Media Literacy (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and her committee for this remarkably informed and necessary report. I say so as a former schoolteacher and teacher of religious studies, a former ITV and BBC political journalist and now chairman of a major London university and a professor of leadership at a business school in the US.

The issues contained in this report absolutely matter. I agree with the report’s statement that media literacy is a vital life skill and with the response of the Government that media literacy and digital inclusion go hand in hand as individuals need the skills and confidence to engage safely, critically and effectively in the digital world.

But there is one category of citizen excluded from consideration by this report and the Government: people in prison. Currently, there are around 90,000 men and women—it is largely men and a few thousand women, because they do not misbehave as much—in our prison system. This morning, I made my third visit in eight days to the same prison in south London where I and my network of 35 visitors have a regular commitment. In the 120 visits I have made in the last 10 years to prisoners in the south of England, I have seen a whole cohort of people whom we have a major responsibility for but no commitment to around media literacy. In fact, there is no mention of them in this report or the Government’s response. Whether we like it or not, the truth is that all those in prison, with a few exceptions, will come out of prison at some point and they will be ignorant of media literacy and incapable of understanding exactly what is proposed in the committee’s brilliant assessment or even the Government’s response. They are media literacy denied.

Of course, that assumes that they are denied phones, iPads, laptops and everything else in the digital world to contain their corrupting, bad behaviour and make sure that they are reformed. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, pointed out, and as was further emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, 42% of crime is scam crime, which is not committed by people in prison but by people outside. Excluding those in prison from access to media literacy and media availability is destructive, divisive, discriminatory and unhelpful.

Ministers in the Ministry of Justice will say that, for prisoners to leave our system, which is not very good, and be excellent citizens, they will need employment, which requires education, and positive relationships. Being digitally excluded makes it harder for them to achieve any of those three outcomes. No wonder that, in so many ways, we have such a huge repeat offending rate—currently it is around 60% to 65%—and we are paying more to keep people back in prison than it would cost to send a great child to Eton or any other elite private school.

We must realise, as I hope the Government do, that if there is to be an integrated strategy between departments then it is about time we woke up to the fact that those in prison deserve media education, often for a long period of time, which can be best deployed through access to ring-fenced digital systems. That is perfectly capable in today’s world; there does not need to be mass availability of everything. To pretend that young men, and some young women, in prisons are incapable of intelligent engagement is not to understand the kind of characters they are. We must realise that they deserve the same level of inclusion that we seek for everybody else.