Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Monday 5th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak here this afternoon. I apologise to the Committee for not being able to speak at Second Reading. I declare my interest as the founder and trustee of a mental health charity in Leicestershire, the Loughborough Wellbeing Centre.

It will not surprise my noble friend the Minister, I suspect, to know that this is a probing amendment. However, given that we are debating in this part of the Bill the enforcement of consumer protection, the matter that I raise relates directly to the greatest harm that a consumer can suffer: their death.

In June 2022, I asked my noble friend Lord Parkinson the following Oral Question: what plans do

“Her Majesty’s Government … have to address online retailers’ algorithmic recommendations for products that can be used for the purposes of suicide”?

At the time, the most obvious Bill to address this matter was the Online Safety Bill, which, as we know, focused on harmful content in particular. In my follow-up question, I said:

“When a particular well-known suicide manual is searched for on Amazon, the site’s algorithmic recommendations then specifically suggest material that can be used, or easily assembled, into a device intended to take one’s own life. If this is not to be regulated as harmful content under the Online Safety Bill, how can this sort of harm be regulated?”—[Official Report, 27/6/22; col. 434.]


This amendment is particularly close to my heart because, sadly, when I was a Member of Parliament, a constituent bought a manual on Amazon then completed suicide. The amendment would amend Clause 149 by expanding the specified prohibition condition definition by adding a commercial practice that

“targets consumers with marketing material for products intended to be used by that person to take their own life.”

I am grateful to the Mental Health Foundation for its support with this amendment.

Even today, Amazon continues to algorithmically recommend products that can be used to take one’s own life to users viewing suicide manuals online. To be specific, users searching for a suicide manual will be recommended specific materials that are touted as being highly effective and painless ways to take one’s own life. Amazon facilitates users purchasing the key items that they need, from instructions to materials, in a few clicks. I would like to think that this is not intentional.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, such automatic recommendation will be harmless and will help consumers to find products that might interest them. However, in this instance, a usually harmless algorithm is functioning to provide people with material that they may use to end their own lives. This risk is not just theoretical. Amazon is recommending products that there have been concerted public health efforts to address in this country and which are known to have caused deaths. So as not to make them better known, I will not name them.

It is particularly important that Amazon ceases to highlight novel suicide methods, as its recommendation algorithm currently does by recommending products to users. There is clear evidence that, when a particular suicide method becomes better known, the effect is not simply that suicidal people switch from one intended method to the novel one but that suicide occurs in people who would not otherwise have taken their own lives. This probing amendment is intended to draw the Government’s attention to this concerning issue. I have spoken about Amazon today given its position in the market and its known bad practice in this area, but the principle of course goes beyond Amazon. New retailers may well emerge in the future and a principle should be established that this type of behaviour is not acceptable.

While I suspect that my noble friend the Minister is going to tell me that the Bill is not the right place for this amendment, I hope that he will agree that a crackdown on these harmful algorithmic recommendations to protect consumers—it was the word “consumers” that meant that it was not suitable for the Online Safety Bill—is needed, in the spirit of consumer protection sought in the Bill. I hope that, at the very least, he will agree to meet me to discuss this further and to help me to raise it with the relevant department, if it is not his. I beg to move Amendment 110.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have one amendment in this group, Amendment 110A, which will be echoed in subsequent groups as part of a general concern about making sure that trading standards are an effective body in the UK and are able to do what they are supposed to do to look after consumers.

As the Minister will know, because we were part of the same conversation, the CMA is concerned that trading standards may have been reduced to the point where they are not as effective as they ought to be. Looking at some of the local cuts—in Enfield, for instance, four officers have been cut down to one—and listening to various people involved in trading standards, there is a general concern that, as they are set up and funded at the moment, they are not able to perform the role that they should be. Given the importance that enforcers have in the structure that the Government are putting together, I am asking in this amendment that the Government review that effectiveness, take a serious look at the structures that they have created and their capability of performing as they would wish under the Bill and report within a reasonable period.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for replying to my amendments and for his offer of a meeting, which I will certainly accept when issued.

The Government are missing some opportunities here. I do not know whether he has tried reporting something to Action Fraud, but if you have not lost money you cannot do it; you need to have been gulled and lost money for any of the government systems to take you seriously. While you can report something to the other ones, they do not tell you what they have done. There is no feedback or mechanism for encouraging and rewarding you for reporting—it is a deficient system.

When it comes to job adverts, by and large they go through job boards. There is a collection of people out there who are not direct internet providers who have leverage, and a flow of data to them can make a huge difference; there may also be other areas. It is that flow of data that enables job scams to be piled down on, and that is what the Bill needs to improve. Although the industry as a whole is willing, there just is not the impetus at the moment to make prevention nearly as good as it should be.

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister very much indeed for his response. Although this has been a short debate, it is a good example of us all just trying to get the Bill to work as well as possible—in this case to protect consumers, but there will be other examples as well.

My noble friend said that the larger services in particular are the ones that are going to have to deal with fraudulent advertisements, so I think the issue about the burdens of user reporting do not apply. I remind him of the paragraph I read out from the Fraud Strategy, where the Government themselves say that they want to make the reporting of fraud online as easy as possible. I will read the record of what he said very carefully, but it might be helpful after that to have a further conversation or perhaps for him to write to reassure those outside this Committee who are looking for confirmation about how transparency reporting, user reporting and complaints will actually apply in relation to fraudulent advertisements, so that this can work as well as possible.

On that basis, I will withdraw my amendment for today, but I think we would all be grateful for further discussion and clarification so that this part of the Bill works as well as possible to protect people from any kind of fraudulent advertisement.