Online Safety Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend is right to point to the noble Lord, Lord Grade of Yarmouth, as one of many voices in your Lordships’ House who will help us in the important scrutiny of this Bill. We are very keen for that to take place. Of course, the other place has to finish its scrutiny before this happens. Once it has done that, we can debate it here.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, business managers will be listening. I hope they will make sure that we are given sufficient time in this House to give proper scrutiny to a highly complex Bill.

If part of the compromises that may have been made in the department are to remove aspects of the Bill, particularly around “legal but harmful”, could the Minister also consider—and have conversations across government—about finding time in a subsequent legislative Session for us to finish the job if the Bill that he brings to this House does not do a proper job?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Regarding future legislative Sessions, I will restrict myself to the debate on the current one. The noble Lord is right: the business managers will have heard how anxious your Lordships’ House is to see the Bill and begin its scrutiny. The decision will be communicated in the usual way.

Media Literacy

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Digital literacy is a key priority in the computing national curriculum in England, which equips people with knowledge, understanding and skills to use the internet creatively and purposefully. Through citizenship education and other subjects, as I mentioned, we are making sure that schoolchildren are equipped with the skills that they need, and of course the companies themselves have a role to play in delivering and funding media literacy education. We welcome the steps that platforms have already taken, but we believe that they can go further to empower and educate their users.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, the 2003 media literacy duty on Ofcom that the Minister referred to predates social media and urgently needs updating. Carole Cadwalladr’s work has shown how online misinformation has potentially perverted our democracy. The Ofcom strategy is insufficient. Will the Minister agree to meet me and other members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Media Literacy in advance of the Online Safety Bill being introduced in this House to try to resolve this problem?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I would be very happy to meet the noble Lord and other members ahead of the Online Safety Bill, during which I know we will debate this important area in greater detail. He is right that much has happened since the Communications Act 2003 was passed, but Ofcom’s own strategy published in December last year shows its up-to-date thinking and work in this important and evolving area.

Covid-19: Broadband

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 5th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government are working in different areas to address affordability, and I am sure that the noble Lord has seen the recent Ofcom report on this issue. Some 99% of households can access an affordable tariff, but the take-up of that is much lower than we would hope, and Ofcom has recommended more proactive marketing of those tariffs.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the pandemic has accelerated the embedded use of broadband for work, learning and leisure, and yet 9 million people are still on the wrong side of the digital divide. It is estimated that 3% of schoolchildren were prevented from accessing learning during lockdowns. Many of these people live in social housing. What efforts are being made to ensure that all registered social landlords include broadband access in the rent and that such an element is then included in housing benefit?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The issues relating to being on the wrong side of the digital divide, as the noble Lord described it, are more complex than simply the tariff or how rent might be set up: they include digital skills and confidence, on which this Government are working very actively, as set out in our tech-savvy nation report.

Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I want to speak relatively briefly in support of my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s Amendment 56A. I find the procedure slightly odd—I am still trying to influence the Minister after she has asked for it to be withdrawn—but I will give it a good go.

The importance of financial education and financial literacy in primary education does not need too much arguing. I recall a friend of mine, Emily, who finished secondary with four A-levels about three or four years ago. She chose to become a successful actress rather than go to university. About six months after she started work—she got work very quickly—she was furious that her education system had not told her about taxation and that suddenly she had to put money aside to pay her taxes as a self-employed actress.

That reinforced for me that we have an education system that is really passive on this. I was delighted a couple of years ago, when I was working for a company called TES, to be involved with the Bank of England and the Beano on producing some financial literacy resources for primary schools, which were very well received. I also endorse the work of KickStart Money.

It has become particularly acute that we must do more in primary education because of the cashless nature of our transactions. According to a survey this month published by, I think, Yahoo, fewer than a quarter of transactions in this country are now paid with cash. Children no longer see and feel money exchanging hands. They are no longer adding it up and making sense of 1p, 2p, 5p, 20p, 50p, £1, £10 and so on because it is not part of what most of us handle any more. There are apps. My stepdaughter will be 10 tomorrow. We use an app for her called RoosterMoney, which helps her with some of these things. But there has been an impact for primary schoolchildren on their numeracy, their understanding of debt, and of how their school is paid for and how their teachers are paid, because it is taxation and public money. These are really important parts of citizenship.

While the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, was talking I thought that, although the amendment is about resourcing financial literacy in primary schools, I had better quickly check the primary curriculum to see what is in it. There are two mentions of “financial”. One is in respect of what the curriculum requires years 5 and 6 to do in terms of spelling. The noble Baroness asked whether there is something horribly wrong in the Department for Education. It is so obsessed with things such as spelling in English that you have to learn how endings that sound like “shall” are spelled, as in “official”, “artificial” and “financial”. The only other mention is in the context of maths. It says that studying maths is a good idea and “necessary for financial literacy”, so it gets a slight mention but that is it. There is no real requirement, but there is a little bit of a nudge that there is a good reason for studying maths. We have to do better.

This amendment, and putting something in statute, would give some priority and send a positive signal from government that we should do more on this. It would be able to fund some of the teacher training that is important to give primary school teachers better confidence and competence around how to link this in to various parts of the curriculum, because it is not just in maths that you can teach financial literacy. Of course, it could fund more of those resources so that it is not just down to the Beano, the Bank of England, KickStart and others and we have some properly evidence-based resources that help teachers to link across the curriculum in an engaging and interesting way for primary school students.

I urge the Minister to reflect and perhaps have a chat with some of her colleagues in the Department for Education—particularly the Schools Minister, who is obsessed with spelling, punctuation, grammar and maths but, frankly, is not really that interested in very much else in terms of what is specified in the national curriculum. We could do better.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his remarks. I absolutely do not deny in any way the importance of financial education, but the issue here is not the importance of any individual cause. The challenge we are faced with—or the privilege that we will all have—is to contribute to a conversation about the right cause for this particular stream of money, with its unique features, and that includes the existing causes that are funded. We will be putting the cart before the horse if we focus too much on causes to go into the Bill; rather, we should put the combined intellect of your Lordships and others into making sure that we spend future moneys in the best way possible.

English Football: Project Big Picture

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I would guess that the prospects for promotion depend a little on who you support—but I leave it to each noble Lord individually to decide on that. We are clear that the principles of fair competition must prevail as we move forward with the review.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the way in which the owners of the big six clubs are behaving is, frankly, a disgrace. They are exploiting the catastrophic impact of the pandemic on the Football League clubs to make a massive power grab. At no point have they consulted fans during this shocking episode, despite these proposals being three years in the making. The Government’s proposed supporter-led review of football governance is now urgently needed, as others have said. The Minister did not answer my noble friend Lord Bassam’s question as to when the Government will commence the review. Will she consult supporters’ groups now on the terms of reference and scope and structure that she mentioned earlier?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord is right about the lack of inclusion of supporters’ groups in the proposal that has been discussed widely in the media. On timing, we do not have a firm date, but we are committed to consulting all stakeholders as we prepare that review and, clearly, fans are an important part of that.

Covid-19: Artificial Intelligence

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right to focus on the importance of trust: it is a vital underpinning in the development of AI. I imagine he is aware that we have just published our National Data Strategy, which sets out very clearly the importance of public understanding of both government and non-government data within an ethical framework.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) (V)]

My Lords, back in April my noble friend Lord Darzi told the BBC in respect of Covid-19 that

“AI remains one of our strongest paths to achieve a perceptible solution but there is a fundamental need for high quality, large and clean data sets.”


Much of this data gets siloed in individual companies and universities, so what are the Government doing to unify these data sources to allow researchers to apply machine learning to new solutions for vaccines, monitoring and personalising care within an ethical context?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right, although I am sure he would acknowledge that the quality, size and integration of those datasets vary considerably, as the recent report highlights, between different sectors of the economy. Again, the National Data Strategy and the consultation on it will be important mechanisms for addressing the issues that the noble Lord raised, as well as the open data initiatives and pilots that we are already running.

Cairncross Review

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on securing the debate and her introduction to it. I must begin by reminding your Lordships that I am also a member of the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies, and of my entry in the register as a chief officer of Tes Global, which publishes the TES magazine, a specialist education publication.

At Tes, we continue to see the value of print, but we have had to build a vibrant digital business behind a great media brand because, of course, journalism has changed. Our journalists see the traffic numbers; they are trained in search engine optimisation; they need video and audio skills. It is no longer enough to be great questioners and writers. While the last big Google algorithm change helpfully puts a premium on authority and trust, our readers are less likely to bother with long-form journalism: 80% of our news traffic is from mobile. Migrating from a print business to a digital one has been costly in investment and revenue. We have had to rapidly evolve. A year ago, we sold the Times Higher Education, which had substantially become a data insights business behind its great journalism. Tes is now largely a school software and training business behind a brand of leading education journalism.

This is all fine, but the need to resource costly investigative journalism is a cornerstone of democracy. The Select Committee that I am on would probably not have been formed by your Lordships if it was not for the Guardian investing in Carole Cadwalladr’s time to investigate Cambridge Analytica. This is at the heart of why the Secretary of State—I very much welcome her to the House—should act more substantially on the excellent Cairncross report.

This was vividly brought home to me last night when looking—I was at home—at the Lords Library briefing on the coronavirus. I will read one paragraph towards the end:

“Since the outbreak of the disease, various organisations and commentators have raised concerns about the spread of disinformation relating to 2019-nCoV. In general, much of the disinformation on the topic has focused on: false cures (for example, drinking bleach); the spread of the disease (that it is a bioweapon); and speculation as to its origin (one suggested cause is 5G). The scale of the problem is such that the WHO has labelled it an ‘infodemic’: an over-abundance of information that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance.”


The lack of authoritative information and the disinformation online is distracting public health officials, to the extent that in Malaysia a Minister has said that it has become a bigger problem than the virus itself. He had to go out and tell people that it did not cause others to walk undead in the streets.

The Minister needs to ask herself: what happens as and when we face a real health emergency here? What of an impoverished BBC, and what happens when the value of the news media shifts in Government? It would then no longer be about malleability in winning elections and referenda but about suddenly needing to win back trust—the lost trust, which becomes something we need as a matter of life and death. We urgently need a national media literacy campaign, like that in Finland, and credible government action on this critical issue.

Online Harms White Paper

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and to precede the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, both of whom have consistently campaigned on the dangers of the internet to children. I agree with what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans said on gambling; I would support a ban on advertising at football matches.

By way of reminding your Lordships of my interests, particularly as a chief officer at TES, a digital education business, and as chair of xRapid, a health tech business, I will start by reminding the House of the upside of the online world. TES has 11.5 million registered users, and, as a platform for teachers, facilitates the global sharing of teaching resources. This saves teachers buckets of time and helps them access a torrent of quality user-generated content. It is inconceivable without the internet. My other interest trains iPhones to do the work of microscopists in diagnosing malaria, which we are now able to give away to those who need it—laboratory quality at zero marginal cost, thanks to online technology. There are many other examples of technology for good, and if we do not grasp them but instead allow our public services to stagnate, we will be left behind as other nations leapfrog our development.

However, the harm of the internet is also a reality. Many of us are working out how to manage it. I am guilty of normally overindulging on my screen time—I am digitally obese. At home, our seven year-old, Coco, asked us just this week whether we can agree as a family our own code for gaining consent if we want to post images of each other on social media. That is a job for this weekend. But there are areas where self-regulation will not apply and where we need urgent government and legislative action.

I urge your Lordships to take 15 minutes to watch Carole Cadwalladr’s brave TED talk, delivered earlier this month in Vancouver. As the journalist who uncovered the Cambridge Analytica scandal, she has credibility in her charge that our democracy has been broken by Facebook. Her argument is compelling. Communities such as Ebbw Vale, with very few immigrants, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit because of their fear of immigration. Such communities are not consumers of the mainstream, right-wing media that stir that particular pot, but they are consumers of Facebook. She describes Facebook as a “crime scene”, where the likes of Nigel Farage were able to oversee what she uncovered. Who knows how much money from who knows where was able to fund of a firehose of lies through Facebook ads. These were targeted at those who were most vulnerable to believing them, using the illegal hack of personal data from tens of millions of users.

The online harm to individuals, as other noble Lords have talked about, is profound, but there can be no greater harm to a nation state than the catastrophe of Brexit, brought about by referendum won by illegal campaigning—and we allow Nigel Farage to start another party to dupe the nation once more. We desperately need to update our electoral law to prevent this destruction of our democracy, and I hope that the legislation following this White Paper may present some opportunities for us to do so.

I must also say that I commend this White Paper. I inevitably want it to go further, but the core proposals of a duty of care and of a regulator are sound. As the manager of a TES resources platform, I welcome those regulatory burdens. I am particularly delighted to see the duty of care principle. For some time I have been keen to see this well-established legal principle from the physical world come into the virtual world. I was introduced to the notion by Will Perrin and I pay tribute to him and his collaborators at the Carnegie Trust, and to the Government for listening to them. My assumption has been that, when applied, this will generate civil action in the courts by victims against technology operators for the damage caused by their algorithms and other relevant actions. Can the Minister say whether this will be available under the government plans, or will redress be available only through the regulator?

Speaking of victims of algorithms, I am also interested in whether the measures here will apply to the Government themselves and other public bodies. Can the Minister please help me? I have spoken before about the worrying case of the sentencing algorithm used in Wisconsin courts that defence attorneys were prevented from examining. We have had another example closer to home. Last year it came to light that our Home Office had deported potentially thousands of students, using a contractor analysing voice recordings with a machine. They asked the Educational Testing Service to analyse voice files to work out if students were using proxies to sit the English tests for them, and an immigration appeal tribunal in 2016 heard that when ETS’s voice analysis was checked with a human follow-up, the computer had been correct in only 80% of cases—meaning that some 7,000 students had their visas revoked in error.

Given what we know about algorithmic bias, and the growing use of algorithms for public service delivery, it is critical that public bodies are also subject to the measures set out in the White Paper. I would also say that, since the Government are increasingly building technology platforms to compete with the private sector, it would be unfair not to impose the same regulatory burdens upon them as there are on those of us working in the commercial world.

My final point relates to the valid point made in the document that technology can be part of the solution. I agree. But there is a danger that the demands placed on technology companies will assume that they are all of the size and wealth of Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. This would be a mistake. They can afford to develop solutions and gain a competitive advantage over smaller businesses as a result. We need to ensure that these measures result in a more, not less, competitive landscape. If there are technology solutions to solve difficult problems such as the copyright infringements that I grapple with or other thefts of intellectual property, those tools should be openly available to platform providers of all sizes.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web he had a great vision that it should be for everyone. Earlier this month he said that the internet,

“seemed like a good idea at the time”,

that the world was certainly better for it, but that,

“in the last few years, a different mindset has emerged”.

At the 30-year point, people have become worried about their personal data, but they,

“didn’t think about it very much until Cambridge Analytica”.

The privacy risk, however, “is subtle”, he argued:

“It’s realising that all this user generated data is being used to build profiles of me and everyone like me—for targeted ads and more importantly, voting manipulation. It’s not about the privacy of photographs, but where my data is abused”.


We need new duties on technology companies and we need a regulator with teeth. I wish the Government well and I hope that we will see legislation on this very soon.

Social Media: News

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, made her case brilliantly, and I join others in saluting the leadership that she is showing the House by raising these issues and getting action in the Data Protection Bill. Her vision is exactly the opposite of that we see in the United States from the FCC in ending net neutrality, which is taking that country into such a dark place in this context.

I remind the House of my interests in respect of my employment at TES Global, which is both a publisher of what used to be known as the Times Educational Supplement and the provider of a substantial platform for teachers to find jobs and share teaching resources, so I find myself on both sides of the false argument, as described by the noble Baroness, Lady Harding. Indeed, I am also an avid user of social media. On the way in here, LinkedIn told me to congratulate one Ray Collins on seven years working at the House of Lords, which I am of course happy to do.

Social media and user-generated content are here to stay. I do not believe it is possible to pre-moderate all the content shared all the time. If we were to ask social media companies to do so, it would be an extraordinary barrier to entry for anyone wanting to create competition in this space, which I think we would want if we want the sort of new tools and platforms described by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. But I do not disagree that we need to do much better, especially on content accessible by children. It needs new policy thinking and a regulatory solution that respects the consumers’ desire to share digital content and their need for trusted content and providers. My view is that tech companies are media companies, but that does not mean that the regulatory regime for traditional media is appropriate or in the public interest. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, I think we need a new regulatory regime for online service providers.

The media need to keep evolving their business model, and will need new models of regulation, away from monetising content to generating traffic and data for other purposes within the business, in a new environment regulated by the GDPR. I also think that it is in the interests of the likes of Facebook to ensure that advertising revenue is fairly shared with the media companies whose content is widely shared for free on their platforms. I am told that they are having those conversations; I hope that we will get concrete action.

I also echo the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, about engineering time. Perhaps Google should extend its famous 20% time to a percentage, let us say even 10%, of its engineers’ time to help solve some of these problems.

The issue of fake news is, of course, ringing large in our ears. I am interested in how France’s President Macron is suggesting regulation of social media platforms during election periods. Perhaps we could restrict sharing to Ofcom-regulated news outlets, I do not know. We will have to see how that and the German experiment work.

Fundamentally, I would love to have a counterpoint on social media to my echo chamber. If I could press a button and see that, it would help my sense of what is going on on the other side. We need accountability, not always up to regulators but sometimes down to users. We will get some thanks to the Data Protection Bill. There is the right to explain and some data mobility measures provide accountability. I am also interested in data trusts and the politics of data. Perhaps we will end up needing collective action, the equivalent of a new digital trade union movement for platform users so that we can impose some data ethics and withdraw our data from the companies that are so hungry for it unless they give us the ethical safeguards that we need.

Finally, I echo what my noble friend Lord Puttnam said about more study of this in schools and in wider society. Then, perhaps, we can have an informed debate to find an imaginative policy solution to these pressing issues.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments. I remind the House of my interests in relation to my work at TES, the digital education company.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the others who have supported the amendment have given the Government a pretty neat way out of the problem that 13 as the age of consent for young people to sign up to “information society services”, as the Bill likes to call them, feels wrong. I have found that for many Members of your Lordships’ House, 16 feels like a safer and more appropriate age, for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has just given in terms of defining when children are children. There is considerable discomfort about 13 in terms of where the Bill currently sits.

However, I think many noble Lords are realists and understand that to some extent the horse has bolted. Given the huge numbers of young people currently signing up to these services who are under 13, trying to pretend that we can find a way of forcing the age up to 16 from the accepted behavioural norm of 13 looks challenging. Yet we want to protect children. So the question is whether these amendments would provide that solution. That hinges on whether it is reasonable to ask the suppliers of information society services to verify age, and whether it is then reasonable to ask them to design in an age-appropriate fashion. From my experience, the answer to both is yes, it is. Currently, all you do is tick a box to self-verify that you are the age you are. If subsequently you want to have your data deleted, you may have to go through a whole rigmarole to prove that you are who you are and the age you say you are, but for some reason the service providers do not require the same standard of proof and efficacy at the point where you sign up to them. That is out of balance, and it is effectively our role to put it back into balance.

The Government themselves, through the Government Digital Service, have an exceedingly good age-verification service called, strangely, Verify. It does what it says on the tin, and it does it really well. I pay tribute to the GDS for Verify as a service that it allows third parties to use: it is not used solely by Government.

So age verification is undoubtedly available. Next, is it possible—this was explored in previous comments, so I will not go on about it—for age-appropriate design to be delivered? From our work at TES, I am familiar with how you personalise newsfeeds based on data, understanding and profiling of users. It is worth saying, incidentally, that those information society services providers will be able to work out what age their users are from the data that they start to share: they will be able to infer age extremely accurately. So there is no excuse of not knowing how old their users are. Any of us who use any social media services will know that the feeds we get are personalised, because they know who we are and they know enough about us. It is equally possible, alongside the content that is fed, to shift some aspects of design. It would be possible to filter content according to what is appropriate, or to give a slightly different homepage, landing page and subsequent pages, according to age appropriateness.

I put it to the Minister, who I know listens carefully, that this is an elegant solution to his problem, and I hope that he reflects, talks to his colleague the right honourable Matthew Hancock, who is also a reasonable Minister, and comes back with something very similar to the amendments on Report, assuming that they are not pressed at this stage.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My noble friend made a very strong case. The internet was designed for adults, but I think I am right in saying that 25% of time spent online is spent by children. A child is a child, whether online or offline, and we cannot treat a 13 year-old as an adult. It is quite straightforward: the internet needs to be designed for safety. That means it must be age appropriate, and the technology companies need to do something about it. I support the amendments very strongly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

I apologise to the Minister for interrupting. I am just interested in that confusion that he talks about. Perhaps I am incorrect, but I understand that images, for example, are data. There is a lot of concern about sexting and about platforms such as Snapchat and the sharing of data. Where is the confusion? Is it in the Government, or in the Chamber?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I do not think I mentioned confusion. What we are talking about in the Bill is purely data protection. We are talking about the age at which children can consent to information society services handling their data. What I think the noble Baroness, and a lot of Peers in the House, are talking about is keeping children safe online, which is more than just protection of their personal data.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I am happy to confirm those two points. On extraterritoriality, I agree with the noble Baroness that it is difficult to control. Commercial sites are easier—an example of which is gambling. We can control the payments, so if they are commercial and cannot pay people, they may well lose their attractiveness. Of course, the only way to solve this is through international agreement, and the Government are working on that. Part of my point is that, if you drive children away to sites located abroad, there is a risk in that. The big, well-known sites are by and large responsible. They may not do what we want, but they will work with the Government. That is the thrust of our argument. We are working with the well-known companies and, by and large, they act responsibly, even if they do not do exactly what we want. As I say, however, we are working on that. The noble Baroness is right to say that, if we drive children on to less responsible sites based in jurisdictions with less sensible and acceptable regimes, that is a problem.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Could the Minister help me with any information he might have about when the GDPR was drawn up? It must have been envisaged when Article 8 was put together that some member states would go with something different—be it 13, 16, or whatever. The issue of foreign powers must have been thought about, as well as verifying age, parental consent, or the verification of parental identity to verify age. Article 8 just talks about having to have parental sign-off. These issues of verification and going off to foreign powers must have been thought about when the article was being put together in Europe. Does he have any advice on what they thought would be done about this problem?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I cannot give the noble Lord chapter and verse on what the European bureaucrats were thinking when they produced the article, but age verification is not really the issue on this one, because it is extremely difficult to verify ages below 18 anyway. Although one can get a driving licence at 17, it is at the age of 18 when you can have a credit card. As I say, the issue here is not age verification—rather, it is about how, when we make things too onerous, that has the potential to drive people away on to other sites which take their responsibilities less seriously. That was the point I was trying to make.

--- Later in debate ---

We are therefore at an important time. By agreeing this amendment, we can ensure that PSHE will be the vehicle by which these issues can be taught to all children in all schools. I hope that when we come to Report the Minister will be able to report that that will be the case. I beg to move.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, does the Minister agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that PSHE would be the most appropriate way to educate young people about data rights? If so, I note that the Secretary of State, Justine Greening, has today announced that Ian Bauckham will lead the review on how relationship and sex education for the 21st century will be delivered. Can the Minister, who is clearly prepared to think about this appointment today, ask whether it is within his scope to think about how data rights education may be delivered as part of that review, and whether the review will draw on the work of the previous person who reviewed the delivery of PSHE, Sir Alasdair Macdonald, the last time Parliament thought that compulsory SRE was a good idea?

[Baroness Kidron]

I support the amendment. I was on the House of Lords Communications Committee, to which the noble Lord just referred. We recommended that digital literacy be given the same status as reading, writing and arithmetic. We set out an argument for a single cross-curricular framework of digital competencies—evidence-based, taught by trained teachers—in all schools whatever their legal status.

At Second Reading, several noble Lords referred to data as the new oil. I have been thinking about it since: I am not so certain. Oil may one day run out; data is infinite. What I think we can agree is that understanding how data is gathered, used and stored, and, most particularly, how it can be harnessed to manipulate both your behaviour and your digital identity, is a core competency for a 21st-century child. While I agree with the noble Lord that the best outcome would be a single, overarching literacy strategy, this amendment would go some small way towards that.