Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Bethell

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, my contribution will be less officious than my intervention earlier in this group. In the last couple of years since I returned to the House—as I describe it—having spent time at the Charity Commission, I have noticed a new practice emerging of noble Lords reading out other people’s speeches. Every time I had seen it happen before, I had not said anything, but today I thought, “I can’t sit here and not say anything again”. I apologise for my intervention.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Moylan for bringing forward his amendments and for introducing them in the incredibly clear way he did; they cover some very complex and diverse issues. I know that there are other amendments in the group which might be described as similar to his.

There are a couple of things I want to highlight. One interesting thing about the debate on this group is the absence of some of our legal friends—I apologise to my noble friend Lady Buscombe, who is of course a very distinguished lawyer. The point I am making is that we are so often enriched by a lot of legal advice and contributions on some of the more challenging legal issues that we grapple with, but we do not have that today, and this is a very difficult legal issue.

It is worth highlighting again, as has been touched on a little in some of the contributions, the concern, as I understand it, with how the Bill is drafted in relation to illegal content and the potential chilling effect of these clauses on social media platforms. As has already been said, there is a concern that it might lead them to take a safety-first approach in order to avoid breaking the law and incurring the sanctions and fines that come with the Bill, which Ofcom will have the power to apply. That is the point we are concerned with here. It is the way in which this is laid out, and people who are much better equipped than I am have already explained the difference between evidence versus reasonable grounds to infer.

What the noble Lord, Lord Allan, hit on in his contribution is also worth taking into account, and that is the role of Ofcom in this situation. One of the things I fear, as we move into an implementation phase and the consequences of the Bill start to impact on the social media firms, is the potential for the regulator to be weaponised in a battle on the cultural issues that people are becoming increasingly exercised about. I do not have an answer to this, but I think it is important to understand the danger of where we might get to in the expectations of the regulator if we create a situation where the social media platforms are acting in a way that means people are looking for recourse or a place to generate further an argument and a battle that will not be helpful at all.

I am not entirely sure, given my lack of legal expertise —this is why I would have been very grateful for some legal expertise on this group—whether what my noble friend is proposing in his amendments is the solution, but I think we need to be very clear that this is a genuine problem. I am not sure, as things stand in the Bill, that we should be comfortable that it is not going to create problems. We need to find a way to be satisfied that this has been dealt with properly.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow my noble friend. I completely agree with her that this is a powerful discussion and there are big problems in this area. I am grateful also to my noble friend Lord Moylan for raising this in the first place. It has been a very productive discussion.

I approach the matter from a slightly different angle. I will not talk about the fringe cases—the ones where there is ambiguity, difficulty of interpretation, or responsibility or regulatory override, all of which are very important issues. The bit I am concerned about is where primary priority content that clearly demonstrates some kind of priority offence is not followed up by the authorities at all.

The noble Lord, Lord Allan, referred to this point, although he did slightly glide over it, as though implying, if I understood him correctly, that this was not an area of concern because, if a crime had clearly been committed, it would be followed up on. My fear and anxiety is that the history of the internet over the last 25 years shows that crimes—overt and clear crimes that are there for us to see—are very often not followed up by the authorities. This is another egregious example of where the digital world is somehow exceptionalised and does not have real-world rules applied to it.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Bethell

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Monday 28th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 30. My noble friend Lady Stroud has put extremely well the reasons why this was never a good policy. On basic Conservative principles—that the route out of poverty and into prosperity is through work—this measure fails dismally. It was never good even when it was first brought in. I concede that maybe the people who brought it in thought it would give them some kind of credibility in the public eye that they were being tough on migration, and that maybe 20 years ago it looked like we faced the end of history. But both those things are no longer true, and if we look just a little down the line to the future they will be emphatically not true. As a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, pointed out, the public are strongly with us on this. The sight of Ukrainian refugees coming to Britain looking for sanctuary will only increase that.

We have not seen the end of history. I am afraid we are going into a very turbulent period of history where refuge and asylum will be sought by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. We will we face an enormous debt to our neighbours to try to provide them some form of sanctuary. We already have 125,000 people waiting over six months for a determination. What kind of number do we need to get to before we change the system? I hope the Minister will use this opportunity to review a bad policy, to move on and to develop a better policy that is suited to the future.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Stroud makes some very strong and compelling arguments in favour of her amendment. I certainly take the view that asylum seekers should indeed be allowed to work as soon as possible once a decision has been made about their application. I think the citizens of this country would support that and want that very much. However, a matter that would raise concern for people would be if we introduced a law that allowed asylum seekers to start work before a decision on their appeal—or rather their application for asylum—had been decided.

Rather than support my noble friend’s amendment, I ask my noble friend the Minister what the Home Office is doing to deal with the backlog of applications for asylum currently sat in the system. My noble friend Lady Stroud referred to the number: 125,000. What more resources is the Home Office applying to become much more efficient and effective in processing those applications? To me, that is where we should focus our effort—not on introducing a law that would mean that asylum seekers are automatically allowed to work before a decision has been made on their status in this country.