Protection of Children Codes of Practice

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Viscount Colville of Culross

Thursday 30th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for initiating this debate, and I agree with almost everything he has just said.

I applaud the enormous work that Ofcom has put into creating and implementing the children’s codes. I am pleased to hear that they have already led to a huge reduction in children online accidentally stumbling on pornography and other harmful materials. However, I fear, as the noble Lord has just said, that the rules-based nature of the codes specifies narrow recommended measures rather than incentivising desired outcomes and encouraging the platforms to implement mitigations to children’s harms which go beyond these codes. This is particularly the case with live-streaming, which, according to Ofcom’s own finding, is a risky functionality. The regulator’s register of risk says that live-streaming can be a risk for several kinds of harm to children; it specifies the real-time sharing of suicide and self-harm content.

When Dame Melanie Dawes came before the Communications and Digital Committee, on which I have the privilege to serve, she said that Ofcom had implemented mitigations to live streaming for under 18s. The measures stopped them from using likes, switches off screen capture and prohibits comments on their feeds. This has the beneficial effect of stopping any adult who might consider grooming a child from interacting and encouraging the child user to take further action. However, it still exposes children to potential harms from adult predators. Surely, the best option would be to stop children from using the functionality, or at least introduce some age-appropriate design that limits usage to 16 to 18 year-olds. I know that Ofcom regards such a ban, or even age-appropriate design, as being too punitive for a service that is used by under 18 year-olds, but it would achieve the aim of the Online Safety Act, which is to protect children from harm.

In addition, I would ask the regulator to address established pathways to harm that end in live streams, even if they do not begin there, in particular the specific threat profile of “com groups”, where children are identified and contacted via other functionalities and then moved to live streams, where they are often coerced into horrific actions. These and other upstream measures will protect children from these harms. It may be a good idea to look at introducing time delays between an account being set up and being allowed to start a live stream. Some services, such as LiveMe, have already banned children from live-streaming on their apps. My additional fear is that, even when services go beyond the thresholds set out in the Act, there is no rollback provision to stop them reneging on such beneficial actions.

My other area of concern is the use of VPNs by children, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, just raised. A huge rise in their use was reported when the codes were first introduced. Internet Matters estimated that, of the under-18s, one in 10 was using VPNs. The fear was that they were going on to VPNs to access harmful content, which the codes had prevented them reaching. Ofcom has said that it is uncertain why there is a big increase in use. Many children claim that they need the VPN because the internet connection at their school is bad and it is a way of improving access to the internet. I wonder why, if this is the case, the rise in VPN use should coincide with the introduction of the children’s code. If there had been a problem with school connections, surely that issue would have been raised prior to the code’s adoption.

The Children’s Commissioner, in her August report, called for the Government to

“explore options to ensure children aren’t able to use VPNs to avoid the age assurance process”.

This could be achieved by

“amending the Online Safety Act to bring in an additional provision which would require VPN providers in the UK to put in place Highly Effective Age Assurance … and prevent them from accessing pornographic sites”.

Can the Minister tell the House whether any such measures are being considered?

At the very least, there should be an education programme for parents who, in many cases, enhance the policing of their children’s use of VPNs by understanding their possible misuses. For instance, when they are asked to pay for children’s access to the VPN app, they should interrogate the need for this access. Surely general advice for safety protection could be given to parents, as happens with parental control of video games.

I know that Ofcom is carrying out research into why children are using VPNs. It is a welcome step, but I must ask why this was not anticipated and research carried out earlier. I am pleased with the greatly improved safety environment for children introduced with these codes, but the internet is a dangerous place. I therefore ask the Minister to ensure that it is a safe place for our children in all its functionalities.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble, Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for bringing this regret Motion. He gave a tour de force of all the reasons why we should regret that these codes are not more ambitious. I too wholeheartedly support the Online Safety Act and, once again, it is a privilege to be with the tech team across the aisles that has worked on this legislation for a very long time. I do not in any way want to diminish the substantial work that Ofcom has done on this. It is a ground-breaking piece of legislation, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said. There is a huge amount of work to implement it and I would not want in any way to slow down that implementation. I regret, however, that these codes are not more ambitious.

My remarks will, very briefly, focus on the first group of concerns that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, focused on: insufficient protections and the lack of ambition in them. I will specifically focus on whether these codes really allow for age-appropriate experiences. Any parent or grandparent knows that what is appropriate for a 13 year-old is very different from what is appropriate for a 17 year-old. Yet, sadly, although Ofcom recognises that user-to-user services should

“consider children in different age groups”,

there is little or no guidance on what they should actually consider. As we are learning, unless those things are specified in detail, the safe harbour provision just means that the user-to-user services do not really need to do it at all. As a result, it is highly unlikely that these codes will produce user-to-user services that are age appropriate for 13 year-olds relative to 17 year-olds. Even more fundamentally, they will not address the millions of under-13s using social media platforms that even those providers themselves admit are only appropriate for 13 year-olds and above.

Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Viscount Colville of Culross

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

So it is not the same?

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

Before my noble friend answers that, can he shed some light on which stakeholders feel that this is unclear?

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Viscount Colville of Culross

Report stage
Wednesday 12th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, the codes of practice are among the most important documents that Ofcom will produce as a result of the Bill—in effect, deciding what content we, the users of the internet, will see. The Government’s right to modify these drafts affects us all, so it is absolutely essential that the codes are trusted.

I, too, welcome the Government’s Amendments 134 to 138, which are a huge improvement on the Clause 39 that was presented in Committee. I am especially grateful that the Government have not proceeded with including economic conditions as a reason for the Secretary of State to modify draft codes, which the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, pointed out in Committee would be very damaging. But I would like the Minister to go further, which is why I put my name to Amendments 139, 140, 144 and 145.

Amendment 139 is so important at the moment. My fear is about the opt-out from publishing these directions from the Secretary of State for Ofcom to modify the draft codes, which will then allow them to be made behind closed doors between the Government and the regulator. This should not be allowed to happen. It would happen at a time when trust in the Government is low and there is a feeling that so many decisions affecting us all are taken without our knowledge. Surely it is right that there should be as much transparency as possible in exposing the pressure that the Minister is placing on the regulator. I hope that, if this amendment is adopted, it will allow Parliament to impose the bright light of transparency on the entire process, which is in danger of becoming opaque.

I am sure that no one wants a repeat of what happened under Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, which gave the Secretary of State power to give directions of a “general character” to anyone, in the “interests of national security” or international relations, as long as they did not disclose important information to Parliament. The Minister’s power to operate in total secrecy, without any accountability to Parliament, was seen by many as wrong and undemocratic. It was subsequently repealed. Amendments 139 and 140 will prevent the creation of a similar problem.

Likewise, I support Amendment 144, which builds on the previous amendments, as another brake on the control of the Secretary of State over this important area of regulations. Noble Lords in this House know how much the Government dislike legislative ping-pong—which we will see later this evening, I suspect. I ask the Minister to transfer this dislike to limiting ping-pong between the Government and the regulator over the drafting of codes of practice. It would also prevent the Secretary of State or civil servants expanding their control of the draft codes of practice from initial parameters to slightly wider sets of parameters each time that they are returned to the Minister for consideration. It will force the civil servants and the Secretary of State to make a judgment on the limitation of content and ensure that they stick to it. As it is, the Secretary of State has two bites of the cherry. They are involved in the original shaping of the draft codes of practice and then they can respond to Ofcom’s formulation. I hope the Minister would agree that it is sensible to stop this process from carrying on indefinitely. I want the users of the digital world to have full faith that the control of online content they see is above board —and not the result of secretive government overreach.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, not for the first time I find myself in quite a different place from my noble friend Lord Moylan. Before I go through some detailed comments on the amendments, I want to reflect that at the root of our disagreement is a fundamental view about how serious online safety is. The logical corollary of my noble friend’s argument is that all decisions should be taken by Secretaries of State and scrutinised in Parliament. We do not do that in other technical areas of health and safety in the physical world and we should not do that in the digital world, which is why I take such a different view—