengthened across the board, including in the search services, as set out in clause 26.
At the moment there is no list of harms in the Bill that must be prioritised by regulated companies. The NSPCC and others have suggested including a new schedule, similar to schedule 7, setting out what the primary priority harms should be. It would be beneficial for the purposes of parliamentary scrutiny for us to consider the types of priority harm that the Government intend the Bill to cover, rather than leaving that to secondary legislation. I hope the Minister will consider that and say why it has not yet been included.
To conclude, while we all hope the Bill will tackle the appalling abuse of children currently taking place online, this cannot be achieved without tackling the conditions in which these harms can take place. It is only by requiring that steps be taken across online platforms to limit the opportunities for sex offenders to abuse children that we can see the prevalence of this crime reduced.
Dame Maria Miller
I rise, hopefully to speak to clause 11 more generally—or will that be a separate stand part debate, Ms Rees?
Chris Philp
The Government obviously support the objective of these amendments, which is to prevent children from suffering the appalling sexual and physical abuse that the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South outlined in her powerful speech. It is shocking that these incidents have risen in the way that she described.
To be clear, that sort of appalling sexual abuse is covered in clause 9—which we have debated already—which covers illegal content. As Members would expect, child sexual abuse is defined as one of the items of priority illegal content, which are listed in more detail in schedule 6, where the offences that relate to sexual abuse are enumerated. As child sexual exploitation is a priority offence, services are already obliged through clause 9 to be “proactive” in preventing it from happening. As such, as Members would expect, the requirements contained in these amendments are already delivered through clause 9.
The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South also asked when we are going to hear what the primary priority harms to children might be. To be clear, those will not include the sexual exploitation offences, because as Members would also expect, those are already in the Bill as primary illegal offences. The primary priority harms might include material promoting eating disorders and that kind of thing, which is not covered by the criminal matters—the illegal matters. I have heard the hon. Lady’s point that if that list were to be published, or at least a draft list, that would assist Parliament in scrutinising the Bill. I will take that point away and see whether there is anything we can do in that area. I am not making a commitment; I am just registering that I have heard the point and will take it away.
Barbara Keeley
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Online Safety Bill (Second sitting)
Baroness Keeley ExcerptsTuesday 24th May 2022
(3 years, 10 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Online Safety Act 2023 View all Online Safety Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 24 May 2022 - (24 May 2022)
The Chair
Thank you very much. Ms Foreman, do you want to add anything to that? You do not have to.
Becky Foreman: I do not have anything to add.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Q
Richard Earley: There are quite a few different questions there, and I will try to address them as briefly as I can. On the point about harmful Facebook groups, if a Facebook group is dedicated to breaking any of our rules, we can remove that group, even if no harmful content has been posted in it. I understand that was raised in the context of breadcrumbing, so trying to infer harmful intent from innocuous content. We have teams trying to understand how bad actors circumvent our rules, and to prevent them from doing that. That is a core part of our work, and a core part of what the Bill needs to incentivise us to do. That is why we have rules in place to remove groups that are dedicated to breaking our rules, even if no harmful content is actually posted in them.
On the question you asked about transparency, the Bill does an admirable job of trying to balance different types of transparency. There are some kinds of transparency that we believe are meaningful and valid to give to users. I gave the example a moment ago of explaining why a piece of content was removed and which of our community standards it broke. There is other transparency that we think is best given in a more general sense. We have our transparency report, as I said, where we give the figures for how much content we remove, how much of it we find ourselves—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Earley: I completely agree. Apologies for hogging more time, but I think you have hit on an important point there, which is about sharing information with researchers. Last year, we gave data to support the publishing of more than 400 independent research projects, carried out along the lines you have described here. Just yesterday, we announced an expansion of what is called our Facebook open research tool, which expands academics’ ability to access data about advertising.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Earley: Going back to how the Bill works, when it comes to—
Barbara Keeley
No, I am not just asking about the Bill. Will you do that?
Richard Earley: We have not seen the Ofcom guidance on what those risk assessments should contain yet, so it is not possible to say. I think more transparency should always be the goal. If we can publish more information, we will do so.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katie O'Donovan: To begin with, I would pick up on the importance of transparency. We at Google and YouTube publish many reports on a quarterly or annual basis to help understand the actions we are taking. That ranges from everything on YouTube, where we publish by country the content we have taken down, why we have taken it down, how it was detected and the number of appeals. That is incredibly important information. It is good for researchers and others to have access to that.
We also do things around ads that we have removed and legal requests from different foreign Governments, which again has real validity. I think it is really important that Ofcom will have access to how we work through this—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katie O'Donovan: I do not want to gloss over the Ofcom point; I want to dwell on it for a second. In anticipation of this Bill, we were able to have conversations with Ofcom about how we work, the risks that we see and how our systems detect that. Hopefully, that is very helpful for Ofcom to understand how it will audit and regulate us, but it also informs how we need to think and improve our systems. I do think that is important.
We make a huge amount of training data available at Google. We publish a lot of shared APIs to help people understand what our data is doing. We are very open to publishing and working with academics.
It is difficult to give a broad statement without knowing the detail of what that data is. One thing I would say—it always sound a bit glib when people in my position say this—is that, in some cases, we do need to be limited in explaining exactly how our systems work to detect bad content. On YouTube, you have very clear community guidelines, which we know we have to publish, because people have a right to know what content is allowed and what is not, but we will find people who go right up to the line of that content very deliberately and carefully—they understand that, almost from a legal perspective. When it comes to fraudulent services and our ads, we have also seen people pivot the way that they attempt to defraud us. There needs to be some safe spaces to share that information. Ofcom is helpful for that too.
Kim Leadbeater
That is fine.
Professor Clare McGlynn: I know that there was a discussion this morning about age assurance, which obviously targets children’s access to pornography. I would emphasise that age assurance is not a panacea for the problems with pornography. We are so worried about age assurance only because of the content that is available online. The pornography industry is quite happy with age verification measures. It is a win-win for them: they get public credibility by saying they will adopt it; they can monetise it, because they are going to get more data—especially if they are encouraged to develop age verification measures, which of course they have been; that really is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse—and they know that it will be easily evaded.
One of the most recent surveys of young people in the UK was of 16 and 17-year-olds: 50% of them had used a VPN, which avoids age verification controls, and 25% more knew about that, so 75% of those older children knew how to evade age assurance. This is why the companies are quite happy—they are going to make money. It will stop some people stumbling across it, but it will not stop most older children accessing pornography. We need to focus on the content, and when we do that, we have to go beyond age assurance.
You have just heard Google talking about how it takes safety very seriously. Rape porn and incest porn are one click away on Google. They are freely and easily accessible. There are swathes of that material on Google. Twitter is hiding in plain sight, too. I know that you had a discussion about Twitter this morning. I, like many, thought, “Yes, I know there is porn on Twitter,” but I must confess that until doing some prep over the last few weeks, I did not know the nature of that porn. For example, “Kidnapped in the wood”; “Daddy’s little girl comes home from school; let’s now cheer her up”; “Raped behind the bin”—this is the material that is on Twitter. We know there is a problem with Pornhub, but this is what is on Twitter as well.
As the Minister mentioned this morning, Twitter says you have to be 13, and you have to be 18 to try to access much of this content, but you just put in whatever date of birth is necessary—it is that easy—and you can get all this material. It is freely and easily accessible. Those companies are hiding in plain sight in that sense. The age verification and age assurance provisions, and the safety duties, need to be toughened up.
To an extent, I think this will come down to the regulator. Is the regulator going to accept Google’s SafeSearch as satisfying the safety duties? I am not convinced, because of the easy accessibility of the rape and incest porn I have just talked about. I emphasise that incest porn is not classed as extreme pornography, so it is not a priority offence, but there are swathes of that material on Pornhub as well. In one of the studies that I did, we found that one in eight titles on the mainstream pornography sites described sexually violent material, and the incest material was the highest category in that. There is a lot of that around.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Professor Clare McGlynn: In many ways, it is going to be up to the regulator. Is the regulator going to deem that things such as SafeSearch, or Twitter’s current rules about sensitive information—which rely on the host to identify their material as sensitive—satisfy their obligations to minimise and mitigate the risk? That is, in essence, what it will all come down to.
Are they going to take the terms and conditions of Twitter, for example, at face value? Twitter’s terms and conditions do say that they do not want sexually violent material on there, and they even say that it is because they know it glorifies violence against women and girls, but this material is there and does not appear to get swiftly and easily taken down. Even when you try to block it—I tried to block some cartoon child sexual abuse images, which are easily available on there; you do not have to search for them very hard, it literally comes up when you search for porn—it brings you up five or six other options in case you want to report them as well, so you are viewing them as well. Just on the cartoon child sexual abuse images, before anyone asks, they are very clever, because they are just under the radar of what is actually a prohibited offence.
It is not necessarily that there is more that the Bill itself could do, although the code of practice would ensure that they have to think about these things more. They have to report on their transparency and their risk assessments: for example, what type of content are they taking down? Who is making the reports, and how many are they upholding? But it is then on the regulator as to what they are going to accept as acceptable, frankly.
Barbara Keeley
Do any other panellists want to add to that?
Janaya Walker: Just to draw together the questions about pornography and the question you asked about children, I wanted to highlight one of the things that came up earlier, which was the importance of media literacy. We share the view that that has been rolled back from earlier versions of the draft Bill.
There has also been a shift, in that the emphasis of the draft Bill was also talking about the impact of harm. That is really important when we are talking about violence against women and girls, and what is happening in the context of schools and relationship and sex education. Where some of these things like non-consensual image sharing take place, the Bill as currently drafted talks about media literacy and safe use of the service, rather than the impact of such material and really trying to point to the collective responsibility that everyone has as good digital citizens—in the language of Glitch—in terms of talking about online violence against women and girls. That is an area in which the Bill could be strengthened from the way it is currently drafted.
Jessica Eagelton: I completely agree with the media literacy point. In general, we see very low awareness of what tech abuse is. We surveyed some survivors and did some research last year—a public survey—and almost half of survivors told no one about the abuse they experienced online at the hands of their partner or former partner, and many of the survivors we interviewed did not understand what it was until they had come to Refuge and we had provided them with support. There is an aspect of that to the broader media literacy point as well: increasing awareness of what is and is not unacceptable behaviour online, and encouraging members of the public to report that and call it out when they see it.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Professor Clare McGlynn: Inevitably, it would have to work from any time that that requirement was put in place, in reality. That measure is being discussed in the Canadian Parliament at the moment—you might know that Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, is based in Canada, which is why they are doing a lot of work in that regard. The provision was also put forward by the European Parliament in its debates on the Digital Services Act. Of course, any of these measures are possible; we could put it into the Bill that that will be a requirement.
Another way of doing it, of course, would be for the regulator to say that one of the ways in which Pornhub, for example—or XVideos or xHamster—should ensure that they are fulfilling their safety duties is by ensuring the age and consent of those for whom videos are uploaded. The flipside of that is that we could also introduce an offence for uploading a video and falsely representing that the person in the video had given their consent to that. That would mirror offences in the Fraud Act 2006.
The idea is really about introducing some element of friction so that there is a break before images are uploaded. For example, with intimate image abuse, which we have already talked about, the revenge porn helpline reports that for over half of the cases of such abuse that it deals with, the images go on to porn websites. So those aspects are really important. It is not just about all porn videos; it is also about trying to reduce the distribution of non-consensual videos.
Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)
Q
I am concerned about VPNs. Will the Bill stop anyone accessing through VPNs? Is there anything we can do about that? I googled “VPNs” to find out what they were, and apparently there is a genuine need for them when using public networks, because it is safer. Costa Coffee suggests that people do so, for example. I do not know how we could work that.
You have obviously educated me, and probably some of my colleagues, about some of the sites that are available. I do not mix in circles where I would be exposed to that, but obviously children and young people do and there is no filter. If I did know about those things, I would probably not speak to my colleagues about it, because that would probably not be a good thing to do, but younger people might think it is quite funny to talk about. Do you think there is an education piece there for schools and parents? Should these platforms be saying to them, “Look, this is out there, even though you might not have heard of it—some MPs have not heard of it.” We ought to be doing something to protect children by telling parents what to look out for. Could there be something in the Bill to force them to do that? Do you think that would be a good idea? There is an awful lot there to answer—sorry.
Professor Clare McGlynn: On VPNs, I guess it is like so much technology: obviously it can be used for good, but it can also be used to evade regulations. My understanding is that individuals will be able to use a VPN to avoid age verification. On that point, I emphasise that in recent years Pornhub, at the same time as it was talking to the Government about developing age verification, was developing its own VPN app. At the same time it was saying, “Of course we will comply with your age verification rules.”
Don’t get me wrong: the age assurance provisions are important, because they will stop people stumbling across material, which is particularly important for the very youngest. In reality, 75% know about VPNs now, but once it becomes more widely known that this is how to evade it, I expect that all younger people will know how to do so. I do not think there is anything else you can do in the Bill, because you are not going to outlaw VPNs, for the reasons you identified—they are actually really important in some ways.
That is why the focus needs to be on content, because that is what we are actually concerned about. When you talk about media literacy and understanding, you are absolutely right, because we need to do more to educate all people, including young people—it does not just stop at age 18—about the nature of the pornography and the impact it can have. I guess that goes to the point about media literacy as well. It does also go to the point about fully and expertly resourcing sex and relationships education in school. Pornhub has its own sex education arm, but it is not the sex education arm that I think many of us would want to be encouraging. We need to be doing more in that regard.
The Chair
We also have Dr Rachel O’Connell, who is the CEO of TrustElevate. Good afternoon.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Jared Sine: Sure—thank you for the question. Business models play a pretty distinct role in the incentives of the companies. When we talk to people about Match Group and online dating, we try to point out a couple of really important things that differentiate what we do in the dating space from what many technology companies are doing in the social media space. One of those things is how we generate our revenue. The overwhelming majority of it is subscription-based, so we are focused not on time on platform or time on device, but on whether you are having a great experience, because if you are, you are going to come back and pay again, or you are going to continue your subscription with us. That is a really big differentiator, in terms of the business model and where incentives lie, because we want to make sure they have a great experience.
Secondly, we know we are helping people meet in real life. Again, if people are to have a great experience on our platforms, they are going to have to feel safe on them, so that becomes a really big focus for us.
Finally, we are more of a one-to-one platform, so people are not generally communicating to large groups, so that protects us from a lot of the other issues you see on some of these larger platforms. Ultimately, what that means is that, for our business to be successful, we really have to focus on safety. We have to make sure users come, have a good, safe experience, and we have to have tools for them to use and put in place to empower themselves so that they can be safe and have a great experience. Otherwise, they will not come back and tell their friends.
The last thing about our platforms is that ultimately, if they are successful, our users leave them because they are engaged in a relationship, get married or just decide they are done with dating all together—that happens on occasion, too. Ultimately, our goal is to make sure that people have that experience, so safety becomes a core part of what we do. Other platforms are more focused on eyeballs, advertising sales and attention—if it bleeds, it leads—but those things are just not part of the equation for us.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Jared Sine: We are very encouraged by the Bill. We think it allows for different codes of conduct or policy, as it relates to the various different types of businesses, based on the business models. That is exciting for us because we think that ultimately those things need to be taken into account. What are the drivers and the incentives in place for those businesses? Let us make sure that we have regulations in place that address those needs, based on the approaches of the businesses.
The Chair
Nima, would you like go next?
Nima Elmi: Thank you very much for inviting me along to this discussion. Building on what Jared said, currently the Bill is not very clear in terms of references to categorisations of services. It clusters together a number of very disparate platforms that have different platform designs, business models and corporate aims. Similarly to Match Group, our platform is focused much more on one-to-one communications and subscription-based business models. There is an important need for the Bill to acknowledge these different types of platforms and how they engage with users, and to ensure appropriate guidance from Ofcom on how they should be categorised, rather than clustering together a rather significant amount of companies that have very different business aims in in this space.
The Chair
Dr O’Connell, would you like to answer?
Dr Rachel O'Connell: Absolutely. I think those are really good points that you guys have raised. I would urge a little bit of caution around that though, because I think about Yellow Tinder, which was the Tinder for teens, which has been rebranded as Yubo. It transgresses: it is a social media platform; it enables livestreaming of teens to connect with each other; it is ultimately for dating. So there is a huge amount of risk. It is not a subscription-based service.
I get the industry drive to say, “Let’s differentiate and let’s have clarity”, but in a Bill, essentially the principles are supposed to be there. Then it is for the regulator, in my view, to say, at a granular level, that when you conduct a risk impact assessment, you understand whether the company has a subscription-based business model, so the risk is lower, and also if there is age checking to make sure those users are 18-plus. However, you must also consider that there are teen dating sites, which would definitely fall under the scope of this Bill and the provisions that it is trying to make to protect kids and to reduce the risk of harm.
While I think there is a need for clarity, I would urge caution. For the Bill to have some longevity, being that specific about the categorisations will have some potential unintended consequences, particularly as it relates to children and young people.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Dr Rachel O'Connell: There is a mention of age assurance in the Bill. There is an opportunity to clarify that a little further, and also to bring age verification services under the remit of the Bill, as they are serving and making sure that they are mitigating risk. There was a very clear outline by Elizabeth Denham when we were negotiating the Digital Economy Act in relation to age verification and adult content sites; she was very specific when she came to Committee and said it should be a third party conducting the checks. If you want to preserve privacy and security, it should be a third-party provider that runs the checks, rather than companies saying, “You know what? We’ll track everybody for the purposes of age verification.”
There needs to be a clear delineation, which currently in clause 50 is not very clear. I would recommend that that be looked at again and that some digital identity experts be brought into that discussion, so that there is a full appreciation. Currently, there is a lot of latitude for companies to develop their own services in-house for age verification, without, I think, a proper risk assessment of what that might mean for end users in terms of eroding their privacy.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Dr Rachel O'Connell: That means you have to track and analyse people’s activities and you are garnering a huge amount of data. If you are then handling people under the age of 13, under the Data Protection Act, you must obtain parental consent prior to processing data. By definition, you have to gather the data from parents. I have been working in this space for 25 years. I remember, in 2008, when the Attorneys General brought all the companies together to consider age verification as part of the internet safety technical task force, the arguments of industry—I was in industry at the time—were that it would be overly burdensome and a privacy risk. Looking back through history, industry has said that it does not want to do that. Now, there is an incentive to potentially do that, because you do not have to pay for a third party to do it, but what are the consequences for the erosion of privacy and so on?
I urge people to think carefully about that, in particular when it comes to children. It would require tracking children’s activities over time. We do not want our kids growing up in a surveillance society where they are being monitored like that from the get-go. The advantage of a third-party provider is that they can have a zero data model. They can run the checks without holding the data, so you are not creating a data lake. The parent or child provides information that can be hashed on the device and checked against data sources that are hashed, which means there is no knowledge. It is a zero data model.
The information resides on the user’s device, which is pretty cool. The checks are done, but there is no exposure and no potential for man-in-the-middle checks. The company then gets a token that says “This person is over 18”, or “This person is below 12. We have verified parental responsibility and that verified parent has given consent.” You are dealing with tokens that do not contain any personal information, which is a far better approach than companies developing things in-house.
Barbara Keeley
Q
The Chair
Q
Nima Elmi: Yes, I am. I have nothing to add.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Jared Sine: Sure. I would add a couple of thoughts. We run our own age verification scans, which we do through the traditional age gate but also through a number of other scans that we run.
Again, online dating platforms are a little different. We warn our users upfront that, as they are going to be meeting people in real life, there is a fine balance between safety and privacy, and we tend to lean a little more towards safety. We announce to our users that we are going to run message scans to make sure there is no inappropriate behaviour. In fact, one of the tools we have rolled out is called “Are you sure? Does this bother you?”, through which our AI looks at the message a user is planning to send and, if it is an inappropriate message, a flag will pop up that says, “Are you sure you want to send this?” Then, if they go ahead and send it, the person receiving it at the other end will get a pop-up that says, “This may not be something you want to see. Go ahead and click here if you want to.” If they open it, they then get another pop-up that asks “Does this bother you?” and, if it does, you can report the user immediately.
We think that is an important step to keep our platform safe. We make sure our users know that it is happening, so it is not under the table. However, we think there has to be a balance between safety and privacy, especially when we have users who are meeting in person. We have actually demonstrated on our platforms that this reduces harassment and behaviour that would otherwise be untoward or that you would not want on the platform.
We think that we have to be careful not to tie the hands of industry to be able to come up with technological solutions and advances that can work side by side with third-party tools and solutions. We have third-party ID verification tools that we use. If we identify or believe a user is under the age of 18, we push them through an ID verification process.
The other thing to remember, particularly as it relates to online dating, is that companies such as ours and Bumble have done the right thing by saying “18-plus only on our platforms”. There is no law that says that an online dating platform has to be 18-plus, but we think it is right thing to do. I am a father of five kids; I would not want kids on my platform. We are very vigilant in taking steps to make sure we are using the latest and greatest tools available to try to make sure that our platforms are safe.
Mrs Miller
Q
Dr Rachel O'Connell: I am the author of the technical standard PAS 1296, an age checking code of practice, which is becoming a global standard at the moment. We worked a lot with privacy and security and identity experts. It should have taken nine months, but it took a bit longer. There was a lot of thought that went into it. Those systems were developed to, as I just described, ensure a zero data, zero knowledge kind of model. What they do is enable those verifications to take place and reduce the requirement. There is a distinction between monitoring your systems, as was said earlier, for age verification purposes and abuse management. They are very different. You have to have abuse management systems. It is like saying that if you have a nightclub, you have to have bouncers. Of course you have to check things out. You need bouncers at the door. You cannot let people go into the venue, then afterwards say that you are spotting bad behaviour. You have to check at the door that they are the appropriate age to get into the venue.
Kirsty Blackman
Q
Rhiannon-Faye McDonald: It is very difficult. While I am strongly about protecting children from encountering perpetrators, I also recognise that children need to have freedoms and the ability to use the internet in the ways that they like. I think if that was implemented and it was 100% certain that no adult could pose as a 13-year-old and therefore interact with actual 13-year-olds, that would help, but I think it is tricky.
Susie Hargreaves: One of the things we need to be clear about, particularly where we see children groomed —we are seeing younger and younger children—is that we will not ever sort this just with technology; the education piece is huge. We are now seeing children as young as three in self-generated content, and we are seeing children in bedrooms and domestic settings being tricked, coerced and encouraged into engaging in very serious sexual activities, often using pornographic language. Actually, a whole education piece needs to happen. We can put filters and different technology in place, but remember that the IWF acts after the event—by the time we see this, the crime has been committed, the image has been shared and the child has already been abused. We need to bump up the education side, because parents, carers, teachers and children themselves have to be able to understand the dangers of being online and be supported to build their resilience online. They are definitely not to be blamed for things that happen online. From Rhiannon’s own story, how quickly it can happen, and how vulnerable children are at the moment—I don’t know.
Rhiannon-Faye McDonald: For those of you who don’t know, it happened very quickly to me, within the space of 24 hours, from the start of the conversation to the perpetrator coming to my bedroom and sexually assaulting me. I have heard other instances where it has happened much more quickly than that. It can escalate extremely quickly.
Just to add to Susie’s point about education, I strongly believe that education plays a huge part in this. However, we must be very careful in how we educate children, so that the focus is not on how to keep themselves safe, because puts the responsibility on them, which in turn increases the feelings of responsibility when things do go wrong. That increased feeling of responsibility makes it less likely that they will disclose that something has happened to them, because they feel that they will be blamed. It will decrease the chance that children will tell us that something has happened.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Susie Hargreaves: We already work with the internet industry. They currently take our services and we work closely with them on things such as engineering support. They also pay for our hotline, which is how we find child sexual abuse. However, the difference it would make is that we hope then to be able to undertake work where we are directly working with them to understand the level of their reports and data within their organisations.
At the moment, we do not receive that information from them. It is very much that we work on behalf of the public and they take our services. However, if we were suddenly able to work directly with them—have information about the scale of the issue within their own organisations and work more directly on that— then that would help to feed into our work. It is a very iterative process; we are constantly developing the technology to deal with the current threats.
It would also help us by giving us more intelligence and by allowing us to share that information, on an aggregated basis, more widely. It would certainly also help us to understand that they are definitely tackling the problem. We do believe that they are tackling the problem, because it is not in their business interests not to, but it just gives a level of accountability and transparency that does not exist at the moment.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Susie Hargreaves: At the moment, there is nothing on the face of the Bill on co-designation. We do think that child sexual abuse is different from other types of harm, and when you think about the huge number of harms, and the scale and complexity of the Bill, Ofcom has so much to work with.
We have been working with Ofcom for the past year to look at exactly what exactly our role would be. However, because we are the country’s experts on dealing with child sexual abuse material, because we have the relationships with the companies, and because we are an internationally renowned organisation, we are able to have that trusted relationship and then undertake a number of functions for Ofcom. We could help to undertake specific investigations, help update the code, or provide that interface between Ofcom and the companies where we undertake that work on their behalf.
We very much feel that we should be doing that. It is not about being self-serving, but about recognising the track record of the organisation and the fact that the relationships and technology are in place. We are already experts in this area, so we are able to work directly with those companies because we already work with them and they trust us. Basically, we have a memorandum of understanding with the CPS and the National Police Chiefs’ Council that protects our staff from prosecution but the companies all work with us on a voluntary basis. They already work with us, they trust our data, and we have that unique relationship with them.
We are able to provide that service to take the pressure off Ofcom because we are the experts in the field. We would like that clarified because we want this to be right for children from day one—you cannot get it wrong when dealing with child sexual abuse. We must not undo or undermine the work that has happened over the last 25 years.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Susie Hargreaves: There is uncertainty, because we do not know exactly what our relationship with Ofcom is going to be. We are having discussions and getting on very well, but we do not know anything about what the relationship will be or what the criteria and timetable for the relationship are. We have been working on this for nearly five years. We have analysts who work every single day looking at child sexual abuse; we have 70 members of staff, and about half of them look at child sexual abuse every day. They are dealing with some of the worse material imaginable, they are already in a highly stressful situation and they have clear welfare needs; uncertainty does not help. What we are looking for is certainty and clarity that child sexual abuse is so important that it is included on the face of the Bill, and that should include co-designation.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Ellen Judson: At the moment, no. The rights that are discussed in the Bill at the minute are quite limited: primarily, it is about freedom of expression and privacy, and the way that protections around privacy have been drafted is less strong than for those around freedom of expression. Picking up on the question about setting precedents, if we have a Bill that is likely to lead to more content moderation and things like age verification and user identity verification, and if we do not have strong protections for privacy and anonymity online, we are absolutely setting a bad precedent. We would want to see much more integration with existing human rights legislation in the Bill.
Kyle Taylor: All I would add is that if you look at the exception for content of democratic importance, and the idea of “active political issue”, right now, conversion therapy for trans people—that has been described by UN experts as torture—is an active political issue. Currently, the human rights of trans people are effectively set aside because we are actively debating their lives. That is another example of how minority and marginalised people can be negatively impacted by this Bill if it is not more human rights-centred.
Chris Philp
Q
Ellen Judson: I accept that that is what the Bill currently says. Our point was thinking about how it will be implemented in practice. If platforms are expected to prove to a regulator that they are taking certain steps to protect content of democratic importance—in the explanatory notes, that is content related to Government policy and political parties—and they are expected to prove that they are taking a special consideration of journalistic content, the most straightforward way for them to do that will be in relation to journalists and politicians. Given that it is such a broad category and definition, that seems to be the most likely effect of the regime.
Kyle Taylor: It is potentially—
Online Safety Bill (First sitting)
Baroness Keeley ExcerptsTuesday 24th May 2022
(3 years, 10 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Online Safety Act 2023 View all Online Safety Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 24 May 2022 - (24 May 2022)
Mrs Miller
Q
Kevin Bakhurst: One area that is very important and which is in the Bill and one of our responsibilities is to make sure there is a sufficiently robust and reactive complaints process from the platforms—one that people feel they can complain to and be heard—and an appeals process. We feel that that is in the Bill. We already receive complaints at Ofcom from people who have issues about platforms and who have gone to the platforms but do not feel their complaints have been properly dealt with or recognised. That is within the video-sharing platform regime. Those individual complaints, although we are not going to be very specific in looking at individual pieces of material per se, are very useful to alert us where there are issues around particular types of offence or harm that the platforms are not seen to be dealing with properly. It will be a really important part of the regime to make sure that platforms provide a complaints process that is easy to navigate and that people can use quite quickly and accessibly.
Richard Wronka: An additional point I would make, building on that, is that this is a really complex ecosystem. We understand that and have spent a lot of the last two or three years trying to get to grips with that complex ecosystem and building relationships with other participants in the ecosystem. It brings in law enforcement, other regulators, and organisations that support victims of crime or online abuse. We will need to find effective ways to work with those organisations. Ultimately, we are a regulator, so there is a limit to what we can do. It is important that those other organisations are able to operate effectively, but that is perhaps slightly outside our role.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Q
Richard Wronka: I think our starting point here is that we think transparency is a really important principle within the regime—a fundamental principle. There are specific provisions in the Bill that speak to that, but more generally we are looking for this regime to usher in a new era of transparency across the tech sector, so that users and other participants in this process can be clearer about what platforms are doing at the moment, how effective that is and what more might be done in the future. That is something that will be a guiding principle for us as we pick up regulation.
Specifically, the Bill provides for transparency reports. Not all services in scope will need to provide transparency reports, but category 1 and 2 services will be required to produce annual transparency reports. We think that is really important. At the moment, risk assessments are not intended to be published—that is not provided for in the Bill—but the transparency reports will show the effectiveness of the systems and processes that those platforms have put in place.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Wronka: I think what is important for us as a regulator is that we are able to access those risk assessments; and for the biggest services, the category 1 services, we would be expecting to do that routinely through a supervisory approach. We might even do that proactively, or where services have come to us for dialogue around those—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Wronka: Some services may wish to publish the risk assessments. There is nothing in the Bill or in our regulated approach that would prevent that. At the moment, I do not see a requirement in the Bill to do that. Some services may have concerns about the level of confidential information in there. The important point for us is that we have access to those risk assessments.
Kevin Bakhurst: Picking up on the risk assessments, it is a tricky question because we would expect those assessments to be very comprehensive and to deal with issues such as how algorithms function, and so on. There is a balance between transparency, which, as Richard says, we will drive across the regime—to address information that can harm, or people who are trying to behave badly online or to game the system—and what the regulator needs in practical terms. I am sure the platforms will be able to talk to you more about that.
Barbara Keeley
Q
There is also a question of timing. The reports suggested that the new hub and jobs will come into play in 2025. I am sure that everyone here wants to see the Bill taking effect sooner. Ofcom will need to do a lot of reviews and reporting in the first year after the Bill receives Royal Assent. How will that be possible if people are not in post until 2025?
Kevin Bakhurst: They are both big questions. I will take the first part and maybe Richard can take the second one about the timing. On the resourcing, it is important to say publicly that we feel strongly that, very unusually, we have had funding from Government to prepare for this regime. I know how unusual that is; I was at a meeting with the European regulators last week, and we are almost unique in that we have had funding and in the level of funding that we have had.
The funding has meant that we are already well advanced in our preparations. We have a team of around 150 people working on online safety across the organisation. A number are in Manchester, but some are in London or in our other offices around the UK. It is important to say that that funding has helped us to get off to a really strong start in recruiting people across the piece—not just policy people. Importantly, we have set up a new digital function within Ofcom and recruited a new chief technology officer, who came from Amazon Alexa, to head up that function.
The funding has allowed us to really push hard into this space, which is not easy, and to recruit some of the skills we feel we need to deliver this regime as effectively and rapidly as possible. I know that resourcing is not a matter within the Bill; it is a separate Treasury matter. Going forward though, we feel that, in the plans, we have sufficient resourcing to deliver what we are being asked to deliver. The team will probably double in size by the time we actually go live with the regime. It is a significant number of people.
Some significant new duties have been added in, such as fraudulent advertising, which we need to think carefully about. That is an important priority for us. It requires a different skillset. It was not in the original funding plan. If there are significant changes to the Bill, it is important that we remain alive to having the right people and the right number of people in place while trying to deliver with maximum efficiency. Do you want to talk about timing, Richard?
Richard Wronka: All I would add to that, Kevin, is that we are looking to front-load our recruitment so that we are ready to deliver on the Bill’s requirements as quickly as possible once it receives Royal Assent and our powers commence. That is the driving motivation for us. In many cases, that means recruiting people right now, in addition to the people we have already recruited to help with this.
Clearly there is a bit of a gating process for the Bill, so we will need a settled legislative framework and settled priority areas before we can get on with the consultation process. We will look to run that consultation process as swiftly as possible once we have those powers in place. We know that some stakeholders are very keen to see the Bill in place and others are less enthusiastic, so we need to run a robust process that will stand the test of time.
The Bill itself points us towards a phased process. We think that illegal content, thanks to the introduction of priority illegal content in the Bill, with those priority areas, is the area on which we can make the quickest progress as soon as the Bill achieved Royal Assent.
The Chair
Thank you. I intend to bring in the Minister at about 10 o’clock. Kirsty Blackman, Kim Leadbeater and Dean Russell have indicated that they wish to ask questions, so let us try to keep to time.
The Chair
And on the screen—[Interruption.] Uh-oh, it has frozen. We will have to come back to that. We will take evidence from the witnesses in the room until we have sorted out the problem with the screen.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Andy Burrows: Thank you for the question. We think that more could be built into the Bill to ensure that children’s needs and voices can be fed into the regime.
One of the things that the NSPCC would particularly like to see is provision for statutory user advocacy arrangements, drawing on the examples that we see in multiple other regulated sectors, where we have a model by which the levy on the firms that will cover the costs of the direct regulation also provides for funded user advocacy arrangements that can serve as a source of expertise, setting out children’s needs and experiences.
A comparison here would be the role that Citizens Advice plays in the energy and postal markets as the user voice and champion. We think that would be really important in bolstering the regulatory settlement. That can also help to provide an early warning function—particularly in a sector that is characterised by very rapid technological and market change—to identify new and emerging harms, and bolster and support the regulator in that activity. That, for us, feels like a crucial part of this jigsaw.
Given the very welcome systemic approach of the regime, that early warning function is particularly important, because there is the potential that if harms cannot be identified quickly, we will see a lag where whole regulatory cycles are missed. User advocacy can help to plug that gap, meaning that harms are identified at an earlier stage, and then the positive design of the process, with the risk profiles and company risk assessments, means that those harms can be built into that particular cycle.
Dame Rachel de Souza: I was very pleased when the Government asked me, when I came into the role, to look at what more could be done to keep children safe online and to make sure that their voices went right through the passage of the Bill. I am committed to doing that. Obviously, as Children’s Commissioner, my role is to elevate children’s voices. I was really pleased to convene a large number of charities, internet safety organisations and violence against women and girls experts in a joint briefing to MPs to try to get children’s voices over.
I worry that the Bill does not do enough to respond to individual cases of abuse and that it needs to do more to understand issues and concerns directly from children. Children should not have to exhaust the platforms’ ineffective complaints routes, which can take days, weeks or even months. I have just conducted a survey of 2,000 children and asked them about their experiences in the past month. Of those 2,000 children, 50% had seen harmful content and 40% had tried to get content about themselves removed and had not succeeded. For me, there is something really important about listening to children and talking their complaints into account. I know you have a busy day, but that is the key point that I want to get across.
The Chair
Lynn Perry is back on the screen—welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself for the record and then answer the question? [Interruption.] Oh, she has gone again. Apparently the problem is at Lynn’s end, so we will just have to live with it; there is nothing we can do on this side.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Andy Burrows: The systemic regime is important. That will help to ensure that the regime can be future-proofed; clearly, it is important that we are not introducing a set of proposals and then casting them in aspic. But there are ways that the Bill could be more strongly future-proofed, and that links to ensuring that the regime can effectively map on to the dynamics of the child sexual abuse problem in particular.
Let me give a couple of examples of where we think the Bill could be bolstered. One is around placing a duty on companies to consider the cross-platform nature of harm when performing their risk assessment functions, and having a broad, overarching duty to ask companies to work together to tackle the child sexual abuse threat. That is very important in terms of the current dynamics of the problem. We see, for example, very well-established grooming pathways, where abusers will look to exploit the design features of open social networks, such as on Instagram or Snapchat, before moving children and abuse on to perhaps live-streaming sites or encrypted messaging sites.
The cross-platform nature of the threat is only going to intensify in the years ahead as we start to look towards the metaverse, for example. It is clear that the metaverse will be built on the basis of being cross-platform and interdependent in nature. We can also see the potential for unintended consequences from other regulatory regimes. For example, the Digital Markets Act recently passed by the EU has provisions for interoperability. That effectively means that if I wanted to send you a message on platform A, you could receive it on platform B. There is a potential unintended consequence there that needs to be mitigated; we need to ensure that there is a responsibility to address the harm potential that could come from more interoperable services.
This is a significant area where the Bill really can be bolstered to address the current dynamics of the problem and ensure that legislation is as effective as it possibly can be. Looking to the medium to long term, it is crucial to ensure that we have arrangements that are commensurate to the changing nature of technology and the threats that will emerge from that.
Dame Rachel de Souza: A simple answer from me: of course we cannot future-proof it completely, because of the changing nature of online harms and technology. I talked to a large number of 16 to 21-year-olds about what they wished their parents had known about technology and what they had needed to keep them safe, and they listed a range of things. No. 1 was age assurance—they absolutely wanted good age assurance.
However, the list of harms and things they were coming across—cyber-flashing and all this—is very much set in time. It is really important that we deal with those things, but they are going to evolve and change. That is why we have to build in really good cross-platform work, which we have been talking about. We need these tech companies to work together to be able to stay live to the issues. We also need to make sure that we build in proper advocacy and listen to children and deal with the issues that come up, and that the Bill is flexible enough to be able to grow in that way. Any list is going to get timed out. We need to recognise that these harms are there and that they will change.
The Chair
I will bring in Kim Leadbeater and then Maria Miller and Kirsty Blackman, but I will definitely bring in the Minister at 10.45 am.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Dame Rachel de Souza: Baroness Kidron has done some fantastic work on this, and I really support her work. I want to tell you why. I am a former headteacher—I worked for 30 years in schools as a teacher and headteacher. Only in the last five or six years did I start seeing suicides of children and teenagers; I did not see them before. In the year just before I came to be Children’s Commissioner, there was a case of a year 11 girl from a vulnerable family who had a relationship with a boy, and it went all over the social media sites. She looked up self-harm material, went out to the woods and killed herself. She left a note that basically said, “So there. Look what you’ve done.”
It was just horrendous, having to pick up the family and the community of children around her, and seeing the long-term effects of it on her siblings. We did not see things like that before. I am fully supportive of Baroness Kidron and 5Rights campaigning on this issue. It is shocking to read about the enormous waiting and wrangling that parents must go through just to get their children’s information. It is absolutely shocking. I think that is enough from me.
Andy Burrows: I absolutely agree. One of the things we see at the NSPCC is the impact on parents and families in these situations. I think of Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life, and the extraordinarily protracted process it has taken to get companies to hand over her information. I think of the anguish and heartbreak that comes with this process. The Bill is a fantastic mechanism to be able to redress the balance in terms of children and families, and we would strongly support the amendments around giving parents access to that data, to ensure that this is not the protracted process that it currently all too often is.
Barbara Keeley
Just quickly, do coroners have sufficient powers? Should they have more powers to access digital data after the death of a child?
Andy Burrows: We can see what a protracted process it has been. There have been improvements to the process. It is currently a very lengthy process because of the mutual legal assistance treaty arrangements—MLAT, as they are known—by which injunctions have to be sought to get data from US companies. It has taken determination from some coroners to pursue cases, very often going up against challenges. It is an area where we think the arrangements could certainly be streamlined and simplified. The balance here should shift toward giving parents and families access to the data, so that the process can be gone through quickly and everything can be done to ease the heartbreak for families having to go through those incredibly traumatic situations.
Alex Davies-Jones
Q
Dame Rachel de Souza: There is no silver bullet. This is now a huge societal issue and I think that some of the things that I would want to say would be about ensuring that we have in our educational arsenal, if you like, a curriculum that has a really strong digital media literacy element. To that end, the Secretary of State for Education has just asked me to review how online harms and digital literacy are taught in schools—reviewing not the curriculum, but how good the teaching is and what children think about how the subject has been taught, and obviously what parents think, too.
I would absolutely like to see the tech companies putting some significant funding into supporting education of this kind; it is exactly the kind of thing that they should be working together to provide. So we need to look at this issue from many aspects, not least education.
Obviously, in a dream world I would like really good and strong digital media literacy in the Bill, but actually it is all our responsibility. I know from my conversations with Nadhim Zahawi that he is very keen that this subject is taught through the national curriculum, and very strongly.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: At present, we have a range of risk assessment processes. We have a risk committee of the board. We do risk assessments when we make a change about—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: At present, we do not have a specific individual designated to do the children’s risk assessment. The key question is how much does Ofcom’s guidance on risk assessments—once we see it—intersect with our current processes versus changes we would need to make to our risk assessment processes?
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: I would have to go away and review the Bill. I do not know whether a specific level is set out in the Bill, but we would want to engage with the regulation and requirements set for companies such as Twitter. However it would be expected that is what we would—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: Already all the biggest decisions that we make as a company are signed off at the most senior level. We report to our chief executive, Parag Agrawal, and then to the board. As I say, there is a risk committee of the board, so I expect that we would continue to make those decisions at the highest level.
Ben Bradley: It is broadly the same from a TikTok perspective. Safety is a priority for every member of the team, regardless of whether they are in a specific trust and safety function. In terms of risk assessments, we will see from the detail of the Bill at what level they need to be signed off, but our CEO has been clear in interviews that trust and safety is a priority for him and everyone at TikTok, so it would be something to which we are all committed.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Julia Lopez
That is not the message that I have heard, but I will be meeting UK Music representatives on Monday; if they share the concerns that the hon. Lady has just expressed, I will be happy to discuss those with them. The Secretary of State and I continue to do a lot of work with ministerial counterparts in other countries and across the Government on this issue. We are alive to the sector’s concerns.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
In an astonishing admission, Lord Frost, the Government’s former Brexit negotiator, recently said of musicians touring to the EU:
“There is a whole set of problems here that is making life difficult on both sides”.
Big problems include the road haulage limits, which mean that UK-based vehicles cannot make more than two laden stops in the EU, which adds a £30,000 cost to each tour. Cabotage limits can add up to £16,000 a day. Those are substantial burdens, and most tours of UK orchestras are to Europe: such tours represent 12% of their earned income. Lord Frost now believes that the Government should change and move to a more pragmatic position to ease touring. Does the Minister agree?
Julia Lopez
I thank the hon. Lady for her interest in this issue. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is not responsible for the overall negotiating position, but as I say we have been in close discussions with other Departments. We have made progress on some of the specific issues raised with us, such as splitter vans, and we have also provided a lot of support to the wider events sector. We have made sure that carnets will not be required and we have been doing a whole bunch of other stuff.
As I said, I am meeting UK Music representatives on Monday to discuss the remaining outstanding issues, but we have also had a number of conversations with EU member states. In the vast majority of those, people no longer require permits or visas to carry out this kind of work.
Events Research Programme
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Nigel Huddleston
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments and I agree with him completely. As I said, a huge amount of work and effort has been done by event organisers, as well as by those involved in the events research programme, including the chairs, Nick Hytner and David Ross, for whom we have extreme appreciation. Such events are very valuable and are lifting our spirits in the way described by my hon. Friend.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
The pilot scheme means that, although some events are going ahead at full capacity, other events cannot continue at all. Contradictions in Government guidance mean that amateur choirs cannot even rehearse indoors with protective measures in place, despite other non-professional activities, such as amateur orchestras, brass bands, theatre and grassroots team sports being allowed indoors. Can the Minister explain why choirs have been singled out from other similar risk activities? Will the Government update guidance to allow non-professional choirs to resume their valuable activities, or do they have to apply to be pilot events to be allowed to rehearse and perform?
Nigel Huddleston
The hon. Lady is correct in highlighting the difference between professional and non-professional choirs. In accordance with performing arts guidance, non-professional groups of up to six people can now sing indoors. They can also perform or rehearse in groups of up to 30 outdoors, or in multiple groups of 30 outdoors, provided that the groups are kept separate. Those limits do not apply to commercial activities. We all know from our mail bags that this is an area of importance to our constituents, and we want to get choirs up and running again in all formats as soon as possible.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Matt Warman
I do not want to preannounce anything that is in Project Gigabit, but I can certainly say to my hon. Friend that the project he mentions is on the radar of DCMS officials, and I look forward to continuing those conversations so that we can deliver the improvements that I know are so valuable to his constituents.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
The Minister for Digital and Culture (Caroline Dinenage)
The Government recognise the importance of international touring for our creative and cultural sectors. The DCMS-led working group on creative and cultural touring, which involves sector representatives and other key Government Departments, is working through the issues to ensure that the sector gets both the clarity and the support that it needs.
Barbara Keeley [V]
Musicians are eager to get back to work when restrictions allow, but for those who would normally tour Europe that will require a mountain of paperwork to be negotiated both for themselves and their instruments. This is increasingly urgent as we approach the lifting of lockdown restrictions, with little time left to negotiate bilateral agreements. Can the Minister confirm that Ministers are talking to their EU counterparts about securing visa waivers to allow our musicians to tour Europe freely when restrictions are lifted?
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady is right: the end of freedom of movement has inevitably had some consequences for touring artists. We want our cultural and creative professionals to be able to work easily across Europe, in the same way that EU creatives are able to work flexibly in the UK, and we are working very closely with the sector to consider all the available options. I have said right from the start that our door will always be open if the EU is willing to reconsider its position, but we are also working with colleagues across Government and members of our working group on our engagement with different member states. I met FCDO colleagues only yesterday once again to discuss this, and we want to ensure that touring can resume as easy as possible for UK artists.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
This Budget may come to be remembered for what it did not mention rather than for what it did contain. The health and care world was reported to be stunned that the NHS was mentioned only once and social care not at all in the Chancellor’s speech, and this despite the fact that we are still in the grip of a deep crisis in health and social care due to this Government’s failure to get covid-19 under control. The UK has experienced higher rates of infections, hospitalisations and deaths from the virus than other countries. The care sector was rocked by more than 30,000 deaths, and a fragile sector has now become even more fragile. Turnover in care staff is at 40% and there are still 100,000 care staff vacancies. The president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has warned that the care system risks “catastrophic failure” without urgent changes. During the pandemic, the number of people with unmet need is likely to have risen to 1.9 million. The £1 billion extra to councils for social care and the reliance on councils raising the social care precept by 3% are both inadequate sticking plasters. We need a recovery plan that gets social care functioning properly by putting it on a par with the NHS.
After a year of incredibly hard work spent fighting this virus, there was no mention of a recovery plan for the NHS, and we learned just a few days ago of the proposal for only a 1% pay rise for NHS staff who have sacrificed so much during this pandemic. My constituents are angry and upset at this derisory pay proposal, because last year Conservative MPs promised, budgeted for and voted into law a 2.1% pay rise for NHS staff.
Many people around the country were excluded from support in this Budget. The 2.4 million people who have been excluded from financial support are not helped by Budget measures that apply to only some of the self-employed. The Chancellor failed again to put in the financial support needed to help people to self-isolate, meaning that they still have to choose between their job and their health. Our schools are left with nothing for additional spending related to covid. Our local councils are being forced into a 5% council tax increase after a decade of cuts that have seen £211 million cut from budgets in my local area of Salford.
To add insult to injury, the Chancellor and the Communities Secretary have come up with a priority list for the levelling-up fund that puts their constituencies into priority 1 for investment but leaves Salford and other more deprived areas lower down the queue. This was not the Budget the country needed, with its triple blow of tax rises, a pay freeze and a cut to universal credit later. Worst of all, while Government Ministers are happy to waste billions on test and trace that fails to deliver and to give contracts to their cronies, they are failing the key worker heroes of the NHS and social care.
Covid-19: Cultural and Entertainment Sectors
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
In the past year, we have seen many hundreds of thousands of people out of work, with many of them no longer having jobs to return to. We have seen 123,000 people tragically die due to covid-19. While today we are debating the economic impacts of the virus, we cannot forget that lockdowns and social distancing were the correct thing to do to prevent this tragic death toll from being even higher. Over the coming months, we need to continue to protect lives, but it is not a zero-sum game where we need to abandon public health precautions in order to reopen the economy. We need an approach that protects livelihoods while also saving lives.
The need for support to protect livelihoods is particularly acute in the cultural and entertainment industries, which have had to close their doors for much of the past year. Even the most optimistic plans for reopening mean that they will not be back at full capacity until towards the end of this year or later. In the absence of support, many organisations have turned to the internet to keep working. Livestream performances, ranging from classical music to opera and plays, have been an invaluable lifeline not only to performers but to people staying at home during lockdown.
Bizarrely, orchestras putting on livestream performances are not eligible for the tax relief they would receive if they had attendees in person. The Government’s guidance on orchestra tax relief says that it can only be claimed if there are some attendees in person, but that is clearly impossible at a time when audiences cannot attend. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will address that in the Budget, to ensure that orchestras get the financial support they need when they livestream without an audience present in person? While I am talking about live music, we cannot let the hon. Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) get away with claiming the best brass band in the world, when we have the award-winning Eccles Borough Band and the Cadishead Public Band.
In the Budget tomorrow, we need support for the people who work in the cultural industries. I have heard from many of my constituents who work in MediaCity in Salford and have found themselves excluded from the Government’s financial support so far. The nature of their work means that many of them are on a mix of self-employed work and short-term pay-as-you-earn contracts, and they do not get support through the self-employment income support scheme. Unless they were under contract at the end of March last year, they did not get furlough support. A year into this crisis, they still have not had any support, and it is worse for people at the start of their careers, when they have not had time to build up any reserves.
Can the Minister tell us whether the Budget tomorrow will finally contain support for those people who have been excluded so far, so that they can get through the remaining months of this pandemic without facing further financial hardship? The Minister may say that he cannot reveal measures ahead of the Budget, but that rule seems to have been comprehensively abandoned.
UK Musicians: EU Visa Arrangements
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Caroline Dinenage
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. The negotiating team did negotiate an opportunity to come back and review this in the years ahead, so the light at the end of the tunnel is not entirely switched off. But there is quite a lot we can do between European nation states to try to make things a lot easier and straightforward. She is right to highlight that this impacts EU artists as much as it does those from the UK. We want to make their lives as easy and as straightforward as possible.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
As well as issues with visas or work permits, UK musicians working in EU countries risk being double-charged their social security contributions if they work in a country that has opted out of the social security co-ordination under the detached worker rules. Can the Minister set out what the Government are doing to avoid that and ensure that UK musicians do not face that financial penalty while they are working in the EU?
Caroline Dinenage
I am really pleased that the hon. Lady has given me the opportunity to answer that question. The protocol on social security co-ordination secured in the agreement ensures that UK nationals and EU citizens have a range of social security cover when working and living in the EU and the UK. It also supports business and trade by ensuring that cross-border workers and their employers are only liable to pay social security contributions in one state at a time. That is, obviously, very beneficial in particular to smaller cultural organisations that may not have the required cash flow to finance any duplicate payments. Member states have until 31 January to sign up to the detached worker provision. The UK continues to engage with our European counterparts via our global and international stakeholder network to encourage countries to sign up to that provision ahead of the deadline.