Online Safety Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I reiterate what the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, has said and thank him for our various discussions between Committee and Report, particularly on this set of amendments to do with age verification. I also welcome the Government’s responsiveness to the concerns raised in Committee. I welcome these amendments, which are a step forward.

In Committee, I was arguing that there should be a level playing field for regulating any online platform with pornographic content, whether it falls under Part 3 or Part 5 of the Bill. I welcome the Government’s significant changes to Clauses 11 and 72 to ensure that robust age verification or estimation must be used and that standards are consistent across the Bill.

I have a few minor concerns that I wish to highlight. I am thoughtful about whether enough is required of search services in preventing young people from accessing pornography in Clause 25. I recognise the Government believe they have satisfied the need. I fear they may have done enough in the short term, but there is a real concern that this clause is not sufficiently future-proofed. Of course, only time will tell. Maybe the Minister could advise us further in that particular regard.

In Committee, I also argued that the duties in respect of pornography in Parts 3 and 5 must come into effect at the same time. I welcome the government commitment to placing a timeframe for the codes of practice and guidance on the face of the Bill through amendments including Amendment 230. I hope that the Minister will reassure us today that it is the Government’s intention that the duties in Clauses 11 and 72 will come into effect at the same time. Subsection (3) of the new clause proposed in Amendment 271 specifically states that the duties could come into effect at different times, which leaves a loophole for pornography to be regulated differently, even if only for a short time, between Part 3 and Part 5 services. This would be extremely regrettable.

I would also like to reiterate what I said last Thursday, in case the Minister missed my contribution when he intervened on me. I say once again that I commend the Minister for the announcement of the review of the regulation, legislation and enforcement of pornography offences, which I think was this time last week. I once again ask the Minister: will he set out a timetable for publishing the terms of reference and details of how this review will take place? If he cannot set out that timetable today, will he write to your Lordships setting out the timetable before the Recess, and ensure a copy is placed in the Library?

Finally, all of us across the House have benefited from the expertise of expert organisations as we have considered this Bill. I repeat my request to the Minister that he consider establishing an external reference group to support the review, consisting of those NGOs with particular and dedicated expertise. Such groups would have much to add to the process—they have much learning and advice, and there is much assistance there to the Government in that regard.

Once again, I thank the Minister for listening and responding. I look forward to seeing the protections for children set out in these amendments implemented. I shall watch implementation very closely, and I trust and hope that the regulator will take robust action once the codes of practice and guidance are published. Children above all will benefit from a safer internet.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the government amendments in this group, which set out the important role that age assurance will play in the online safety regime. I particularly welcome Amendment 210, which states that companies must employ systems that are “highly effective” at correctly determining whether a particular user is a child to prevent access to pornography, and Amendment 124, which sets out in a code of practice principles which must be followed when implementing age assurance—principles that ensure alignment of standards and protections with the ICO’s age appropriate design code and include, among other things, that age assurance systems should be easy to use, proportionate to the risk and easy to understand, including to those with protected characteristics, as well as aiming to be interoperable. The code is a first step from current practice, in which age verification is opaque, used to further profile children and related adults and highly ineffective, to a world in which children are offered age-appropriate services by design and default.

I pay tribute again to the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and I associate myself with the broad set of thanks that the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, gave in his opening speech. I also thank colleagues across your Lordships’ House and the other place for supporting this cause with such clarity of purpose. On this matter, I believe that the UK is world-beating, and it will be a testament to all those involved to see the UK’s age verification and estimation laws built on a foundation of transparency and trust so that those impacted feel confident in using them—and we ensure their role in delivering the online world that children and young people deserve.

I have a number of specific questions about government Amendment 38 and Amendment 39. I would be grateful if the Minister were able to answer them from the Dispatch Box and in doing so give a clear sign of the Government’s intent. I will also speak briefly to Amendments 125 and 217 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, as well as Amendment 184 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. All three amendments address privacy.

Government Amendment 38, to which I have added my name, offers exemptions in new subsections (3A) and (3B) that mean that a regulated company need not use age verification or estimation to prevent access to primary priority content if they already prevent it by means of its terms of service. First, I ask the Minister to confirm that these exemptions apply only if a service effectively upholds its terms of service on a routine basis, and that failure to do so would trigger enforcement action and/or an instruction from Ofcom to apply age assurance.

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[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I shall follow on directly from some of the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, around privacy. I shall not repeat the arguments around children and pornography but touch on something else, which is the impact of these amendments on the vast majority of internet users, the 85%-plus who are 18 or older. Of course, when we introduce age assurance measures, they will affect everyone: we should not kid ourselves that it is only about children, because everyone will have to pass through these gateways.

I shall speak particularly to Amendments 184 and 217 on privacy. I am sure that most adults will support extra safety measures for children, but they also want to be able to access a wide range of online services with the least possible friction and the lowest risk to their own personal data. We can explore how this might work in practice by looking at something that we might all do in this Chamber. Looking round, I believe that we are all at least 18 years old, and we might find ourselves idly passing the time creating an account on a new user-to-user or search service that has been recommended. We should consider this group of amendments by how that might play out. In future, the services will have to check that we are in the United Kingdom—there is a range of ways in which they can do that. Having confirmed that, they will need to understand whether we are 18-plus or a child user so that they can tailor their service appropriately.

I hope we all agree that the services should not be asking us for passports or driving licences, for example, as that would be entirely contrary to the thrust of privacy regulations and would be a huge gateway to fraud and other problems. The most efficient way would be for them to ask us for some sort of digital certificate—a certificate that we have on our devices where we have proven to a trusted third party that we are 18-plus. The certificate does not need to contain any personal data but simply confirms that we are of age. That is very similar to the way in which secure websites work: they send a digital certificate to your browser and you verify that certificate with a trusted third party—a certificate authority—and then you can open an encrypted connection. We are reversing the flow: the service will ask the user for a certificate and then verify that before granting access. A user may have a setting on their device in future where they confirm that they are happy for their 18-plus certificate to be given to anybody or whether they would like to be asked every time there will be a new set of privacy controls.

Building the infrastructure for this is non-trivial. Many things could go wrong but at least the kind of model I am describing has some hope of achieving widespread adoption. It is very good for the adult users as they can continue to have the frictionless experience as long as they are happy for their device to send a certificate to new services. It is good for the market of internet services if new services can bring users on easily. It is good for privacy by avoiding lots of services each collecting personal data, as most people access a multiplicity of services. Perhaps most importantly in terms of the Bill’s objectives, it is good for children if services can separate out the vast majority of their users who are 18-plus and then focus their real efforts on tailoring the services for the minority of users who will be children. The Bill will introduce a whole set of new obligations.

We should not underestimate the scale of the challenge in practice; it will work only if major internet companies are willing to play the game and get into the market of offering 18-plus certificates. Companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft—the ones we normally love to hate—will potentially provide the solution, as well as not-for-profits. There will be foundations for those who object to the big internet companies, but it is those big internet companies which will have the reach; they each have millions of users in the United Kingdom. This is not to fly the flag for those companies; it is simply a question of efficiency. I suspect that everyone in the Chamber uses a combination of services from those big providers. We already share with them the personal data necessary for age assurance, and there would be no additional sharing of data. If they were willing to provide a certificate, they could do so at the kind of scale necessary for the 50 million or so adult internet users in the United Kingdom to be able to get one easily and then pass it to services when they choose to access them.

There may be some discomfort with big tech playing this role, but I cannot see the kind of aggressive targets that we are setting in the amendments working unless we take advantage of those existing platforms and use them to make this work. Amendment 230 tells us that we have about 18 months, which is very soon in terms of trying to build something. We should be clear that if we are to deliver this package it will depend on persuading some of those big names in tech to create age certification schemes for UK users.

For this to have widespread adoption and a competitive market, we need it to be free of direct financial costs to individual users and to services choosing to age-verify, as we have asked them to do so. We need to think very carefully about that, as it raises a whole series of competition questions that I am sure Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority will have to address, not least because we will be asking companies to provide age certification free of charge that will be used by their existing and future competitors to meet their compliance requirements.

There may be some listening who think that we can rely on small age-assurance start-ups. Some of them have a really important role to play and we should be proud of our homegrown industry, but we should be realistic that they will reach scale only if they work with and through the large service providers. Many of them are already seeking those kinds of relationship.

As a test case, we might think of an application such as Signal, a messaging app that prides itself on being privacy-first. It does not want to collect any additional information from its users, which is perfectly reasonable, given where it is coming from. It will be really interesting to see how comfortable such a service will be with working with certification schemes, under which it can prove that users are over 18 by taking advantage of the data held by other services which collect significant amounts of data and have a very good idea of how old we are.

I have not focused on under-18s but, once this system is in place, application providers will be thinking very carefully about the pros and cons of allowing under-18s on at all. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is also concerned about this. There will be services that will think very carefully, if they find that the vast majority of their users are 18-plus, about the extent to which they want to put time and effort into tailoring them for users under 18. We do not intend that outcome from the Bill, but we need realistically to consider it.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

Just to be clear, I say that the purpose of my question to the Minister was to get at the fact that, for low-risk situations, there can be age assurance that is a lot less effective or intrusive, for that very reason.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

I agree; that is very helpful. I think Amendments 74, 93 and 99 also talk about the exclusion, as the noble Baroness raised, of services from the child safety duties if they can show that they are only 18-plus. It will be quite material and critical to know at what level they can demonstrate that.

I have avoided talking about pornography services directly, but there are interesting questions around what will happen if this model develops, as it likely will. If big tech is now starting to provide age certification for the kinds of mainstream services we may all want to access, they may be much less comfortable providing that same certification to pornography providers, for reputational reasons. A mainstream provider would not want to enter that market. Ofcom will need to take a view on this. We have talked about interoperability in the framework we have created, but it is a big question for Ofcom whether it wants to steer all age certification providers also to provide 18-plus certification for pornography providers or, effectively, to allow two markets to develop—one for mainstream certification and one for certification for pornography.

I have taken a few minutes because this is a very high-risk area for the Bill. There are material risks in willing into existence a model that depends on technical infrastructure that has not yet been built. The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, referred to prior experience; one of the reasons why we have not delivered age assurance before is that the infrastructure was not there. We now want it built, so must recognise that it is quite a high-risk endeavour. That does not mean it is not worth attempting, but we must recognise the risks and work on them.

If the implementation is poor, it will frustrate adult users, which may bring the Bill into disrepute. We need to recognise that as a genuine risk. There are people out there already saying that the Bill means that every internet service in the world will ask you for your passport. If that is not the case, we need to stress that we do not expect that to happen. There are also potentially significant impacts on the market for online services available to both adults and children in the UK, depending on the design of this system.

The purpose of thinking about some of these risks today is not to create a doom-laden scenario and say that it will not work. It is entirely the opposite—to say that, if we are to move ahead into a world in which children are protected from harmful content, for which very good reasons have been articulated and a huge amount of work has gone ahead, and in which services can tailor and gear access to the age of the child, we have to be able to take the 18-plus out of that, put it into a separate box and do so in a really easy, straightforward manner. If not, the 18-plus will end up dragging down what we want to do for the underage.

I hope that explanation helps in the context of these amendments. We will need to test them against it as implementation happens over the next few months.

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Moved by

[Baroness Kidron]

35: Clause 10, page 9, line 37, at end insert—
“(iv) features, functionalities or behaviours (including those enabled or created by the design or operation of the service) that are harmful to children”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that in carrying out risk assessments, user to user services must consider the potential for the design and operation of services to create harm separately and additionally to harm relating to the dissemination of or encountering harmful content.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to all the amendments in this group. It is a cause of great regret that, despite many private meetings with officials, government lawyers and Ministers, we have not yet come to an agreement that would explicitly include in the Bill harm that does not derive from content. I will be listening very carefully to the Minister, if he should change his mind during the debate.

The amendments in this group fall into three categories. First, there is a series of amendments in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford: Amendments 35, 36, 37A and 85. I hope the Government will accept them as consequential because, in meetings last week, they would not accept that harm to children can arise from the functionality and design of services and not just from the content. Each of these amendments simply makes it clear that harm can arise absent from content: nothing more, nothing less. If the Minister agrees that harm may derive from the design of products and services, can he please explain, when he responds, why these amendments are not acceptable? Simply put, it is imperative that the features, functionalities or behaviours that are harmful to children, including those enabled or created by the design or operation of the service, are in scope of the Bill. This would make it utterly clear that a regulated company has a duty to design its service in a manner that does not harm children.

The Government have primary priority harmful content, priority content or non-designated harmful content, the latter being a category that is yet to be defined, but not the harm that emerges from how the regulated company designs its service. For example, there are the many hundreds of small reward loops that make up a doomscroll or make a game addictive; commercial decisions such as Pokémon famously did for a time, which was to end every game in a McDonald’s car park; or, more sinister still, the content-neutral friend recommendations that introduce a child to other children like them, while pushing children into siloed groups. For example, they deliberately push 13 year-old boys towards Andrew Tate—not for any content reason, but simply on the basis that 13 year-old boys are like each other and one of them has already been on that site.

The impact of a content-neutral friend recommendation has rocked our schools as female teachers and girls struggle with the attitudes and actions of young boys, and has torn through families, who no longer recognise their sons and brothers. To push hundreds of thousands of children towards Andrew Tate for no reason other than to benefit commercially from the network effect is a travesty for children and it undermines parents.

The focus on content is old-fashioned and looks backwards. The Bill is drafted as if it has particular situations and companies in mind but does not think about how fast the business moves. When we started the Bill, none of us thought about the impact of TikTok; last week, we saw a new service, Threads, go from zero to 70 million users in a single day. It is an act of stunning hubris to be so certain of the form of harm. To be unprepared to admit that some harm is simply design means that, despite repeated denials, this is just a content Bill. The promise of systems and processes being at the heart of the Bill has been broken.

The second set of amendments in this group are in the name of my noble friend Lord Russell. Amendments 46 and 90 further reveal the attitude of the Government, in that they are protecting the companies rather than putting them four-square in the middle of their regime. The Government specifically exempt the manner of dissemination from the safety duties. My noble friend Lord Russell’s amendment would leave that out and ensure that the manner of dissemination, which is fundamental to the harm that children experience, is included. Similarly, Amendment 240 would take out “presented by content” so that harm that is the result of the design decisions is included in the Bill.

The third set are government Amendments 281C and 281D, and Amendment 281F, in my name. For absence of doubt, I am totally supportive of government Amendments 281C to 281E, which acknowledge the cumulative harms; for example, those that Molly Russell experienced as she was sent more and more undermining and harmful content. In as far as they are a response to my entreaties, and those of other noble Lords, that we ensure that cumulative harmful content is the focus of our concerns, I am grateful to the Government for tabling them. However, I note that the Government have conceded only the role of cumulative harm for content. Amendments 281D and 281E once again talk about content as the only harm to children.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford have added their names to Amendment 281F, and I believe I am right in saying that if there were not a limit to four names, there were a great many Peers who would have added their names also. For the benefit of the House, I will quote directly from the amendment:

“When in relation to children, references to harm include the potential impact of the design and operation of a regulated service separately and additionally from harms arising from content, including the following considerations … the potential cumulative impact of exposure to harm or a combination of harms … the potential for harm to result from features, functionalities or behaviours enabled or created by the design and operation of services … the potential for some features and functionalities within a service to be higher risk than other aspects of the service … that a service may, when used in conjunction with other services, facilitate harm to a child on a different service … the potential for design strategies that exploit a child’s developmental vulnerabilities to create harm, including validation metrics and compulsive reward loops … the potential for real time services, features and functionalities such as geolocation, livestream broadcasts or events, augmented and virtual environments to put children at immediate risk … the potential for content neutral systems that curate or generate environments, content feeds or contacts to create harm to children … that new and emerging harms may arise from artificial intelligence, machine generated and immersive environments”.


Before I continue, I ask noble Lords to consider which of those things they would not like for their children, grandchildren or, indeed, other people’s children. I have accepted that the Government will not add the schedule of harms as I first laid it: the four Cs of content, conduct, contact and commercial harms. I have also accepted that the same schedule, written in the less comfortable language of primary priority, priority and non-designated harms, has also been rejected. However, the list that I just set out, and the amendment to the duties that reflect those risks, would finally put the design of the system at the heart of the Bill. I am afraid that, in spite of all our conversations, I cannot accept the Government’s argument that all harm comes from content.

Even if we are wrong today—which we are most definitely not—in a world of AI, immersive tech and augmented reality, is it not dangerous and, indeed, foolish, to exclude harm that might come from a source other than content? I imagine that the Minister will make the argument that the features are covered in the risk assessment duties and that, unlike content, features may be good or bad so they cannot be characterised as harmful. To that I say: if the risk assessment is the only process that matters, why do the Government feel it necessary to define the child safety duties and the interpretation of harm? The truth is, they have meaning. In setting out the duty of a company to a child, why would the Government not put the company’s design decisions right at the centre of that duty?

As for the second part of the argument, a geolocation feature may of course be great for a map service but less great if it shows the real-time location of a child to a predator, and livestreaming from a school concert is very different from livestreaming from your bedroom. Just as the noble Lord, Lord Allan, explained on the first day on Report, there are things that are red lines and things that are amber; in other words, they have to be age-appropriate. This amendment does not seek—nor would it mean—that individual features or functionalities would be prevented, banned or stopped. It would mean that a company had a duty to make sure that their features and functionalities were age-appropriate and did not harm children—full stop. There would be no reducing this to content.

Finally, I want to repeat what I have said before. Sitting in the court at Molly Russell’s inquest, I watched the Meta representative contest content that included blood cascading down the legs of a young woman, messages that said, “You are worthless”, and snippets of film of people jumping off buildings. She said that none of those things met the bar of harmful content according to Meta’s terms and conditions.

Like others, I believe that the Online Safety Bill could usher in a new duty of care towards children, but it is a category error not to see harm in the round. Views on content can always differ but the outcome on a child is definitive. It is harm, not harmful content, that the Bill should measure. If the Minister does not have the power to accede, I will, with great regret, be testing the opinion of the House. I beg to move.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, as so often in the course of the Bill, I associate myself wholeheartedly with the comments that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just made. I, too, thank my noble friend the Minister and the Secretary of State for listening to our debates in Committee on the need to be explicit about the impact of cumulative harmful content. So I support Amendments 281C, 281D and 281E, and I thank them for tabling them.

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We have talked about this at great length. If we can use the time between now and Third Reading fruitfully to address the points I have raised on these amendments—the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has heard them repeatedly; I make them for the benefit of the rest of your Lordships’ House, because we have had much discussion—I am very willing to look at that and bring forward points to address this at Third Reading. However, I have set out our concerns about the approach taken in the amendments she has tabled. I am very grateful to her for her time and for discussing this. Procedurally, if she presses them to a vote now, the matter will have been dealt with on Report and we will not be able to look at this again at Third Reading. I hope she may yet have found comfort in what I have said and be willing to continue those discussions, but if she wishes to press her amendments to a Division now, the Government will not be able to accept them and I would recommend that noble Lords vote against.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I thank everybody who has spoken for these amendments. I also thank the Minister for our many discussions and apologise to the House for the amount of texts that I sent while we were trying to get stand-alone harms into the Bill—unfortunately, we could not; we were told that it was a red line.

It is with some regret that I ask the House to walk through the Lobbies. Before I do so, I acknowledge that the Government have met me on very many issues, for which I am deeply grateful. There are no concessions on this Bill, only making it better. From my perspective, there is no desire to push anybody anywhere, only to protect children and give citizens the correct relationship with the digital world.

I ask those who were not here when I said this before: please think about your children and grandchildren and other people’s children and grandchildren before you vote against these amendments. They are not only heartfelt, as the Minister said, but have been drafted with reference to many experts and people in the business, who, in their best practice, meet some of these things already. We do not want the Bill, by concentrating on content, to be a drag on what we are pushing forward. We want it to be aspirational and to push the industry into another culture and another place. At a personal level, I am very sorry to the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of respect, but I would like to test the opinion of the House.

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Moved by

[Baroness Kidron]

36: Clause 11, page 10, line 38, at end insert—
“(c) mitigate the impact of harm to children in different age groups presented by features, functionalities or behaviours enabled or created by the design or operation of the service.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that User to user services’ duty to protect children from harm includes the ways in which the design and operation of services may create harm separately and additionally to harm relating to the dissemination of or encountering harmful content.

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Moved by

[Baroness Kidron]

37A: Clause 11, page 10, line 46, at end insert—
“(c) protect children in age groups judged to be at risk of harm from features, functionalities or behaviours enabled or created by the design or operation of the service”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that user to user services’ duty to protect children from harm includes the ways in which the design and operation of services may create harm separately and additionally to harm relating to the dissemination or encountering harmful content.

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[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, as somebody who is only five feet and two inches, I have felt that size does not matter for pretty much all my life and have long wanted to say that in a speech. This group of amendments is really about how size does not matter; risk does. I will briefly build on the speech just given by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, very eloquently as usual, to describe why risk matters more than size.

First, there are laws for which size does matter—small companies do not need to comply with certain systems and processes—but not those concerned with safety. I have in my mind’s eye the small village fête, where we expect a risk assessment if we are to let children ride on rides. That was not the case 100 years ago, but is today because we recognise those dangers. One of the reasons why we stumbled into thinking that size should matter in this Bill is that we are not being honest about the scale of the risk for our children. If the risk is large enough, we should not be worrying about size; we should be worrying about that risk. That is the first reason why we have to focus on risk and not size.

The second reason is subsequent to what I have just said—the principles of the physical world should apply to the online world. That is one of the core tenets of this Bill. That means that if you recognise the real and present risks of the digital world you have to say that it does not matter whether a small number of people are affected. If it is a small business, it still has an obligation not to put people in harm’s way.

Thirdly, small becomes big very quickly—unfortunately, that has not been true for me, but it is true in the digital world as Threads has just shown us. Fourthly, we also know that in the digital world re-engineering something once it has got very big is really difficult. There is also a practical reason why you want engineers to think about the risks before they launch services rather than after the event.

We keep being told, rightly, that this is a Bill about systems and processes. It is a Bill where we want not just the outcomes that the noble Lord, Lord Allan, has referred to in terms of services in the UK genuinely being safer; we are trying to effect a culture change. I would argue one of the most important culture changes is that any bright, young tech entrepreneur has to start by thinking about the risks and therefore the safety procedures they need to put in place as they build their tech business from the ground up and not once they have reached some artificial size threshold.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I have to admit that it was incompetence rather than lack of will that meant I did not add my name to Amendment 39 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, and I would very much like the Government to accept his argument.

In the meantime, I wonder whether the Minister would be prepared to make it utterly clear that proportionality does not mean a little bit of porn to a large group of children or a lot of porn to a small group of children; rather, it means that high-risk situations require effective measures and low-risk situations should be proportionate to that. On that theme, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Allan, whose points I broadly agree with, that while we would all wish to see companies brought into the fold rather than being out of the fold, it rather depends on their risk.

This brings me neatly to Amendments 43 and 87 from the noble Lord, Lord Russell, to which I managed to add my name. They make a very similar point to Amendment 39 but across safety duties. Amendment 242 in my name, to which the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford have added their names, makes the same point—yet again—in relation to Ofcom’s powers.

All these things are pointing in the same direction as Amendment 245 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, which I keep on trumpeting from these Benches and which offers an elegant solution. I urge the Minister to consider Amendment 245 before day four of Report because if the Government were to accept it, it would focus company resources, focus Ofcom resources and, as we discussed on the first day of Report, permit companies which do not fit the risk profile of the regime and are unable to comply with something that does not fit their model yet leaves them vulnerable to enforcement also to be treated in an appropriate way.

Collectively, the ambition is to make sure that we are treating things in proportion to the risk and that proportionate does not start meaning something else.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, that all these amendments are very much heading in the same direction, and from these Benches I am extremely sympathetic to all of them. It may well be that this is very strongly linked to the categorisation debate, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said.

The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, matters even more when we are talking about pornography in the sense that child safety duties are based on risks. I cannot for the life of me see why we should try to contradict that by adding in capacity and size and so on.

My noble friend made a characteristically thoughtful speech about the need for Ofcom to regulate in the right way and make decisions about risk and the capacity challenges of new entrants and so on. I was very taken by what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, had to say. This is akin to health and safety and, quite frankly, it is a cultural issue for developers. What after all is safety by design if it is not advance risk assessment of the kinds of algorithm that you are developing for your platform? It is a really important factor.

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[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to note that, in the exchange between the noble Lords, Lord Allan and Lord Moylan, there was this idea about where you can complain. The independent complaints mechanism would be as advantageous to people who are concerned about freedom of speech as it would be for any other reason. I join and add my voice to other noble Lords who expressed their support for the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, on Amendment 162 about the Public Order Act.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, we are dangerously on the same page this evening. I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, about demonstrating the need for an independent complaints mechanism. The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, captured quite a lot of the need to keep the freedom of expression aspect under close review, as we go through the Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, have raised an important and useful debate, and there are some crucial issues here. My noble friend captured it when he talked about the justifiable limitations and the context in which limitations are made. Some of the points made about the Public Order Act offences are extremely valuable.

I turn to one thing that surprised me. It was interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, quoted the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which said it had reservations about the protection of freedom of expression in the Bill. As we go through the Bill, it is easy to keep our eyes on the ground and not to look too closely at the overall impact. In its briefing, which is pretty comprehensive, paragraph 2.14 says:

“In a few cases, it may be clear that the content breaches the law. However, in most cases decisions about illegality will be complex and far from clear. Guidance from Ofcom could never sufficiently capture the full range or complexity of these offences to support service providers comprehensively in such judgements, which are quasi-judicial”.


I am rather more optimistic than that, but we need further assurance on how that will operate. Its life would probably be easier if we did not have the Public Order Act offences in Schedule 7.

I am interested to hear what the Minister says. I am sure that there are pressures on him, from his own Benches, to look again at these issues to see whether more can be done. The EHRC says:

“Our recommendation is to create a duty to protect freedom of expression to provide an effective counterbalance to the duties”.


The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, cited this. There is a lot of reference in the Bill but not to the Ofcom duties. So this could be a late contender to settle the horses, so to speak.

This is a difficult Bill; we all know that so much nuance is involved. We really hope that there is not too much difficulty in interpretation when it is put into practice through the codes. That kind of clarity is what we are trying to achieve, and, if the Minister can help to deliver that, he will deserve a monument.