Online Safety Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak along similar lines to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I will address my noble friend Lord Moylan’s comments. I share his concern that we must not make the perfect the enemy of the good but, like the noble Baroness, I do not think that size is the key issue here, because of how tech businesses grow. Tech businesses are rather like building a skyscraper: if you get the foundations wrong, it is almost impossible to change how safe the building is as it goes up and up. As I said earlier this week, small tech businesses can become big very quickly, and, if you design your small tech business with the risks to children in mind at the very beginning, there is a much greater chance that your skyscraper will not wobble as it gets taller. On the other hand, if your small business begins by not taking children into account at all, it is almost impossible to address the problem once it is huge. I fear that this is the problem we face with today’s social media companies.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, hit the nail on the head, as she so often does, in saying that we need to think about risk, rather than size, as the means of differentiating the proportionate response. In Clause 23, which my noble friend seeks to amend, the important phrase is “use proportionate measures” in subsection (2). Provided that we start with a risk assessment and companies are then under the obligation to make proportionate adjustments, that is how you build safe technology companies—it is just like how you build safe buildings.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I will build on my noble friend’s comments. We have what I call the Andrew Tate problem. That famous pornographer and disreputable character started a business in a shed in Romania with a dozen employees. By most people’s assessment, it would have been considered a small business but, through his content of pornography and the physical assault of women, he extremely quickly built something that served an estimated 3 billion pages, and it has had a huge impact on the children of the English-speaking world. A small business became a big, nasty business very quickly. That anecdote reinforces the point that small does not mean safe, and, although I agree with many of my noble friend’s points, the lens of size is perhaps not the right one to look through.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I did not want to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, in full flow as he introduced the amendments, but I believe he made an error in terms of the categorisation. The error is entirely rational, because he took the logical position rather than the one in the Bill. It is a helpful error because it allows us to quiz the Minister on the rationale for the categorisation scheme.

As I read it, in Clause 86, the categories are: category 1, which is large user-to-user services; category 2A, which is search or combined services; and category 2B, which is small user-to-user services. To my boring and logical binary brain, I would expect it to be: “1A: large user-to-user”; “1B: small user-to-user”; “2A: large search”; and “2B: small search”. I am curious about why a scheme like that was not adopted and we have ended up with something quite complicated. It is not only that: we now have this Part 3/Part 5 thing. I feel that we will be confused for years to come: we will be deciding whether something is a Part 3 2B service or a Part 5 service, and we will end up with a soup of numbers and letters that do not conform to any normal, rational approach to the world.