Online Safety Bill

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I enter this Committee debate with great trepidation. I do not have the knowledge and expertise of many of your Lordships, who I have listened to with great interest. What I do have is experience working with children, for over 40 years, and as a parent myself. I want to make what are perhaps some innocent remarks.

I was glad that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford raised the issue of online gaming. I should perhaps declare an interest, in that I think Liverpool is the third-largest centre of online gaming in terms of developing those games. It is interesting to note that over 40% of the entertainment industry’s global revenue comes from gaming, and it is steadily growing year on year.

If I am an innocent or struggle with some of these issues, imagine how parents must feel when they try to cope every single day. I suppose that the only support they currently have, other than their own common sense of course, are rating verifications or parental controls. Even the age ratings confuse them, because there are different ratings for different situations. We know that films are rated by the British Board of Film Classification, which also rates Netflix and now Amazon. But it does not rate Disney, which has its own ratings system.

We also know that the gaming industry has a different ratings system: the PEGI system, which has a number linked to an age. For example PEGI 16, if a parent knew this, says that that rating is required when depiction of violence or sexual activity reaches a stage where it looks realistic. The PEGI system also has pictures showing that.

Thanks to the Video Recordings Act 1984, the PEGI 12, PEGI 16 and PEGI 18 ratings became legally enforceable in the UK, meaning that retailers cannot sell those video games to those below those ages. If a child or young person goes in, they could not be sold those games. However, the Video Recordings Act does not currently apply to online games, meaning that children’s safety in online gaming relies primarily on parents setting up parental controls.

I will listen with great interest to the tussles between various learned Lords, as all these issues show to me that perhaps the most important issue will come several Committee days down the path, when we talk about media literacy. That is because it is not just about enforcement, regulation or ratings; it is about making sure that parents have the understanding and the capacity. Let us not forget this about young people: noble Lords have talked about them all having a phone and wanting to go on pornographic sites, but I do not think that is the case at all. Often, young people, because of peer pressure and because of their innocence, are drawn into unwise situations. Then there are the risks that gaming can lead to: for example, gaming addiction was mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford. There is also the health impact and maybe a link with violent behaviour. There is the interactive nature of video game players, cyber bullying and the lack of a feeling of well-being. All these things can happen, which is why we need media literacy to ensure that young people know of those risks and how to cope with them.

The other thing that we perhaps need to look at is standardising some of the simple gateposts that we currently have, hence the amendment.

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I support Amendments 19, 22 and so on in the name of my noble friend Lady Harding, on app stores. She set it out so comprehensively that I am not sure there is much I can add. I simply want to thank her for her patience as she led me through the technical arguments.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure I have been annoying my noble friend the Minister for the last year by asking him when the Bill is coming. Today is one of those days when everything happens at once: two of my daughters are out of school because of industrial action, and I spent most of this morning arguing with them about whether they could go on the internet and how long they could spend on it. They said it was for homework, and I said that it was not and that they should read a book; you can imagine it.

There is a point to that slightly grumpy anecdote. First, I take issue with the suggestion by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that your Lordships’ House does not engage with the next generation. More to the point, there is a fundamental tension that millions of parents up and down the country face. Our children are online a lot and sometimes we want them to be online. Do not underestimate the way that lockdown accelerated their online lives through home-schooling, necessarily—I declare my interest as a non-executive at Ofsted. Sometimes this was to their advantage, but I suspect on the whole it was probably not.

My concern is that while children should be able to get on and do their homework, we have allowed big tech to mark its own homework. The really appalling evidence that we have heard today underlines the urgency to get this Bill right.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, hit the nail on the head—he usually does—about the speed and complexity of the technology; it is just so fast. Most parents that I know certainly do their best to keep their children safe. It is a bit like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill; it just comes back down, because it is so much easier now for our children to be deceived, abused and bullied and to view the stuff of nightmares. When this includes pornography sites, which many others have talked about, with characters from children’s TV such as “Frozen” and “Scooby-Doo”, I do not think it is particularly dramatic to wonder what we have become as a society to allow this sort of thing to happen. I welcome the consensus that we have heard around the need to protect our children, although it tragically is too late for many. I am sorry that the process has dragged.

I will work across the House at Committee stage and beyond to make sure that the Bill is sufficiently stringent, that the scope is correct and that it is workable, because we cannot risk giving parents and young people false reassurance or weak new systems. The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, was very clear on this and I share her concerns about app stores not being in scope.

Going back to pornography, I know my noble friend the Minister takes these things extremely seriously, but I do not see how anybody can feel reassured unless the Government commit to robust age verification, as set out by my noble friend Lord Bethell.

In the time I have left, I want to address cyber flashing. I am very glad the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, did so too. I completely agree that it should be based on consent. I felt weary having to have these sorts of conversations again: about victims having to somehow prove that they are not overreacting, or if it was a bit of a laugh then it does not really matter. It makes no difference to their experience. I do not want to be presumptuous, but I think there is cross-party impetus to ensure that the new offence is based on a principle of non-consent, and I hope the Government will be prepared to listen. This is no criticism of my noble friend the Minister, who is an excellent Minister with an excellent team at DCMS, but it seems to me that these issues have been left in the “too difficult” pile for far too long and we must not miss our chance now that it is here.