Media Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

That is right. He has succeeded; I have lost my thread.

If we had had more time or if the phrase “extended consensus” had been interpreted more widely, these matters could have been dealt with. In the end, we will end up with an unnecessarily flawed Bill and a subject to which an incoming Government—as long as they are not a Conservative one—will have to devote their time. We could have wrapped all this up today and adopted the compromise put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. If necessary, we could even now improve that compromise by amending it at Third Reading. But we will not do so. The will is not there.

We are now seeing an elected dictatorship of two parties—my own, alas, and the Conservative Party—pushing through things that have not achieved consensus support simply, as I explained at Second Reading, for political advantage. This is a sad day not only for press regulation but for Britain’s democracy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to associate the Green Party with the remarks of both the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. The noble Baroness spoke up very clearly for the people with very little power who are being crushed by those with great power—the oligarchic press and media system, to which I have referred in previous speeches.

To pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, I often hear the phrase, “We are a self-governing House” said with great pride. “We are not ruled by the usual channels”—or at least we are not supposed to be. They do not represent large parts of your Lordships’ House.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and Members from all parts of the House for their good wishes about my health. I went into hospital yesterday morning for a procedure on a long-standing back complaint. It went very well and as I left, the doctor said, “Oh, you might find a bit of discomfort once the painkillers wear off”. Always listen to your doctor. I was really touched to read today’s Hansard. There were good wishes that you usually have to die to get in this House. I feel rather like Tom Sawyer in that respect.

The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is right—I am only going to speak to the amendments to Clause 50—as the notes issued by the House on the wash-up period state:

“The wash-up period allows a Government to enact essential or non-controversial legislation”.


Whatever else this is, Clause 50 is neither of those things. We all know it has been put into the Bill like a sore thumb, to fix a deal between the Conservative Party and the major newspaper proprietors. That is the wicked world in which we live.

Having served in government and in this House for well over 30 years, I cannot get excited about wash-up. George Woodcock, the great trade union leader of the early 1960s, said that good trade unionism is a series of squalid compromises; so is wash-up, I am afraid. I understand what we are doing today. If we did not have this rather crude end to a Parliament, even a general election period of six weeks would be eaten up by both Houses debating Bills. It is not the end of the world; there is another Parliament coming.

I can see that the noble Lord, Lord Black, is in his place. Like Don Quixote, he is ready to charge at the windmills of state control of the press. That has never been any part of Section 40, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, explained in quoting the expert on the situation, Lord Leveson. I was the Minister in the Ministry of Justice who had responsibility for trying to put forward a solution to the problem of how you square the circle of press freedom and the power of big money in the press. I find it ironic that, at the end of this Parliament, we are being asked simultaneously to help the titans of the press to escape the bullying of SLAPPs—that is the use of big money to curb freedom—and at the same time those same press bodies are resisting attempts to give the ordinary citizen the protection from big-money press that they are asking for.

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[Lord Pannick (CB)]

The reality of political life—the noble Lord knows this as much as I do—is that wash-up is a very difficult constitutional concept. However, that is what we have, and it is the only way of getting business through. Since the noble Lord asks me, I do not think this is contentious at all. I thought the provision of Section 40 when it was enacted was a disgrace.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Wait a minute. I have continued to consider so since, and my views are confirmed by the fact that we have all managed perfectly well for 10 years.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Give me a moment. I said I would give way, but I would like to finish my point. If the noble Baroness does not mind, I would like to finish my answer to the noble Lord and then I will happily give way to her.

Therefore I do not consider this contentious, because there is no conceivable justification for maintaining any part of Section 40. I happily give way.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way, and I suggest that perhaps his tone is testimony to the degree of contention in your Lordships’ Chamber at this moment. I also contest the argument he makes that lots of examples have not been given. As was pointed out, examples were given yesterday in Committee, but your Lordships’ House is also very aware of the wash-up procedure and the need for speed, and people’s desire to progress. However, just to give the noble Lord one example, the NUJ—the National Union of Journalists—ethics and disabled members councils have written to IPSO complaining about its failure to address the way in which disabled people are covered by the media organisations that it is supposed to regulate, and asking for action. I have seen no sign of action. That is just one example, since the noble Lord asked for them.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

That is a very sensitive subject.

Media Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

No.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

There are new rules.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

Well, I hasten to add that I have no intention of going beyond that time. If that is a new rule, of which I was unaware, I certainly think it is a highly retrograde step because in Committee we should be exploring all the implications of all amendments. That is something we will no doubt return to at another time.

I welcome this debate and these amendments, particularly the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, moved his amendment and made reference to Wales as well as Scotland. I do not intend to go in depth into the Scottish context. I welcome the fact that amendments have come from that side of the Committee, with their intentions shared in other parts of the Committee, no doubt. I discussed some of these matters with friends in the Scottish National Party but, quite frankly, I feel incapable of addressing the Scottish context, which is very different from the Welsh context in terms of structure and the location and strength of the language in the country as a whole.

I would like to make this point at the beginning of my remarks. On page 6 of the Bill, which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, it says

“‘recognised regional or minority language’ means Welsh” ,

et cetera. But Welsh is not a minority language. Welsh is a national language in Wales and is officially recognised as such in statutes passed by Westminster. Therefore, it is inappropriate for that terminology to be used in this context.

In saying that, I should perhaps clarify, in case there is some uncertainty about it, that I come from a very different background to most Members in this House. Welsh is my first language; Welsh is the language that I speak almost all the time at home; Welsh is the language of 90% of my community and village, and 70% in the county in which I live. I have two children and six grandchildren. All six grandchildren speak Welsh as a first language; those six grandchildren have two grandparents who are Welsh-speaking and four who are not Welsh-speaking. That is the reality in Wales today: Welsh is a language that has been grasped by people of Wales, in Wales, but also by people have also moved into Wales. It is part of their heritage. In fact, there are 20 Welsh-medium schools in Cardiff now, teaching through the medium of Welsh. That is the reality.

Welsh is a language that has a diversity within it as well. People come on holiday to Wales and they see Jason Mohammad on Welsh television. The sound is off in the pub, so they turn it up to hear what he is saying. They are amazed when they find that Jason Mohammad is, of course, speaking in Welsh. He is one of the Welsh community, a fluent Welsh speaker, and he learned it as a second language. We have rappers, such as Sage Todz, who raps in Welsh and in English. There is no problem with that. They are an ethnic part of the Welsh community, and the language belongs to the whole of Wales. It belongs to those who speak Welsh and to those who do not speak Welsh, because it is part of our culture.

There have been changes in places such as Merthyr Tydfil, where I lived before I entered Parliament. The language was almost dead when I was there. It is partly thanks to television and partly thanks to education that things have changed since then. We will be coming on to some of these aspects in a later bank of amendments. However, I want to make the point as strongly as I can that the context of the Welsh language is a very different one to being treated as a minority language or a regional language.

This does raise questions in relations to Welsh and to Gaelic, whether they should be seen just in a Scottish context—or in a part-of-Scotland context for Gaelic—or in a Welsh context—the whole of Wales, as far as Welsh is concerned, where it is an official language throughout the whole of Wales—or should they be seen in a British context? That is the implication in some of these amendments. If they are being seen in a British context, do they have a claim to existence, in respect and with regard to nurturing, within England itself?

There was a time when I was on the board of S4C —the Welsh language television service—where some of our programmes were being picked up in England, particularly things like rugby, understandably, where there were audiences of 100,000 and more from within England. That raises the question: how many people in England actually speak Welsh? We do not know that, because in successive censuses—in 2001, 2011 and 2021—there has been a refusal to ask that question in England. It may be 100,000; it may be 200,000; it may even be half a million. We do not know.

We know that many, many young people leave Wales to look for work, and they live in England. They tune into S4C, and, of course, it is very much easier to do that now than when I was on the board in earlier times. The fact that there can be audiences of that scale indicates that a question must arise if you are talking about minority languages. What is the position of minority languages such as the Gaelic language and the Welsh language in England? What intentions will there be to find out how many speakers there are? What are the appropriate requests and demands of those? In terms of television, which we are discussing, there is now no problem: television knows no boundaries, and Welsh-language television can be seen in the United States, in Patagonia or wherever, because of the facility technology affords to it.

There are a number of questions that arise in that context. This is not the time to follow this through, but they run through to questions as to whether the Welsh language and the Gaelic language should be available, in some schools at least, in conurbations in England if we are saying that the Welsh and Gaelic languages are British languages. I just assume that this is the position from which the Government come on such matters. In which case, what are the Government going to be doing about it?

I am grateful for these amendments being tabled because it puts into context our interpretation of the words “regional or minority language”, which are on the face of the Bill. I suggest that this needs to be thought through again, in order for it to have a respect, or even a meaning, as far as we in Wales are concerned.

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of Creative Scotland. I thank my noble friend Lord Dunlop for his work to champion the Gaelic Media Service and add my support to his amendment.

I just want to respond a little bit to the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, that the Welsh and Scottish situations are not the same. No, they are not, and we feel rather hard done by because, as the noble Lord said, the two pillars of education and broadcasting have done much to support the Welsh language. I think that my noble friend Lord Dunlop’s amendments are just trying to reverse what I call the devolution deficit that has done no favours to the Gaelic Media Service.

We heard at Second Reading about the economic benefits of MG Alba. It sustains 340 jobs in the Highlands and Islands and produces gross value added of over £17 million. It is very interesting today that the Scottish Government’s new Deputy First Minister is not only a fluent Gaelic speaker and the first-ever Scottish Minister for Gaelic, as my noble friend said, but she also has responsibility for the economy. Despite its impressive economic record, however, MG Alba is facing a huge generational challenge at this very moment of having to transition to a digital service on its existing funding.

My noble friend Lord Dunlop has already set out that Scottish Government Ministers have been very vocal about their so-called strong and consistent support for the Gaelic language service. What I support about my noble friend’s amendments is that, by denominating the Gaelic Media Service as a public broadcaster, they are not committing the UK Government to funding, but they could ensure that the Scottish Government are held more accountable for their—in real terms—dwindling support for MG Alba.

If the Minister is minded in his reply to say that this issue should wait for the BBC charter review, I respectfully warn him that he is in danger of conflating two issues. The Media Bill is the appropriate place to confirm that there should be a Gaelic broadcaster. It is the place that confirms again that there should be a Welsh language public broadcaster, so why not Gaelic? The charter review would simply be a mechanism for the delivery of this. Frankly, if MG Alba has to wait another two years, it may be too late for the future of the Gaelic Media Service.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise humbly to take part in what has been a very rich and informative debate. I would particularly single out the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. I apologise that I did not take part in the Second Reading of this Bill due to other commitments. I declare for general purposes for the whole of this Bill that I was formerly an editor of the Guardian Weekly and spent 20 years as a journalist, so that is the background that I bring into this.

We have uncovered some important technical drafting detail here, both from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and I hope that we will certainly be seeing some government amendments on Report addressing those issues. However, I really just wanted to offer general Green support for the importance of having linguistic diversity broadcast across these islands, and I really wanted to stress that this is a terribly important issue.

We were talking in the last group about the British broadcasting ecosystem having a general claim to being world-leading. I am afraid that English characteristic monolingualism is something of a global joke. It is really important that we acknowledge that there is multilingualism on these islands, and it needs to be supported and encouraged.

I experienced a monolingual environment in the Australia of my childhood. Having exposure to only a single language impoverished my youth. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Ulster Scots, Irish and Cornish are treasures of these islands, and they need support. They preserve tradition and knowledge, and they contribute to cultural diversity.

I note that, last week, the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee heard evidence on the proposed Scottish Languages Bill, which aims to establish official status and improve educational support for languages. The chair of the professional association for Gaelic secondary teachers noted that Gaelic-medium education is, in effect, now stopping at S1 or S2. In 2023, only 1% of primary school pupils were in GM education, but 46% of primary school pupils in the Western Isles, for example, are in Gaelic-medium education and 54% study Gaelic. If we are going to have broadcasters that truly serve across these islands, we clearly need to see the delivery of all these languages.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for Amendment 9, which I think has already been very powerfully argued for. I also note the degree of lobbying, from the Citizens’ PSM Forum, already referred to, but also a number of other groups and individuals who have contacted me about this, indicating that they regard this as terribly important.

I will focus on science, because I think that science broadcasting, in terms of socially valued public service genres, really deserves to be stressed. This picks up points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on the first group, in the context of our climate emergency and all the other exceeding of planetary boundaries threats that we face. I am speaking in the context where today’s Guardian reports that a survey of IPCC scientists notes that the majority view is that we are heading towards 2.5 degrees of global heating. I remain an optimist and I do not necessarily agree with that—it is a question of social innovation and change—but what is clearly crucial is that the public sector broadcasters provide the scientific information and context that the public need to understand the debates and the issues.

I declare my position here as a science graduate from 1987. Much of what I was taught in my science degree I now know to be utterly out of date. One thing that may not apply to the other aspects of this—certainly to the first point here—is that science changes with lightning speed. Most of what I was taught in soil science I can now regard only as absolute junk. Much of what I was taught in genetics has been utterly overturned. If we are to have a public who are informed about these really crucial issues, science programming can be difficult, controversial and very expensive but it is crucial that there is a remit in the Bill that we need this from our public sector broadcasters.

Personally, I try to keep up to date with a whole range of podcasts. I can recommend to noble Lords “Big Biology” or the New Books Network “Systems and Cybernetics” channel, but they are not necessarily terribly accessible and it is really important that we have public sector broadcasters providing the content that informs the public on scientific issues.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

My Lords, I too have added my name to Amendment 9. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, said, a clear definition of the genres, rather than the vague “appropriate”, is necessary to ensure commissioning from the PSBs across a full range of programmes and proper oversight from Ofcom. As my noble friend Lord Foster mentioned, the Minister said earlier that the Bill has not removed Section 358 of the Communications Act, which requires Ofcom to collect information on principal genres, but it does not define what these genres are, so we return to the essential fact that, if not specified, Ofcom will not be required to monitor this crucial content in quantitative terms.

Specifying genres provides guarantees for a future we cannot predict. It does not take a lot of imagination to envisage the slippery slope. With the genres gone, there are two likely consequences. First, the commercial PSBs will seek to diminish their commitment and will lobby accordingly, exactly as ITV did with regional current affairs programmes. Secondly, Ofcom will have less discretion to hold them to account if it is under no obligation to monitor individual genres.

I return to the pre-legislative DCMS Committee report and to what the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said so forcefully, that removing the requirement on commercial PSBs to provide specific genres for UK children’s content

“led to significant reductions in the production of original children’s TV, and we are concerned that the draft Media Bill’s removal of the specific reference to other genres will lead to similar reductions in content, particularly in the less commercially successful areas”.

That is from the committee’s report, but we all agree on it, I think.

I have one rather off-the-wall question, having listened to the very interesting debate about language: can we please find another word instead of “genre”? Maybe there is a Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish word that we could use instead.

Gambling Advertising

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Trevethin and Oaksey. His final suggestion was a pertinent and encouraging one. Like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for securing this debate and for all the work that he has done over many years on this issue. I declare my position as a member of Peers for Gambling Reform.

I shall begin, for a change, with some positive good news—this picks up something mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Foster—which is the ban on various forms of advertising that has come into place in Sheffield following a decision by the council in March. This is a great demonstration that campaigning works and can make a difference. I know some of the people who have been campaigning for that in Sheffield over a significant period. It is also a demonstration of the public desire to have healthier environments and healthy societies, which is what indeed this public health measure does. It is a ban, within the limits of the power of Sheffield City Council, applying to authority-owned hoardings. As well as gambling and betting products it covers short-term loans, alcoholic drinks, fossil-fuel products, some breast and infant milk formulas and petrol, diesel and hybrid plug-in vehicles. We can see the focus there on health. An important point to make is that, as the director of public health in Sheffield, Greg Fell, said, while this measure is not going to break our gambling harm epidemic—and it is important that the public health sector sees that the epidemic is there—it sets an important direction of travel.

I have a direct question for the Minister. Local councils and local communities have been expressing a desire to see these gambling adverts and other harmful adverts out of their communities. If the Government will not act centrally—although I would prefer it if they did—will they allow local communities to make the decision for themselves, not just on the sites that they control but on all the advertising sites within their communities?

It is important to note how much this advertising is focused in poorer, disadvantaged communities. In Sheffield, the group Adfree Cities found that 60% of the advertisements were in the poorest areas of the city while just 2% of the adverts were in the most affluent locations. More than four in five outdoor billboard adverts around the country are focused in the poorest areas of England and Wales. These impact negatively on people’s lives and on the environment in those communities.

Like other noble Lords, I commend the Library, as usual, on its excellent briefing. All the evidence is that, along with the deluge of gambling advertising that we are all being exposed to, we are seeing a great rise in problem gambling. Under the new methodology from the Gambling Commission, we are talking about a 2.5% problem gambler rate—that is more than 1 million people. This is an addiction problem and a public health crisis. The GamCare helpline had more than 50,000 calls and online chats in 2023, up 24% on the previous year.

Other noble Lords have referred to the situation of football. Again, there is a strong, fast-rising grass-roots campaign saying, “We want something to be done about this”. As far as I have been able to discover, AFC Wimbledon was the last club to join the campaign The Big Step, calling for an end to all gambling advertising in football. That campaign is part of Gambling with Lives, the charity set up by families bereaved by gambling-related suicide. I do not think anyone has said this figure yet, but I think it needs to be recorded: the Government’s own estimate is that there are 496 suicides related to problem gambling every year. And I have one figure showing how much people are suffering: in the first weekend of the Premier League last August, fans were subjected to 11,000 gambling adverts.

To put this all in a broader context, we have an epidemic of problem advertising. Figures out this morning from the WHO show that the UK has the worst rate of child alcohol abuse worldwide. We have a real problem where advertising is creating an unhealthy society. We need a much healthier society, which is something the Government themselves often acknowledge. Gambling is part of a much broader problem. There is no right to advertise. We have right to say as a society that we do not want to force unhealthy products on people and communities.

Human Rights: Sportswashing

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, for securing this important debate. I am honoured to take part alongside the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, who gave a very important speech. I share her great concern about women’s sport, including how far we have to go towards equality and the understanding that we can go backwards as well as forwards, which is sometimes forgotten. I also credit the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for acknowledging having changed his mind; in your Lordships’ House, it is always good to see people’s thinking developing and going forward.

I will go a long way back to a couple of the origins of sporting activity thousands of years ago. One was the ancient Olympics held in honour of Zeus, who, for the ancient Greeks, was the despotic, sexually abusive king of the gods on Mount Olympus. There was the Mesoamerican ball game. Sometimes, positively, it seems to have been used as alternative to war: Topiltzin, the Toltec king, played against three rivals, with the winner getting to rule over the losers. But later in its history, it became associated with human sacrifice and usually decapitation—blood-soaked sport indeed.

I looked up the origins of the term “sportswashing” as we currently use it. It seems to have begun in 2015, when Azerbaijan used the European Games to divert international attention away from human rights in that country. As the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, did, we have to draw a parallel between greenwashing and sportswashing. They both make associations with health, democracy, equality and even environmental action—all positives that are churned up together and supposed to put out something good. But, so often, what we are talking about is a very thin coat over some very nasty things underneath.

It is worth looking at where in the UK the term was first widely used: I think it was probably in 2018, regarding Abu Dhabi, the Manchester City football team and the case of Matthew Hedges, a PhD student who was convicted of spying in the UAE. Eventually, after a great deal of suffering, he was later pardoned.

What we saw was lots of Manchester City supporters coming out to defend the UAE and its record on human rights because they wanted to defend their football team. That is a very interesting example of the way in which sport can be used as a lever and a tool, and Amnesty International was particularly effective in highlighting that at the time.

Closer to the current day, a moment when sportswashing became untenable was when UEFA decided to move the 2022 Champions League final from St Petersburg, President Putin’s hometown. That was after the illegal invasion of Ukraine by the Russian regime, but there had already been extensive sportswashing by what was obviously an authoritarian and internationally aggressive regime. That was at its peak during the 2018 World Cup. The president of FIFA declared at the Kremlin that the world was now “in love” with President Putin—what does that image look like now? Even at the time, it was not hard to see how disturbing that was. Rio Ferdinand and Peter Schmeichel were also at that meeting.

Further back, in Argentina the military junta seized power two years before the 1978 World Cup. When the Argentinian team won the cup, it was seen as a real political boost for the junta that helped to keep it in power.

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was truly bloodstained and a mark of shame on the so-called beautiful game. In 2010, when Qatar won the right to stage the World Cup, it had only one of the eight stadiums needed. Human Rights Watch reported that to build the rest, and the hotels and roads, more than 2 million migrants were forced to work in sweltering heat and extremely abusive labour conditions. They were abused in the interests of sport—and money, of course, which I will return to. It was reported that at least 6,500 migrant workers died during those 10 years of construction. We are not really that far from the Mesoamerican ball games, are we? This is a country where migrant workers and other residents, should they be LGBTIQA+, face severe repression of their basic human rights, as do many other people. This is despite the fact that in 2016 FIFA signed up to the UN principles on business and human rights, requiring it to

“avoid infringing on the human rights of others”.

The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, spoke extensively about the situation in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. I will not go back over the entire ground that he covered, but it is worth looking at the total list because there has been an explosion of sportswashing by Saudi Arabia. It has spent at least $6.3 billion on sportswashing since 2021—that is 300 sponsorship deals. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and the state-owned oil company—we come back to the link between the environment and sport—have invested in sports such as boxing, racing, football, snooker, golf, ATP tennis, cricket and the America’s Cup regatta, and they are sportswashing what is an increasingly oppressive regime. The regime continues to intervene in Yemen, one of the world’s worst human rights crises, and was responsible for the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

I will also briefly revisit—as the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, did—the situation of Bahrain, particularly Formula 1. The regime has regularly used the Grand Prix to enhance its image, and over the past two decades, as the noble Lord outlined, there have been numerous human rights violations directly associated with the event itself; we are coming back to bloodstains again.

I raise, as the noble Lord did specifically, the case of Sayed Hashim AlWadaei, son of Hajer Mansoor, and ask the Government what they are doing in that situation. I am aware that it is not directly in the Minister’s portfolio, but none the less, in this context, he must have expected this question. Would the Minister defend the UK ambassador to Bahrain, Alastair Long, on 2 March 2024 releasing a promotional video celebrating 20 years of F1 in Bahrain? He talked of the vision it took from His Majesty and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince and boasted of Bahrain-UK tourism ties, completely ignoring human rights abuses and actively sportswashing the regime. I remind your Lordships’ House that this is the UK ambassador to Bahrain. Does the Minister consider that acceptable?

An obvious part of this debate on sportswashing is the place of boycotts, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I have to raise the impact of the sports boycott on apartheid South Africa. I very much agree with the noble Lord that the sports boycott was only part of the story, but it was none the less an important part. I have to cross-reference what is generally known as the anti-boycotts Bill that the Government are currently pushing through your Lordships’ House, formally the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, not currently in his place, spoke extremely powerfully at the Second Reading of that Bill. I urge noble Lords who have not read that speech to do so. He also writes in today’s Guardian about the power of sports boycotts and the power of local action when the national Government were failing to take action. As the noble Lord says in the Guardian,

“the British people’s international solidarities often exceed those of our political leaders”.

That does not, however, absolve the Government of taking action. Noble Lords and I have only covered so much; there are so many issues around the place of repressive regimes in British sport today. So I have a direct question to the Minister: what steps will the Government take to ensure that multi-billion-dollar companies based in the UK are not actively engaged in covering up human rights abuses through their sports-related activities, actively sportswashing and making regimes have a more positive appearance? My second question is: what steps will the Government take to ensure Sayed Hashim’s release?

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, that sport is only a small part of this story. Finance is a big part of the ways in which repressive regimes have infiltrated our society; they have used elements of our financial sector and other elements of our society to make themselves appear respectable. Since my entry into the House, I have talked about the corruption of the London laundromat, the still partly hidden scandal of golden visas and our role as butler to the world’s kleptocrats and populists. That is a term I have borrowed from the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, who gave a speech of that title in your Lordships’ House in February 2022.

It can sometimes seem that sport is small beer in comparison with that wave of corruption that we have invited into the UK—the wave covering up human rights abuses and corruption that has occurred through the City of London and through other British mechanisms. But I come back to the point that the plutocrats and autocrats are people too. They seek acceptance, gilding on tarnished reputations and fake legitimacy, and we have to acknowledge that sport is something that has a very special ability to provide that.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Before we get away from the video, will the Minister defend the words that the UK ambassador said in it?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I have not seen the video, and I do not want to defend words I have not heard. I have set out how His Majesty’s ambassador and all Crown servants overseas follow the policies of His Majesty’s Government and are rightly held to account for what they say publicly—but my colleagues at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office are perhaps better placed to discuss that.

It is important that we continue to have direct conversations on human rights and other important matters. The UK continues to show global leadership in encouraging all states to uphold international rights obligations and to ensure that those who violate human rights are held to account. The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, mentioned the World Cup in Qatar, where I hope he saw that my right honourable friend Stuart Andrew—the Minister for Sport and the Minister for Equality—made the point directly by wearing the OneLove rainbow armband when he attended. By doing so, he showed that we do not shy away from these conversations and gestures. Following the tournament, we continue to engage with Qatar, which has moved forward on labour rights, as noted by noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Moynihan, who pointed to the independent monitoring done by the International Labour Organization.

The benefits of inward investment are key in international sport. In the last decade, there has been an unprecedented level of interest and a flow of private capital investment into the sports sector globally, particularly from international institutional investors. Like others, I think my noble friend Lord Hayward did us a great service in this debate by touching on the importance of sponsors. The Government have consistently supported the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, which are widely regarded as the authoritative international framework to steer practical action by both Governments and businesses across the world in this important area.

The last decade has seen growth in a number of areas across sport, with significant levels of new and innovative investment, particularly in women’s sport. The Government have outlined the important role of inward investment in our sports sector through their recently published sports strategy, which works to encourage investment in our sport system in a sustainable manner. We will work across government departments and with external partners to highlight best practice and opportunities for inward investment in our domestic sport, including women’s sport.

In July, the Government hosted the inaugural investment in sport symposium, bringing people from the sector together with investors and other associated organisations to discuss the opportunities that are available. We have also launched a new women’s sport investment accelerator pilot scheme, which brings UK-based women’s sports rights holders who are seeking investment together with industry experts and investors. We believe there are further opportunities within the sector, in the form of viable investment propositions for the right investors who are committed to the long-term growth and health of the sport.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for what has been a timely debate and a chance to look ahead to the debates we will have on the independent football regulator, but also a powerful opportunity to remind us of the importance of how the Government engage with countries around the world through sport and in other ways, to the benefit of the UK, our sportsmen and sportswomen, and the millions of people across the country who enjoy sport in all its forms.

I was struck by what the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said. There is a powerful lesson in the example of Lloyd George, whose comments about the impression he formed at the 1936 Olympic Games are difficult to hear, not just for the noble Lord and his colleagues on the Liberal Benches but for us all. But I am glad that, as we look back on those Olympics, it is the figure of Jesse Owens, with his impressive four gold medals, that looms larger in the historical imagination, underlining the importance of seizing the opportunity of sporting events to advance important conversations on matters of human rights and politics, which, as noble Lords have rightly said, are often intertwined.

News Broadcasting: Regulation

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, and to sincerely thank him for the work that he does in attempting to provide some clarity and oversight, which is very obviously and urgently needed, coming from a civil society perspective. To reflect on the noble Lord’s speech, the rate of change and the difficulty of regulation highlights the need for us to have education on media literacy and critical thinking. The public need to have the tools; young people going through our education system need to look at something and see where it is coming from and understand it from a critical perspective. It is important that we stress that.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for securing this debate on such an important subject. I declare my position as a former newspaper editor with the Guardian Weekly; I also worked for the Times, the Independent and the Telegraph. I just want to mention that, unfortunately, I was not able to take part in the Second Reading of the Media Bill, but I plan to take part in the further stages. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, I have also taken part in Times Radio’s “Political Frenemies”, along with the noble Lord, Randall of Uxbridge, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. That is the kind of case where you can get politicians talking with a neutral adjudicator in the middle, which is very different to politicians talking to each other. I mention to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that there are more than two parties around if he wants to invite more parties on to his show.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

I am a third party.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Okay—the noble Baroness is a third party.

In preparing for today’s topic of debate, I looked back at a press release that I put out in 2012—a dozen years ago now—in immediate response to the Leveson report. Boy, there has been a lot of water under the bridge in our media since then. I said then that I welcomed what Leveson offered—most of it has not subsequently been delivered—and I criticised the report for its lack of tackling the issue of media ownership. We do not have the kind of plurality that we need—the kind of issues I addressed yesterday around overseas ownership, and in particular the ownership of the Telegraph. An issue there is whether and how mergers and acquisitions are referred, and that has not been dealt with.

I also want to come back to the rather fraught point of the potential for Leveson 2. My understanding is that in December, the Observer reported that Sir Keir Starmer was not intending to revive the second stage of the Leveson inquiry into press standards should he form the next Government—it was abandoned by the Conservative Party in 2018—nor would Labour oppose the plans to weaken the press regulation regime in the Media Bill. It is worth noting that under previous leaders, Labour was in favour of reviving the Leveson process. In May 2018, the former party leader, Ed Miliband, said that axing the second stage was “contemptible” and

“a matter of honour, of a promise we made”—[Official Report, Commons, 9/5/2018; col. 724.]

to the victims of phone hacking. I know that a lot of things have happened, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. However, that scandal is still very much alive and present, as we saw recently in a court case.

It was suggested to me that this debate would be all about GB News; I will just take a minute on that. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that civil society campaigns, taking a stand, doing politics, HOPE not hate saying it thought that what GB News is doing was unacceptable and that brands might not want to be associated with it, are all part of the right of a free society for people to campaign and call for boycotts—that is another issue that we are tackling the Government on in another Bill. However, there are some serious questions that the Government must provide guidance to Ofcom on. Will Ofcom allow senior party officials to present election programmes as long as they are not candidates? Can a channel host party loyalists from only one side who deliver nightly polemics and try to direct the results of election campaigns? As a professional journalist myself, I can see that GB News has taken a pattern where, in the daytime it tends to be relatively straight and have ex-BBC presenters, but in the evening, when it is likely to have more impact, there is a very different tone. Therefore, when we are thinking about balance, surely Ofcom needs to look at the impact as well as just the content that is spread over 24 hours.

Arts

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the powerful contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and join the universal thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, for securing this debate and introducing it so powerfully. It is worth focusing on his key message that the arts feed us. They are to our physical, emotional and intellectual benefit. However, rather than cake, we should look at them as bread—one of the staffs of life.

I shall focus on the importance of that staff being available to all communities, as did the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans in noting the near collapse of provision in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, particularly in opportunities for people to participate in the arts. For the Green Party, that must be the foundation of arts policy: focusing not on what people purchase—Hollywood movies or blockbuster exhibitions —but on what they participate in or jointly create. We know that that is of great public interest, in the best sense.

To take an example that noble Lords may be aware of, there is currently a giant furore around Suffolk County Council’s decision to deliver a 100% cut to core arts funding. This has even penetrated the London-centric mainstream media bubble. We have to acknowledge the long-term impact of more than a decade of government austerity on local government—and I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The foundational blame lies in Westminster. But the local decision is still indefensible and has since, to a degree, been reversed, although the outcome is yet to be finalised. However, a partial climbdown by the county council leaves hugely valued local institutions, such as DanceEast and the New Wolsey Theatre, without the kind of certainty needed to securely continue to deliver hugely valued community services. The mother of 15 year-old Jack, who has autism, told Channel 4 how much a weekly drama class had brought him out of his shell. “I absolutely love them”, Jack told Channel 4’s reporter.

Noble Lords will be aware that I work across many issues in your Lordships’ House. In health debates, we often hear that the Government understand and value the increasing contribution to health of social prescribing, which enables people to access dance, theatre and other creative arts as a way of caring for them and improving their health and lives. Yet Ipswich, where one-third of children live in poverty, faces a collapse of such provision, which can only put more costs on to our struggling NHS and take away that essential food to set children up for a healthy life.

Finally, I step away from my main focus to comment on the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who is not currently in his place, and disagree in the strongest terms with him about the relationship between BP and the British Museum. As the campaign group Culture Unstained said, this is “completely indefensible”. Greenwashing and artwashing do not clean the hands of companies such as BP, but they do damage the reputation, the standing and the world’s view of institutions that enable that effort at greenwashing.

To comment further on the noble Lord embrace of philanthropy, relying on philanthropy as a foundation to keep our institutions going means that a tiny number of people get a big say in the direction of those institutions—the subjects they tackle and the kind of work they support. How much better it would be to ensure that big companies and rich individuals pay their taxes and we all democratically decide how to allocate the funding. If we want arts that embrace and show the way to change, rather than simply seek to reinforce the status quo, we need democratically decided funding for them.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise with pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, to speak to Amendment 201, to which I have attached my name. Essentially, I associate myself with everything that they said. I will seek not to repeat them but just make a couple of additional points.

Democracy demands clarity. We all know that we are heading into a general election, in which discussion of affordable housing will be right up there at the top of the agenda. We need to set out a definition about what we are talking about, if we are to have a sensible debate about our housing policy future.

For any noble Lords who have not seen it, I recommend the excellent briefing from the House of Commons Library—if I am allowed to recommend that—on the definition of affordable housing in July this year. One of its top headlines is:

“No agreed definition of affordable housing”.


It notes that the most commonly used framework is that of the National Planning Policy Framework, used by local planning authorities, which takes in social rent, as well as a range of so-called intermediate rent and for-sale products. As the Affordable Housing Commission of 2020 concluded, “many” of these so-called affordable homes are “clearly unaffordable” for those on middle or lower incomes.

This being the House of Lords, we should look for a second at the historical framework of this. If we go back to 1979, we see that nearly half of the British population lived in what were clearly affordable homes—they lived in council homes, with council rents. That reality is not that long ago. We have since seen the massive privatisation of right to buy, and a move towards treating housing primarily as a financial asset, rather than as homes in which people can securely, comfortably, safely and healthily live. That is what brings us to this point today. This amendment is not going to fix that but it would at least set out the clarity of terms for us to be able to talk about this in a practical kind of way.

I looked at the Green Party policy for a sustainable society. It starts with the absolute foundation, stating that it is

“a universal human right to shelter which is affordable, secure and to a standard adequate for the health and well-being of the household”.

That is why we are now saying today: right homes, right place and right price. We need to think about what that price means. In the Green Party we have set out very clearly what we believe the right price is. On purchase, we should be looking to move towards a situation where house prices are not more than four times average salaries. On rent, where the real extreme levels of suffering are now, there should be a living rent—a definition backed by many of the NGOs. Genuinely affordable housing means that median local rents would not take up more than 35% of median local take-home pay. That is what I would set out.

I could perhaps have put down an amendment to set those figures out, but that is not what I have done. What I have said instead is that we need to set out the terms of this debate, as this amendment does. I strongly commend Amendment 201 to your Lordships’ House.

[The Lord Bishop of Southwark]

My Lords, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, have all spoken eloquently on Amendment 201, which I support. I thank them for tabling it.

The independent Archbishops’ Commission on Housing reported in March 2021, and your Lordships’ House may recall the debate that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury secured on 24 March 2021, on the subject of housing. I simply wish to highlight a few points from that which I believe are relevant to the debate on this amendment.

The first is that the object of central government policy and of legislation should always be the ready provision of good housing—homes in which people want to live, in areas capable of flourishing. Too often, sadly, that is not the case, and we build among the smallest dwellings in Europe. Secondly, we require a bipartisan approach that enables a consistent policy to be followed across decades, and not one that is beholden to the sort of interests that have so limited housebuilding. It is worth remembering, as has already been mentioned today, that the last year in which we achieved house- building at the current target of 300,000 was 1969, over 50 years ago. Thirdly, we require a definition of affordable housing that relates specifically to income. Without this, any policy on affordable housing will fail. I support Amendment 201.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mendoza (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register as the new chairman of Historic England and as provost of Oriel College, Oxford, which is in the middle of applying for enormous amounts of planning permission and listed building consent to do a great deal of work. I thank noble Lords for their good wishes, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, as a former chair of the commission when it was known as English Heritage.

I did not speak in Committee so I will keep my remarks brief. On Amendment 202A, building preservation notices are used relatively sparingly, as I understand it, but they are a powerful tool to protect against damage and destruction of local heritage, particularly when the building itself could be listed. They are almost like an immediate but temporary listing in order to give the local planning authority some time to sort it out.

I hope that the addition of this clause will allow local planning authorities to continue to consult Historic England so that this tool will not be used vexatiously or overzealously but will be used where it is absolutely necessary. I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for pointing that out. Dialogue with local planning authorities is something that Historic England does a great deal of.

In terms of the amendment that my noble friends Lord Northbrook and Lord Bellingham spoke about, there is already a great deal of engagement between Historic England and local planning authorities. They already pay a lot of attention to the advice that Historic England publishes. However, my understanding from much of this debate is that there is even more that we can do. I am very happy for Historic England to work with officials at the department to ensure that we can do more to help local planning authorities make the right decisions and be acquainted with all the published advice that they need to be aware of.

On a happier note, the Minister’s amendment to allow the blue plaque scheme to be extended throughout England is a wonderful and very simple amendment. I hope that it goes through. It is a fantastic scheme run excellently, so far, by English Heritage, as the Minister said, for 150 years. As he said, there are plenty of other schemes around the country from place to place, but they are not consistent. So, would it not be wonderful if we had a consistent scheme, judged by the same criteria, allowing members of the public to nominate people they care about in the places that they love to allow deeper involvement in the heritage and history of our country? I think that from 2024 people will be able to nominate in their areas to encourage a greater connection to place, which we know is so important. It has been described here. The “Crooked House” is a fantastic example of a building that was not listed—it was being considered for listing—but meant so much to so many. That is not unusual. People really care about the heritage of their places.

I will briefly pay tribute to Sir Laurie Magnus, who chaired Historic England for a decade, going beyond his allotted two terms because of Covid. He chaired the organisation in an exemplary fashion, with his customary passion, verve, brio, courteousness and deep care and attention to the heritage of England. I know we are all very grateful to Sir Laurie. He has obviously now gone on to much more glamorous things as the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests. Of course, we wish him well with that very serious task. I thank noble Lords, and I will now sit down and be quiet.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will briefly comment on two of the amendments. First, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, introduced Amendment 204A so powerfully. I share others’ strong preference for this amendment, rather than the weaker Amendment 204B.

I want to emphasise the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, about embodied carbon. These structures that were built in the past are there for us. Knocking them down and building something again has environmental costs, which we have to start to take seriously. Along that line, I want to pick up a phrase used by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. He spoke about how we might want to knock things down and replace them with tidier looking buildings. I ask your Lordships’ House to think very carefully about the word “tidy” because heritage and history is seldom tidy, just as nature is not tidy. Straight lines and very even frameworks—the idea that tidiness is a virtue—has done enormous amounts of damage. It is something we really need to challenge. With a lack of tidiness, there may well be character, diversity and reality rather than something new and artificial.

My second point is to commend government Amendment 271A on the extension of blue plaques. I take this opportunity to invite the Minister to comment from the Dispatch Box and reflect on the fact that currently in Greater London only 14% of blue plaques commemorate the lives and contributions of women. I looked into this to see whether I could get a plaque for Moll Cutpurse or Bathsua Makin. Unfortunately, the buildings with which they were associated do not survive. However, will the Minister take this opportunity from the Dispatch Box to reflect on the need to ensure the encouragement of women and greater diversity in the lives which are commemorated?

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I will very briefly add to the salutations rightly directed at my noble friend Lord Parkinson for his important amendment extending the blue plaque scheme. One moment my noble friend is expounding issues related to online safety, and a little while later he brings forward a major heritage measure, which I think will have given him great personal pleasure because of his considerable interest in matters related to history.

The extension of the scheme will surely stimulate added interest on a considerable scale in localities throughout our country and extend knowledge of individuals who contributed within those localities and, in many cases, at national level too. The scheme will not be appropriate in every single case. For example, in Birmingham there is a fine memorial to Joseph Chamberlain. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, will know it, as will the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, with whose remarks on the preservation of buildings I agree strongly.

On the Joseph Chamberlain memorial, there is a suitably inscribed plaque recording his important work. The city council has agreed in principle to a proposal from the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston, and me to add plaques to Joseph Chamberlain’s two sons, Austen and Neville, who contributed greatly to the life of Birmingham and, of course, at national level. In Neville’s case, rather controversially, but he was above all the greatest social reformer the Conservative Party has ever produced. It would be right to ensure, as I think we will, that the new plaques blend in satisfactorily with the existing one. However, I think that in most cases, the blue plaques shining forth in their localities will do so much to stimulate historical interest throughout our country. For that, I salute my noble friend.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

I say all this as someone who is regularly piled on. I noticed when I started to speak that the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, is in her place. I remember my shock and horror when I saw the abuse she got some seven years ago and subsequently—really vicious, vile, horrible abuse for her political stance. Such abuse often takes a very sexualised form if you are a woman. So I can say from my lived experience that I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of vile, horrible, misogynistic pile-ons, and so do Joanna Cherry, Rosie Duffield and a lot of people involved in contentious political issues. We need to make politics more civil by having the arguments and the debates and not mischaracterising, delegitimising or demonising people. I am just not sure that a criminal intervention here is going to help. I think it might make matters worse.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said in introducing this group some time ago, it is very diverse. I shall comment on two aspects of the amendments in this group. I entirely associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Allan, who really nailed the problems with Amendment 266, and I very much support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws; I would have signed them if I had caught up with them.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, talked about causing alarm and distress. I can draw on my own experience here, thinking about when someone randomly starts to post you pictures of crossbows. I think about what used to happen when I was a journalist in Bangkok, when various people used to get hand grenades posted into their letterbox. That was not actively dangerous—the pin was not pulled; it was still held down—but it was clearly a threat, and the same thing happens on social media.

This is something of which I have long experience. In 2005, when I was the founder of the feminist blog Carnival of Feminists, I saw the kinds of messages that the noble Baronesses have referred to, which in the days before social media used to be posted as comments on people’s blogs. You can still find the blog out there—it ran from 2005 to 2009—but many of its links to other blogs will be dead because they were often run by young women, often young women of colour, who were driven to pull down their blogs and sometimes were driven off the internet entirely by threatening, fearsome messages of the type that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, referred to. We can argue about the drafting here—I will not have any opinion on that in detail—but something that addresses that issue is really important.

Secondly, we have not yet heard the Government’s introductions to Amendment 268AZA, but the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, provided us with the information that it is an amendment to create the offence of encouraging or assisting self-harm. I express support for the general tenor of that, but I want to make one specific point: so far as I can see, the amendment does not have any defence or carve-out for harm-reduction messages, which may be necessary.

To set the context here, figures from the Royal College of Psychiatrists say that about one in 10 young people self-harm at some stage in their youth, and the RCP says those figures are probably an underestimate because they are based on figures where medical professionals actually see them so the number is probably significantly higher than that. An article in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing from 2018 entitled “Self-cutting and harm reduction” is focused on in-patient settings, but the arguments in it are important in setting the general tone. It says that

“harm reduction in all its guises starts from the premise that the end goal”—

that is, to end self-harm entirely—

“is neither necessarily nor inevitably abstinence”,

which cannot be the solution for some people. Rather,

“the extinction of some particular form of behaviour may not be realistic for, or even desired by, the individual”.

So you may find messages that say, “If you are going to cut yourself, use a clean blade. If you do cut yourself, look after the wound afterwards”, but there is a risk that those kinds of well-intentioned, well-meaning and indeed expert messages could be caught by the amendment. I googled self-harm and harm reduction, and the websites that came up included Self Injury Support, which provides expert advice; a number of mental health trusts and healthcare trusts; and, indeed, the royal college’s own website.

The noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, was trying to address this issue with Amendment 268AZC, which would allow the DPP to authorise prosecutions, but it seems to me that a better approach would be to have in the government amendment a statement saying, “We acknowledge that there will be cases where people talk about self-harm in ways that seek to minimise harm rather than simply stopping it, and they are not meant to be caught by this amendment”.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, it seems a very long time since we heard the introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, but it was useful in setting this helpful and well-informed debate on its way. I am sure the whole Committee is keen to hear the Minister introducing the government amendments, even at this very late stage in the debate.

I would like to make reference to a few points. I was completely captivated by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who invoked the 10 commandments. I say to him that one can go to no higher order, which I am sure will support the amendments that he and his colleagues have put forward.

I will refer first to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Kennedy. At a minimum, they are interesting because they try to broaden the scope of the current offences. I believe they also try to anticipate the extent of the impact of the government amendments, which in my view would be improved by my noble friend’s amendments. As my noble friend said, so many of the threats that are experienced online by, and directed towards, women and girls are indirect. They are about encouraging others: saying “Somebody should do something terrible to you” is extremely common. I feel that here is an opportunity to address that in the Bill, and if we do not, we will have missed a major aspect. I hope that the Minister will take account of that and be positive. We can all be relaxed about whether the amendments need to be made, but the intent is there.

That part of the debate made a strong case to build on the debate we had on an earlier day in Committee about violence against women and girls, which was led by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and supported by noble Baronesses and noble Lords from all sides of the House. We called upon the Minister then to ensure that the Bill explicitly includes the necessary amendments to make it refer to violence against women and girls because, for all the reasons that my noble friend Lady Kennedy has explained, it is considerably greater for them than for others. Without wishing to dismiss the fact that everybody receives levels of abuse, we have to be realistic here: I believe that my noble friend’s amendments are extremely helpful there.

This is a bit in anticipation of what the Minister will say—I am sure he will forgive me if he already has the answers. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Allan, referred particularly to the coalition of some 130 individuals and organisations which have expressed their concerns. I want to highlight those concerns as well, because they speak to some important points. The groups in that coalition include the largest self-harm charity, Self Injury Support, along with numerous smaller self-harm support organisations and, of course, the mental health charity Mind. Their voice is therefore considerable.

To emphasise what has already been outlined, the concern with the current amendments is that they are somewhat broad and equivalent to an offence of glamorising self-harm, which was rejected by the Law Commission in its consultation on the offence. That followed concern from the Magistrates’ Association and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners that the offence would be ambiguous in application and complex to prosecute. It also risks criminalising people in distress, something that none of us want to see.

In addition, the broadness of the offence risks criminalising peer support and harm reduction resources, by defining them as capable of “encouraging or assisting” when they are in fact intended to help people who self-harm. This was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, today and in respect of her Private Member’s Bill, which we debated very recently in this Chamber, and I am sure that it would not be the Minister’s intention.

I would like to emphasise another point that has been made. The offence may also criminalise content posted by people who are in distress and sharing their own experiences of self-harm—the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred to this—by, for example, posting pictures of wounds. We do not want to subject vulnerable people to litigation, so let us not have an offence which ends up harming the very people it aims to protect. I shall be listening closely to the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Allan. He reminded me of significant reports of the huge amount of exploitation in the digital sector that has come from identification of photos. A great deal of that is human labour, even though it is often claimed to have been done through machine intelligence.

In speaking to this late but important amendment, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, for giving us the chance to do so, because, as every speaker has said, this is really important. I should declare my position as a former newspaper editor. I distinctly recall teasing a sports journalist in the early 1990s when it was reported that journalists were going to be replaced by computer technology. I said that the sports journalists would be the first to go because they just wrote to a formula anyway. I apologise to sports journalists everywhere.

The serious point behind that is that a lot of extreme, high claims are now being made about so-called artificial intelligence. I declare myself an artificial-intelligence sceptic. What we have now—so-called generative AI—is essentially big data. To quote the science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, what we have is applied statistics. Generative AI relies on looking at what already exists, and it cannot produce anything original. In many respects, it is a giant plagiarism machine. There are huge issues, beyond the scope of the Bill, around intellectual property and the fact that it is not generating anything original.

None the less, it is generating what people in the sector like to describe as hallucinations, which might otherwise be described as errors, falsehoods or lies. This is where quotes are made up; ideas are presented which, at first glance, look as though they make sense but fall apart under examination; and data is actively invented. There is one rather famous case where a lawyer got himself into a great deal of trouble by producing a whole lot of entirely false cases that a bot generated for him. We need to be really careful, and this amendment shows us a way forward in attempting to deal with some of the issues we are facing.

To pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, about the real-world impacts, I was at an event in Parliament this week entitled “The Worker Experience of the AI Revolution”, run by the TUC and Connected by Data. It highlighted what has happened with a lot of the big data exercises already in operation: rather than humans being replaced by robots, people are being forced to act like robots. We heard from Royal Mail and Amazon workers, who are monitored closely and expected to act like machines. That is just one example of the unexpected outcomes of the technologies we have been exercising in recent years.

I will make two final comments. First, I refer to 19th-century Luddite John Booth, who was tortured to death by the state. He was a Luddite, but he was also on the record as saying that new machinery

“might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

History is not pre-written; it is made by the choices, laws and decisions we make in this Parliament. Given where we are at the moment with so-called AI, I urge that caution really is warranted. We should think about putting some caution in the Bill, which is what this amendment points us towards.

My final point relates to an amendment I was not allowed to table because, I was told, it was out of scope. It asked the Secretary of State to report on the climate emissions coming from the digital sector, specifically from artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that it will operate on a vast scale. I point out that, already, the digital sector is responsible for 3% of the world’s electricity use and 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is about the same as the airline sector. We really need to think about caution. I very much agree with everyone who said that we need to have more discussions on all these issues before Report.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this is a real hit-and-run operation from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. He has put down an amendment on my favourite subject in the last knockings of the Bill. It is totally impossible to deal with this now—I have been thinking and talking about the whole area of AI governance and ethics for the past seven years—so I am not going to try. It is important, and the advisory committee under Clause 139 should take it into account. Actually, this is much more a question of authenticity and verification than of content. Trying to work out whether something is ChatGPT or GPT-4 content is a hopeless task; you are much more likely to be able to identify whether these are automated users such as chatbots than you are to know about the content itself.

I will leave it there. I missed the future-proofing debate, which I would have loved to have been part of. I look forward to further debates with the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, on the deficiencies in the White Paper and to the Prime Minister’s much more muscular approach to AI regulation in future.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 25th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, so few of us are involved in this discussion that we are now able to write each other’s speeches. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, for articulating some of my concerns, probably more elegantly than I will myself. I will focus on two amendments in this group; in fact, there are lots of interesting things, but I will focus on both the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton.

On the issue of proactive steps to remove listings of knives for young people, I am so sympathetic to this because in a different area of my life I am pretty preoccupied with the problem of knife crime among young people. It really bothers me and I worry about how we tackle it. My concern of course is that the police should be working harder to solve that problem and that we cannot anticipate that the Bill will solve all social problems. There is a danger of removing the focus from law enforcement in a real-world problem, as though removing how you buy the knife is the issue. I am not convinced that that helps us.

I wanted to reflect on the kind of dilemmas I am having around this in relation to the story of Mizzy that is doing the rounds. He is the 18 year-old who has been posting his prank videos on TikTok and has caused quite a stir. People have seen him wandering into strangers’ homes uninvited, asking random people in the street if they want to die, running off with an elderly lady’s dog and making fun of Orthodox Jews—generally speaking, this 18 year-old is obnoxious. His TikTok videos have gone viral; everybody is discussing them.

This cruelty for kicks genre of filming yourself, showing your face full to the camera and so on, is certainly abhorrent but, as with the discussion about knife crime, I have noticed that some people outside this House are attempting to blame the technology for the problem, saying that the videos should have been removed earlier and that it is TikTok’s fault that we have this anti-social behaviour, whereas I think it is a much deeper, broader social problem to do with the erosion of adult authority and the reluctance of grown-ups to intervene clearly when people are behaving badly—that is my thesis. It is undoubtedly a police matter. The police seem to have taken ages to locate Mizzy. They eventually got him and charged him with very low offences, so he was on TV being interviewed the other evening, laughing at how weak the law was. Under the laws he was laughing at, he could freely walk into somebody’s house or be obnoxious and get away with it. He said, “We can do what we want”. That mockery throws up problems, but I do not necessarily think that the Bill is the way to solve it.

That leads me to my concerns about Amendment 268AA, because Mizzy was quoted in the Independent newspaper as saying:

“I’m a Black male doing these things and that’s why there’s such an uproar”.


I then went on a social media thread in which any criticism of Mizzy’s behaviour was described as racist harassment. That shows the complexity of what is being called for in Amendment 268AA, which wants platforms to take additional steps

“to combat incidents of online racially aggravated harassment”.

My worry is that we end up with not only Mizzy’s TikTok videos being removed but his critics being removed for racially harassing him, so we have to be very careful here.

Amendment 268AA goes further, because it wants tech companies to push for prosecution. I really think it is a dangerous step to encourage private companies to get tangled up in deciding what is criminal and so on. The noble Lord, Lord Allan, has exactly described my concerns, so I will not repeat them. Maybe I can probe this probing amendment. It also broadens the issue to all forms of harassment.

By the way, the amendment’s explanatory statement mentions the appalling racist abuse aimed at footballers and public figures, but one of the fascinating things was that when we number-crunched and went granular, we found that the majority of that racist abuse seemed to have been generated by bots, which takes us to the position of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, earlier: who would you prosecute in that instance? Bots not even based in the UK were generating what was assumed to be an outbreak of racist abuse among football fans in the UK, but the numbers did not equate to that. There were some people being racist and vile and some things that were generated in these bot farms.

To go back to the amendment, it goes on to broaden the issue out to

“other forms of harassment and threatening or abusive behaviour”.

Again, this is much more complicated in today’s climate, because those kinds of accusation can be deployed for bad faith reasons, particularly against public figures.

We have an example close to this House. I hope that Members have been following and will show solidarity over what has been happening to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, who is chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and tasked with upholding the equality law but is at the centre of a vicious internal row after her officials filed a dossier of complaints about her. They have alleged that she is guilty of harassment. A KC is being brought in, there are 40 complaints and the whole thing is costing a fortune for both taxpayers and the noble Baroness herself.

It coincided with the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, advising Ministers to update the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 to make clear that it refers to biological sex and producing official advice clarifying that trans women can be lawfully excluded from female-only spaces. We know how toxic that whole debate is.

Many of us feel that a lot of the accusations against the noble Baroness are ideologically and politically motivated vexatious complaints. I am distressed to read newspaper reports that say that she has been close to tears and has asked why anyone would go into public service. All this is for the crime of being a regulator upholding and clarifying the law. I hope it does not happen to the person who ends up regulating Ofcom—ending up close to tears as he stands accused of harassment, abusive behaviour and so on.

The point is that she is the one being accused of harassment. I have seen the vile abuse that she has received online. It is completely defamatory, vicious abuse and yet somehow it ends up being that, because she does not provide psychological safety at work and because of her views, she is accused of harassment and is the one in the firing line. I do not want us to introduce that kind of complexity—this is what I have been worried about throughout—into what is banned, removed or sent to the police as examples of harassment or hate crime.

I know that is not the intention of these amendments; it is the unintended consequences that I dread.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 262 in my name, although in speaking after the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who suggested that the grown-ups should control anti-social behaviour by young people online, I note that there is a great deal of anti-social behaviour online from people of all ages. This is relevant to my Amendment 262.

It is a very simple amendment and would require the Secretary of State to consult with young people by means of an advisory board consisting of people aged 25 and under when reviewing the effectiveness and proportionality of this legislation. This amendment is a practical delivery of some of the discussion we had earlier in this Committee when we were talking about including the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Bill. There is a commonly repeated phrase, “Nothing about us without us”. It was popularised by disability activists in the 1990s, although in doing a little research for this I found that it originates in Latin in Poland in the 15th century. So it is an idea that has been around for a long while and is seen as a democratic standard. It is perhaps a variation of the old “No taxation without representation”.

This suggestion of an advisory board for the Secretary of State is because we know from the discussion earlier on the children’s rights amendments that globally one in three people online is a child under the age of 18. This comes to the point of the construction of your Lordships’ House. Most of us are a very long way removed in experiences and age—some of us further than others. The people in this Committee thinking about a 12 year-old online now are parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. I venture to say that it is very likely that the Secretary of State is at least a generation older than many of the people who will be affected by its provisions.

This reflects something that I also did on the Health and Care Bill. To introduce an advisory panel of young people reporting directly to the Secretary of State would ensure a direct voice for legislation that particularly affects young people. We know that under-18s across the UK do not have any role in elections to the other place, although 16 and 17 year-olds have a role in other elections in Wales and Scotland now. This is really a simple, clear, democratic step. I suspect the Minister might be inclined to say, “We are going to talk to charities and adults who represent children”. I suggest that what we really need here is a direct voice being fed in.

I want to reflect on a recent comment piece in the Guardian that made a very interesting argument: that there cannot be, now or in the future, any such thing as a digital native. Think of the experience of someone 15 or 20 years ago; yes, they already had the internet but it was a very different beast to what we have now. If we refer back to some of the earlier groups, we were starting to ask what an internet with widespread so-called generative artificial intelligence would look like. That is an internet which is very different from even the one that a 20 year-old is experiencing now.

It is absolutely crucial that we have that direct voice coming in from young people with experience of what it is like. They are an expert on what it is like to be a 12 year-old, a 15 year-old or a 20 year-old now, in a way that no one else can possibly be, so that is my amendment.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

We should also remember from our history that what is labelled as false by a minority of people can be invaluable scepticism, challenging a consensus and eventually allowing truth to emerge. The fact—the truth—was once that the world was flat. Luckily, the fact-checkers were not around to ban the minority who challenged that view, and now we know a different truth.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have attached my name to Amendments 52 and 99 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, respectively signed by the noble Lords, Lord Bethell and Lord Clement-Jones, and Amendment 222 in her name. I entirely agree with what both the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said. The noble Lord in particular gave us a huge amount of very well-evidenced information on the damage done during the Covid pandemic—and continuing to be done—by disinformation and misinformation. I will not repeat what they said about the damage done by the spread of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination falsehoods and the kind of malicious bots, often driven by state actors, that have caused such damage.

I want to come from a different angle. I think we were—until time prevented it, unfortunately—going to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, which would have been a valuable contribution to this debate. Her expert medical perspective would have been very useful. I think that she and I were the only two Members in the Committee who took part in the passage of the Medicines and Medical Devices Act. I think it was before the time of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell—he is shaking his head; I apologise. He took part in that as well. I also want to make reference to discussions and debates I had with him over changes to regulations on medical testing.

The additional point I want to make about disinformation and misinformation—this applies in particular to Amendment 222 about the independence of the advisory committee on disinformation and misinformation—is that we are now seeing in our medical system a huge rise in the number of private actors. These are companies seeking to encourage consumers or patients to take tests outside the NHS system and to get involved in a whole set of private provision. We are seeing a huge amount of advertising of foreign medical provision, given the pressures that our NHS is under. In the UK we have had traditionally, and still have, rules that place severe restrictions on the direct advertising of medicines and medical devices to patients— unlike, for example, the United States, where it is very much open slather, with some disastrous and very visible impacts.

We need to think about the fact that the internet, for better or for worse, is now a part of our medical system. If people feel ill, the first place they go—before they call the NHS, visit their pharmacist or whatever—is very often the internet, through these providers. We need to think about this in the round and as part of the medical system. We need to think about how our entire medical ecology is working, and that is why I believe we need amendments like these.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes two incredibly important points. We are seeking to give people greater agency on their own health and the internet has been an enormous bonus in doing that, but of course that environment needs to be curated extremely well. We are also seeking to make use of health tech—non-traditional clinical interventions, some of which do not pierce the skin and therefore fall outside the normal conversation with GPs—and giving people the power to make decisions about the use of these new technologies for themselves. That is why curation of the health information environment is so important. Does the noble Baroness have any reflections on that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. He has made me think of the fact that a particular area where this may be of grave concern is cosmetic procedures, which I think we debated during the passage of the Health and Care Act. These things are all interrelated, and it is important that we see them in an interrelated way as part of what is now the health system.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to a number of amendments in this group. I want to make the point that misinformation and disinformation was probably the issue we struggled with the most in the pre-legislative committee. We recognised the extraordinary harm it did, but also—as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said—that there is no one great truth. However, algorithmic spread and the drip, drip, drip of material that is not based on any search criteria or expression of an opinion but simply gives you more of the same, particularly the most shocking, moves very marginal views into the mainstream.

I am concerned that our debates over the last five days have concentrated so much on content, and that the freedom we seek does not take enough account of the way in which companies currently exercise control over the information we see. Correlations such as “Men who like barbecues are also susceptible to conspiracy theories” are then exploited to spread toxic theories that end in real-world harm or political tricks that show, for example, the Democrats as a paedophile group. Only last week I saw a series of pictures, presented as “evidence”, of President Biden caught in a compromising situation that gave truth to that lie. As Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner for her contribution to the freedom of expression, said in her acceptance speech:

“Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity”.


That is the background to this set of amendments that we must take seriously.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said, Amendment 52 will ensure that platforms undertake a health misinformation risk assessment and provide a clear policy on dealing with harmful, false and misleading information. I put it to the Committee that, without this requirement, we will keep the status quo in which clicks are king, not health information.

It is a particular pleasure to support the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on his Amendments 59 and 107. Like him, I am instinctively against taking material down. There are content-neutral ways of marking or questioning material, offering alternatives and signposting to diverse sources—not only true but diverse. These can break this toxic drip feed for long enough for people to think before they share, post and make personal decisions about the health information that they are receiving.

I am not incredibly thrilled by a committee for every occasion, but since the Bill is silent on the issue of misinformation and disinformation—which clearly will be supercharged by the rise of large language data models—it would be good to give a formal role to this advisory committee, so that it can make a meaningful and formal contribution to Ofcom as it develops not only this code of conduct but all codes of conduct.

Likewise, I am very supportive of Amendment 222, which seeks independence for the chair of the advisory body. I have seen at first hand how a combination of regulatory capture and a very litigious sector with deep pockets slows down progress and transparency. While the independence of the chair should be a given, our collective lived experience would suggest otherwise. This amendment would make that requirement clear.

Finally, and in a way most importantly, Amendment 224 would allow Ofcom to consider after the effect whether the code of conduct is necessary. This strikes a balance between adding to its current workload, which we are trying not to do, and tying one hand behind its back in the future. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister why we would not give Ofcom this option as a reasonable piece of future-proofing, given that this issue will be ever more important as AI creates layers of misinformation and disinformation at scale.

--- Later in debate ---

We need to equip society—children and adults—so that they can make knowledgeable and intelligent use of the internet. We have focused on the harm that the internet does, but the proper use of it can have a very positive impact. The previous debate that we had about misinformation and disinformation highlighted the importance of media literacy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and I join her in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for introducing this group very clearly.

In taking part in this debate, I declare a joint interest with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in that I was for a number of years a judge in the Debating Matters events to which she referred. Indeed, the noble Baroness was responsible for me ending up in Birmingham jail, during the time that such a debate was conducted with the inmates of Birmingham jail. We have a common interest there.

I want to pick up a couple of additional points. Before I joined your Lordships’ Committee today I was involved in the final stages of the Committee debate on the economic crime Bill, where the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, provided a powerful argument—probably unintentionally—for the amendments we are debating here now. We were talking, as we have at great length in the economic crime Bill, about the issue of fraud. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, highlighted, in the context of online harms fraud is a huge aspect of people’s lives today and one that has been under-covered in this Committee, although it has very much been picked up in the economic crime Bill Committee. As we were talking about online fraud, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, said that consumers have to be “appropriately savvy”. I think that is a description of the need for education and critical thinking online, equipping people with the tools to be, as he said, appropriately savvy when facing the risks of fraud and scams, and all the other risks that people face online.

I have attached my name to two amendments here: Amendment 91, which concerns the providers of category 1 and 2A services having a duty, and Amendment 236, which concerns an Ofcom duty. This joins together two aspects. The providers are making money out of the services they provide, which gives them a duty to make some contribution to combatting the potential harms that their services present to people. Ofcom as a regulator obviously has a role. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who said that the education system also has a role, and there is some reference in here to Ofsted having a role.

What we need is a cross-society, cross-systems approach. This is where I also make the point that we need to think outside the scope of the Bill—it is part of the whole package—about how the education system works, because media literacy is not a stand-alone thing that you can separate out from the issues of critical thinking more broadly. We need to think about our education system, which is far too often, for schools in particular, where we get pupils to learn and regurgitate a whole set of facts and then reward them for that. We need to think about how our education system prepares children for the modern online world.

There is a great deal we can learn from the example—often cited but worth referring to—of Finland, which by various tests has been ranked as the country most resistant to fake news. A very clearly built-in idea of questioning, scrutiny and challenge is being encouraged among pupils, starting from the age of seven. That is something we need to transform our education system to achieve. However, of course, many people using the internet now are not part of our education system, so this needs to be across our society. A focus on the responsibilities of Ofcom and the providers has to be in the Bill.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, over the last decade, I have been in scores of schools, run dozens of workshops and spoken to literally thousands of children and young people. A lot of what I pass off as my own wisdom in this Chamber is, indeed, their wisdom. I have a couple of points, and I speak really from the perspective of children under 18 with regard to these amendments, which I fully support.

Media literacy—or digital literacy, as it is sometimes called—is not the same as e-safety. E-safety regimes concentrate on the behaviour of users. Very often, children say that what they learn in those lessons is focused on adult anxieties about predators and bullies, and when something goes wrong, they feel that they are to blame. It puts the responsibility on children. This response, which I have heard hundreds of times, normally comes up after a workshop in which we have discussed reward loops, privacy, algorithmic bias, profiling or—my own favourite—a game which reveals what is buried in terms and conditions; for example, that a company has a right to record the sound of a device or share their data with more than a thousand other companies. When young people understand the pressures that they are under and which are designed into the system, they feel much better about themselves and rather less enamoured of the services they are using. It is my experience that they then go on to make better choices for themselves.

Secondly, we have outsourced much of digital literacy to companies such as Google and Meta. They too concentrate on user behaviour, rather than looking at their own extractive policies focused on engagement and time spent. With many schools strapped for cash and expertise, this teaching is widespread. However, when I went to a Google-run assembly, children aged nine were being taught about features available only on services for those aged over 13—and nowhere was there a mention of age limits and why they are important. It cannot be right that the companies are grooming children towards their services without taking full responsibility for literacy, if that is the literacy that children are being given in school.

Thirdly, as the Government’s own 2021 media literacy strategy set out, good media literacy is one line of defence from harm. It could make a crucial difference in people making informed and safe decisions online and engaging in a more positive online debate, at the same time as understanding that online actions have consequences offline.

However, while digital literacy and, in particular, critical thinking are fundamental to a contemporary education and should be available throughout school and far beyond, they must not be used as a way of putting responsibility on the user for the company’s design decisions. I am specifically concerned that in the risk-assessment process, digital literacy is one of the ways that a company can say it has mitigated a potential risk or harm. I should like to hear from the Minister that that is an additional responsibility and not instead of responsibility.

Finally, over all these years I have always asked at the end of the session what the young people care about the most. The second most important thing is that the system should be less addictive—it should have less addiction built into it. Again, I point the Committee in the direction of the safety-by-design amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Russell that try to get to the crux of that. They are not very exciting amendments in this debate but they get to the heart of it. However, the thing the young people most often say is, “Could you do something to get my parents to put down their phones?” I therefore ask the Minister whether he can slip something into the Bill, and indeed ask the noble Lord, Lord Grade, whether that could emerge somewhere in the guidance. That is what young people want.