Schools: Mobile Phones

Lord Chartres Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chartres (CB)]

My Lords, speaking on this subject after the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is rather like Ruth gleaning after a combine harvester. I agree with absolutely everything she said in her masterful summary of the subject.

The statistic that haunts me at night is one about people who have just left our schools. It is from the Office for National Statistics; we are told that this year there are 872,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in work, employment or training. We are also told that a large part of that has to do with technologies and the sort of dangers and pressures that other noble Lords have described.

I quote Jonathan Haidt again, but a different phrase:

“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, and unstable”.


This has had devastating effects. Perhaps, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, suggested, it is wake-up time for public authorities and parents to regain our courage after a period in which there has been a great deal of hesitancy about positively teaching and reinforcing healthful ways of life as established truths, rather than as merely interesting topics for classroom discussion. There is a crisis of authority involved in what we have been discussing; it has left the field empty, to some extent, to be filled by people with repellent views such as Andrew Tate.

I was very impressed by the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, in particular her appeal that the voices of young people should be represented in this debate. We cannot uninvent social media; we must learn how to live with it fruitfully. I have been particularly inspired, in the spirit of what the noble Baroness said, by a campaign launched by a 17 year-old from Glasgow, Lewis Swire. He is a remarkable young man who won the Diana Award in 2023 for social activism. He has launched Reel It In, a youth-led campaign to end social media addiction. He cites the 2019 special report from the Science and Technology Committee in another place, which said:

“Strategies to prolong user engagement should be prohibited”.


How far have the Government got with devising ways of doing precisely that?

We are exposing people to some very dangerous material. My last words are that the inquest into the death of Molly Russell, aged 14 and from Harrow, concluded that she ended her life while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online contact.