Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill [HL]

Lord Bethell Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 13th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. Like her, I am optimistic about AI in the round, but deepfakes are a nasty little side hustle that a small group of perverts and criminals are using to make money out of the misery of others. We need to shut down this business as soon as possible.

The reason for that is that it is not a victimless crime, as a number of noble Peers have pointed out very clearly—I am grateful to those in the Gallery who are here to bear their testimony. The victims are suffering badly already. They are the people whose images are shown in the films and who are subsequently abused when people who are escalated to violence and abuse take out their imaginings in the physical world. We have only scratched the surface of the potential for this deepfake industry to cause harm in our society. I predict that, if we do not act now, it will become a significantly bigger and more troublesome problem for the direct victims and those who are in the images.

As a number of Peers have pointed out, we should have shut this down with the Online Safety Act. It came up in those debates; I regret enormously that a Bill that was meant to have been future-proof and technology-agnostic somehow let this slip through its fingers. I am enormously grateful to my noble friend Lady Owen for bringing this Bill to the House. As everyone in the Chamber seems to agree, it is an extremely effective device for shutting down this loophole and protecting our women and children from this nasty business.

My appeal is for urgency. I am extremely grateful for the patience of the Minister in this respect. I hope very much that he can answer the questions. The Government have promised action and I would like to think of this as something of a test case, because we have an arthritic legislative process, which is really straining and struggling to keep up with technological change. Let us make this the moment when we react to changes in the technological sphere promptly, with agility and with an emphatic legislative response.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, put forward some ideas for how that could be done, even if this Bill itself is not the right one to go through. Let us please embrace those sorts of creative ideas to get these measures on to the statute book as soon as possible. I very much encourage the Minister: he will get full support from all corners of the Chamber if he takes that approach.