Online Safety Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I have not engaged with this amendment in any particular detail—until the last 24 hours, in fact. I thought that I would come to listen to the debate today and see if there was anything that I could usefully contribute. I have been interested in the different points that have been raised so far. I find myself agreeing with some points that are perhaps in tension or conflict with each other. I emphasise from the start, though, my complete respect for the Joint Committee and the work that it did in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. I cannot compare my knowledge and wisdom on the Bill with those who, as has already been said, have spent so much intensive time thinking about it in the way that they did at that stage.

Like my noble friend Lady Harding, I always have a desire for clarity of purpose. It is critical for the success of any organisation, or anything that we are trying to do. As a point of principle, I like the idea of setting out at the start of this Bill its purpose. When I looked through the Bill again over the last couple of weeks in preparation for Committee, it was striking just how complicated and disjointed a piece of work it is and so very difficult to follow.

There are many reasons why I am sympathetic towards the amendment. I can see why bringing together at the beginning of the Bill what are currently described as “Purposes” might be for it to meet its overall aims. But that brings me to some of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has just made. The Joint Committee’s report recommends that the objectives of the Bill

“should be that Ofcom should aim to improve online safety for UK citizens by ensuring that service providers”—

it then set out objectives aimed at Ofcom rather than them actually being the purposes of the Bill.

I was also struck by what the noble Lord, Lord Allen, said about what we are looking for. Are we looking for regulation of the type that we would expect of airlines, or of the kind we would expect from the car industry? If we are still asking that question, that is very worrying. I think we are looking for something akin to the car industry model as opposed to the airline model. I would be very grateful if my noble friend the Minister was at least able to give us some assurance on that point.

If I were to set out a purpose of the Bill at the beginning of the document, I would limit myself to what is currently in proposed new subsection (1)(g), which is

“to secure that regulated internet services operate with transparency and accountability in respect of online safety”.

That is all I would say, because that, to me, is what this Bill is trying to do.

The other thing that struck me when I looked at this—I know that there has been an approach to this legislation that sought to adopt regulation that applies to the broadcasting world—was the thought, “Somebody’s looked at the BBC charter and thought, well, they’ve got purposes and we might adopt a similar sort of approach here.” The BBC charter and the purposes set out in it are important and give structure to the way the BBC operates, but they do not give the kind of clarity of purpose that my noble friend Lady Harding is seeking—which I too very much support and want to see—because there is almost too much there. That is my view on what the place to start would be when setting out a very simple statement of purpose for this Bill.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, this day has not come early enough for me. I am pleased to join others on embarking on the Committee stage of the elusive Online Safety Bill, where we will be going on an intrepid journey, as we have heard so far. Twenty years ago, while I was on the Ofcom content board, I pleaded for the internet to be regulated, but was told that it was mission impossible. So this is a day I feared might not happen, and I thank the Government for making it possible.

I welcome Amendment 1, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson, Lord Clement-Jones, and others. It does indeed encapsulate the overarching purpose of the Bill. But it also sets out the focus of what other amendments will be needed if the Bill is to achieve the purpose set out in that amendment.

The Bill offers a landmark opportunity to protect children online, and it is up to us to make sure that it is robust, effective and evolvable for years to come. In particular, I welcome subsection (1)(a) and (b) of the new clause proposed by Amendment 1. Those paragraphs highlight an omission in the Bill. If the purposes set out in them are to be met, the Bill needs to go much further than it currently does.

Yes, the Bill does not go far enough on pornography. The amendment sets out a critical purpose for the Bill: children need a “higher level of protection”. The impact that pornography has on children is known. It poses a serious risk to their mental health and their understanding of consent, healthy sex and relationships. We know that children as young as seven are accessing pornographic content. Their formative years are being influenced by hardcore, abusive pornography.

As I keep saying, childhood lasts a lifetime, so we need to put children first. This is why I have dedicated my life to the protection of children and their well-being. This includes protection from pornography, where I have spent over a decade campaigning to prevent children easily accessing online pornographic content.

I know that others have proposed amendments that will be debated in due course which meet this purpose. I particularly support the amendments in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Lord, Lord Bethell. Those amendments meet the purpose of the Bill by ensuring that children are protected from pornographic content wherever it is found through robust, anonymous age verification that proves the user’s age beyond reasonable doubt.

Online pornographic content normalises abusive sexual acts, with the Government’s own research finding

“substantial evidence of an association between the use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women”

and children. This problem is driven largely by the types of content that are easily available online. Pornography is no longer the stereotype that we might imagine from the 1970s and 1980s. It is now vicious, violent and pervasive. Content that would be prohibited offline is readily available online for free with just a few clicks. The Online Safety Bill comes at a crucial moment to regulate online pornography. That is why I welcome the amendment introducing a purpose to the Bill that ensures that internet companies “comply with UK law”.

We have the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and UK law does not allow the offline distribution of material that sexualises children—such as “barely legal” pornography, where petite-looking adult actors are made to look like children—content which depicts incest and content which depicts sexual violence, including strangulation. That is why it is important that the Bill makes that type of material illegal online as well. Such content poses a high risk to children as well as women and girls. There is evidence that such content acts as a gateway to more hardcore material, including illegal child sexual abuse material. Some users spiral out of control, viewing content that is more and more extreme, until the next click is illegal child sexual abuse material, or even going on to contact and abuse children online and offline.

My amendment would require service providers to exclude from online video on-demand services any pornographic content that would be classified as more extreme than R18 and that would be prohibited offline. This would address the inconsistency between online and offline regulation of pornographic content—

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, we have had a good-natured and informative opening debate, but we should keep our remarks to this particular amendment, in the knowledge that all future amendments will have their rightful discussion in due course.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord. I hope that the amendments I support will be supported by CEASE, Refuge and Barnardo’s—I declare an interest here. Let us not let the chance of creating a robust Online Safety Bill slip through our fingers. It is now time to act with boldness, vision, morality and determination. I trust that we will continue to focus on the purpose of the Bill: to make the online world safer, especially for our children. They are relying on us to do the right thing, so let us do so.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I strongly support my noble friend in his amendment. I clarify that, in doing so, I am occupying a guest slot on the Front Bench: I do so as a member of his team but also as a member of the former Joint Committee. As my noble friend set out, this reflects where we got to in our thinking as a Joint Committee all that time ago. My noble friend said “at last”, and I echo that and what others said. I am grateful for the many briefings and conversations that we have had in the run-up to Committee, but it is good to finally be able to get on with it and start to clear some of these things out of my head, if nothing else.

In the end, as everyone has said, this is a highly complex Bill. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, in preparation for this I had another go at trying to read the blooming thing, and it is pretty much unreadable —it is very challenging. That is right at the heart of why I think this amendment is so important. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I worry that this will be a bonanza for the legal profession, because it is almost impenetrable when you work your way through the wiring of the Bill. I am sure that, in trying to amend it, some of us will have made errors. We have been helped by the Public Bill Office, but we will have missed things and got things the wrong way around.

It is important to have something purposive, as the Joint Committee wanted, and to have clarity of intent for Ofcom, including that this is so much more about systems than about content. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—clearly, we all respect her work chairing the communications committee and the insights she brings to the House—I think that a very simple statement, restricting it just to proposed new paragraph (g), is not enough. It would almost be the same as the description at the beginning of the Bill, before Clause 1. We need to go beyond that to get the most from having a clear statement of how we want Ofcom to do its job and the Secretary of State to support Ofcom.

I like what the noble Lord, Lord Allan, said about the risk of overcommitment and underdevelopment. When the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford talked about being the safest place in the world to go online, which is the claim that has been made about the Bill from the beginning, I was reminded again of the difficulty of overcommitting and underdelivering. The Bill is not perfect, and I do not believe that it will be when this Committee and this House have finished their work; we will need to keep coming back and legislating and regulating in this area, as we pursue the goal of being the safest place in the world to go online —but it will not be any time soon.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who I respect, that I understand what she is saying about some of her concerns about a risk-free child safety regime and the unintended consequences that may come in this legislation. But at its heart, what motivate us and make us believe that getting the Bill right is one of the most important things we will do in all of our times in this Parliament are the unintended consequences of the algorithms that these tech companies have created in pushing content at children that they do not want to hear. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, wanting to comment.