Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2022

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have some questions and rather a strong comment. It is clearly convenient that we do not diverge too far from the existing European regulations. I should like to ask whether there is much divergence. There is a good deal of reference here to the World Wide Web Consortium, which attempts to set the standards. It is an interesting body, not entirely intergovernmental, and operates, I assume, by consensus. Are the Government entirely happy with the way in which the World Wide Web Consortium operates, or are there any problems? I know that the Government are concerned about rising Chinese influence within the World Wide Web Consortium.

Do the standards that the United States, for example, sets in this particularly technical area differ considerably from those set within the European Union? One of the challenges that we face in reshaping our regulatory patterns as we leave the European Union is how far we simply follow the United States instead or whether we continue to keep as close as possible to the European Union. I note in this area that a high proportion of British citizens who retire overseas retire within the European Union. If we are looking at something relevant to the disabled and the elderly, therefore, it would make a great deal of difference to ensure that we do not diverge too far from the European Union.

My final comment and objection draws on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee comment that the proposals move down from legislative processes to administrative purposes. This, after all, is something that the Government are doing across a whole range of legislation: lessening the ability of Parliament to scrutinise, lessening accountability to Parliament and, indeed, as a number of the Minister’s right-wing colleagues mentioned in the Northern Ireland protocol debate earlier this week, asserting executive sovereignty against parliamentary sovereignty.

I suspect the Minister is among those unhappy with this trend. I should like him to take back to his colleagues that, given the extent of this gradual slide towards lessening parliamentary accountability and giving greater ministerial discretion across the board— something we are also dealing with in the Procurement Bill and a number of other Bills before the House—there will come a point when the House stands up and objects to SIs. I will take back to my party group whether, if it comes before the House, we should draw the attention of the House to this element of reducing parliamentary scrutiny. There is behind these technical and entirely suitable regulations a larger constitutional issue of how we maintain parliamentary democracy, rather than executive government, in this country.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome these regulations and congratulate my noble friend the Minister on the manner in which he introduced them to the Grand Committee. In essence, the regulations take us from the European standards, EAS, to the Web3 standards, IWAS. For the convenience of the Grand Committee, when my noble friend responds, perhaps he could set out some of the material differences, as he sees them, between EAS and IWAS to bring some clarity to this matter.

He rightly commented on the monitoring done by the GDS and the report published at the end of 2021. In that report, 612 public websites were sampled: 593 with a light touch, 19 more in depth. Does the Minister believe that this is the right level of scrutiny and assessment of public sector websites, and that going into only 19 in more depth is the right means of getting a clear picture of what is going on out there? Some 90% of the websites have an accessibility statement but only 7% of those sampled had what should have been in that accessibility statement. There is a clear departure there. Can he say whether the EHRC is playing a full role in this and whether he would envisage greater involvement by the EHRC in this process?

Some 19 years ago, when I was at the Disability Rights Commission, I was involved in the first formal investigation into UK websites. It was an important piece of work then but multiple times more important in 2022. In this area, we considered not just websites but mobile applications because what we get from technology is the potential inclusion, empowerment and enablement of disabled people given what the technology is capable of doing. Equally, however, technology can exclude and discriminate if it is not produced and constructed while rooted in being inclusive by design.

It is understandable why it has taken the country years to enable buildings such as Parliament—that is, a physical building—to become accessible for disabled people. It is desperately unfortunate when we see inaccessible steps, if you will, being built in cyberspace when, in many ways, we are starting from a greenfield site. If everything across the public and private sectors was predicated on inclusive design, there would be no issues here. Does my noble friend the Minister believe that more needs to be done across this area, with a greater understanding across Whitehall, to grasp what it really means to begin and run all this through that conception of “inclusive by design”? Does he agree that inclusion leads to innovation, empowerment, engagement and enablement, by which I mean human-led technology enabling all the talent that we have in this country? In many ways, there could preciously be a more important time for us to focus on this.