Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 7th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I rise early to support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, partly to spare the stress of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and also because there is a Liberal Democrat amendment imminent in the Chamber, although we of course will be abstaining—our solidarity with the Liberal Democrats does not extend too far.

However, it does extend to this amendment, which ties in well with the noble Baroness’s earlier amendment concerning qualifications. I was fascinated to hear her referring to the Australian cyber service, which I had not heard about before. I would be fascinated to know more and it would be interesting to hear from the Minister what other lessons there may be for us to learn from similar jurisdictions around the globe. I suspect the Canadians, for example, some of our European partners and some of the south-east Asian nations, such as Singapore or South Korea, will probably have very advanced and sophisticated bureaucracies, if I can put it that way, or institutions looking at the cyber threat.

Again, I shall address, rather than the technical detail of the noble Baroness’s amendment, the spirit in which it is brought and why it fits so well with her earlier amendment. It is about injecting a sense of urgency into how we raise our game in cyber in terms of our economy. When she mentioned the cyber action toolkit, it took me back to the days when I was one of the Cyber Ministers in the coalition Government. My responsibility was towards small businesses, and we launched endless small business toolkits, mainly because we wanted to say that we had launched a small business toolkit. We certainly never put in place any mechanisms for auditing its impact or success, and I think the constant references to about 7% of SMEs now having cyber policies in place may point to my abject failure in that role, and perhaps that of some of my successors.

The more I have listened to this debate, the more it takes me back to my childhood, when we would get leaflets about a possible nuclear conflagration. I know that Ministers and the Government are now telling people to stockpile water and baked beans because of the impact of El Niño, but we know that a cyber attack on the UK would cripple our economy and essential public services, so it is akin, given the geopolitical situation, to a national emergency.

The noble Baroness mentioned the views of the Association of British Insurers. Again, that was part of the toolkit. The feeling was that professional services would drive small businesses towards becoming more skilled in assessing their cyber risks, that you could not get insurance, or indeed cyber insurance, unless you had clear policies to deal with cyber attacks. With professional services firms, you could not necessarily get legal liability insurance for a data breach, which is not necessarily going to cripple your business but will affect your customers and therefore leave you open to liability, unless you could demonstrate that you had proper processes in place to protect your data. There is a whole ecosystem, it seems to me, that needs to be brought to bear to support the uptake of cyber skills and cyber audits by small businesses: we cannot be complacent and assume that 7% is an acceptable figure and that it should be allowed to evolve.

To a certain extent, the noble Baroness’s amendment is about the after-effects: if you suffer a cyber attack then you should be able to call on skilled people, whom we hope will have achieved the kind of recognised qualifications that the noble Baroness talked about earlier. She compared them to doctors but, when I thought about the amendment, I thought more about plumbers and electricians and the technical qualifications that you need to have to do a technical and difficult job.

We also need to look at what happens before. How do we increase the number of small businesses that put in place policies that will protect them from cyber attacks? That involves using the private sector, insurance companies and professional services firms to push forward clear protocols to which small business should be expected to adhere in order to receive the cover that they need to carry on doing business.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 100, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Northover. I spoke in support of this type of amendment at Second Reading and I still support its intentions, but I will give it an added twist. The question in my mind is where this resource for SMEs should sit and whether it should have any statutory powers or simply be an information and advisory centre.

There is no doubt that cyber security is needed—and here is another scary statistic—because 96% of all successful cyber attacks in the UK are perpetrated on SMEs, which represent soft targets for hackers. I suggest—here I take noble Lords back to day 1 of Committee— that this resource should sit within the office for cyber resilience proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and my noble friend Lord Birt. Indeed, this is yet another example of the need to establish a body like an OCR, given the disturbingly fragmented approach to cyber security in this Bill.

Where can we sensibly draw the line between SMEs across all sectors and the rest of the business world? For instance, advice given to a medium-sized company with, say, 200 staff will overlap hugely with that given to a company with 2,000 staff. In the minds of the hackers and the ransomware merchants there is very little distinction. I argue that our economy needs a coherent, joined-up approach, run by a single competent authority with statutory teeth, for the benefit of SMEs and other companies and sectors.

I am afraid that, as it stands, this Bill is a recipe for chaos. Cooks and broth would be a kind analogy—there is barely any room in the kitchen for the number of departments, teams, councils, centres and agencies involved. The last count I heard was 30 or so, but I believe a few more have cropped up since.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

I think we all share the sympathy that the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, has identified SMEs need. There are 5.7 million SMEs in the UK and many of them—indeed, most of them—will purchase what are relatively complex platforms. The noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, is extremely experienced in the SME sector; I have less experience than him, but I do have some. Hardly any of them will be able to employ anybody who is able to understand either the complexity of the platform that they have purchased or the highly dynamic threats to that platform that exist. There are many ways in which we need to raise our game and to help.

I personally think that, at least in the short term, the most important thing, which we have not discussed enough so far, is to require providers to supply safe products and, moreover, when they become vulnerable—which happens all the time, often unexpectedly—to patch those products for their customers immediately. The providers have a level of sophistication that the customers do not, and we have insufficiently focused on that in our discussion so far.

The second thing to mention—this is not really part of the Bill—is that the Government’s Cyber Essentials programme is very sound. The Minister quoted a figure the other day, which I forget, but only a trivial number of businesses have signed up and taken the pledge. This needs much more publicity and much more dynamism from within government to raise the understanding of the level of threat that SMEs face.

Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st September 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I will also speak to all the other amendments in my name, which are all supported by the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, and some by others of your Lordships.

The Bill in its present form, as others have already said, is extraordinarily limited in scope and ambition—well short, for example, of the scope of the EU’s own NIS2 and its Cyber Resilience Act. One likely and highly unwelcome consequence of this shortfall is that, if the Bill passes in its present form, the UK will be even less well defended than our equivalents in Europe and even more of an attractive target for the bad actors than we are now.

Taken together, my amendments would, first, create a single regulator, the “Office for Cyber Resilience”, or OCR; secondly, they would extend the scope of the Bill to all services that have a material impact on the UK’s economy, society or defence and security; thirdly, they would place obligations on technology suppliers, barely discussed so far, to provide safe services; fourthly, they would require relevant bodies to adjust to threats from new and emerging technologies; fifthly, they would ensure that we have sufficient and appropriately qualified cyber professionals; and, sixthly, they would enable new organisations to be brought under the auspices of the Bill as circumstances change.

Why a single regulator? Because the threat we face, as we have heard all afternoon, is enormous, from state actors, from organised criminal gangs and even from obsessive teenagers. Since Second Reading, I have been made personally aware of multiple attempted hacks; some, on the public record, have succeeded, and some have been mentioned already. In July, after Second Reading, Lewis, the self-proclaimed teenage founder of cyber criminal group ExfilSquad, stole 607,000 records from the Department for Education, declaring it “stupid easy”. Such an attack is not at present within the scope of the Bill. In late July, the police national legal database was breached, exposing data on 100,000 police officers and criminal justice professionals. That is also not in scope. In August, as the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, mentioned, customers of Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports had their email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations and postcodes stolen in an attack that is also not in scope.

There will have been, since we all last met, many more successful breaches that we simply do not know about, many with a highly adverse impact on the organisations concerned. We need a single regulator because we need a singular focus, not a fragmented one. We need to amass all relevant knowledge in one place about the perpetrators and the vulnerabilities. We need a singular focus on how to respond to minimise attacker success.

We should extend the scope of the Bill because it focuses only narrowly on a very small fraction of the economy, the 12 national infrastructure sectors, each with its own regulator, and because the overwhelming bulk of the high-performing private sector is excluded from the Bill, including M&S and JLR. The damage to our economy can only grow. Moreover, I can see no good reason why the Government themselves, or any part of the public sector—the NHS has just been mentioned—should enjoy a carve-out and should not be brought into scope too. I note that the EU’s NIS2 does just that, with limited exceptions.

My amendment on scope proposes that services that have a material impact on society, the economy or our defence and security should be deemed essential and should have an annual, independently conducted cyber resilience audit alongside the annual, independently conducted financial audit they all have now. For those concerned, rightly, about a possible burden on SMEs, I point out that there are around 6 million private sector businesses in the UK, but that 8,000 with more than 250 employees—less than one-fifth of 1% of the total—produce around half of all private sector turnover, so that only a tiny fraction of businesses would be included within the regulatory orbit of the OCR as I have defined it.

Why place obligations on suppliers? Because while some breaches occur because of poor practice within recipient organisations—falling for scams or failing to introduce multi-factor authentication, for example—at least an equivalent number of breaches result from providers selling insufficiently robust services or not closing down vulnerabilities speedily once they become apparent. In July, the supplier of a service to over 1,000 UK charities and non-profit organisations was breached and personal details and donations paid by multiple donors were stolen—a supplier not in scope.

Cars were once sold absent of all safety functionality—seat belts, airbags and the like—but Ralph Nader put an end to all that, thank goodness. The EU has the Cyber Resilience Act. We need an OCR to ensure that the UK’s modern technology suppliers provide safe-to-use and secure services. Why arm the OCR with the power to require relevant bodies to adjust to threats from new and emerging technologies? I think we have just had the answer to that question in spades, from quite a few devastating contributions—for me, the most affecting was from the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko. New technologies like agentic AI pose an existential threat now. We all appear to agree about that. They are already escaping their minders and practicing trickery. They are in effect unregulated, but they simply must be—I only hear agreement on that question.

The only slight note of caution that I strike is that technology is changing all the time, so we cannot have a Bill which has such an amount of detail in it. I think it was the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, who suggested it should be more principle-based. We cannot have something with lots of fine detail in it because things will change. Only one person so far has mentioned quantum technology, which will potentially have an even bigger impact down the line than AI. The UK, by the way, has the second highest number of quantum start-ups of any country in the world, second only to the United States.

Why give the OCR a role in the oversight of training and qualifying cyber professionals? Plainly, there are other ways of skinning this particular cat. However, I note how very poor all Governments have been over time in strategic skill planning—viz dentists, for instance. The previous Government’s founding of the Cyber Security Council was a valuable innovation. It is early days but, since its inception, it has qualified 1,761 professionals, 570 in the highest “chartered” category. Purely informal estimates, however, indicate that. across the UK economy as a whole, we will need something like 50,000 to -60,000 qualified cyber professionals, and the sooner we have them, the better.

We have a long road ahead, and with an OCR defined as the “powerhouse” of cyber security and abreast of the scale and nature of offending and vulnerabilities, it would be best placed to vouchsafe that the Cyber Security Council’s qualification standards are bang up to date. I suggest it should report annually on whether the numbers are sufficient and whether we are on track to produce the scale of cyber professionalism that both the public and private sectors will require.

Finally, why enable the OCR to recommend to the Secretary of State the expansion of the definition of an “essential service” to be brought under OCR regulation? Government can be a slow-moving, bureaucratic tangle and an independent, informed and focused regulator with just one job to do is much more likely to act with due urgency and identify vulnerable but critical and essential services that need to be brought under scope.

The noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, a gentle and much-respected man in the House who is careful with his words, described this Bill at Second Reading as “a muddle”. I fear that that was understatement. This Bill has been too long in the genesis. It completely fails to deal with the world as it has developed, as the most experienced and acute cyber professionals describe it and as the worst of its victims have experienced it. I implore the Minister to recognise that this is not a partisan matter, as has been very clear from our proceedings this afternoon. There are profound reservations across the Committee about the Bill as presently constructed. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just did, I urge the Minister to use the period between now and the Bill’s next stage to engage widely, open-mindedly and meaningfully with those who wish to improve it. I beg to move.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 7, 9, 11, 76, 77 and 88 to 91 in the name of my noble friend Lord Birt, each of which I have added my name to, and to Amendment 87 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones.

Broadcasting: Recent Developments

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I will focus on the BBC from a commercial and international perspective, and should declare an interest up front. In my years as a journalist and foreign correspondent in Latin America and the Middle East, and then as a CEO of a British online information service on emerging markets, I must admit to benefiting hugely from the BBC’s reflected reputation for balance, independence and trusted news. In my experience, the BBC’s brand is actually stronger outside the UK than within, in almost all regions of the world, bar perhaps certain elements in the US.

Looking at the BBC’s global, rather than domestic audience, it is here that the greatest opportunities lie, which in turn raises fundamental questions about the business model of a public service broadcaster. I should declare a second interest, and a rather less positive one: my application for a place on the BBC’s 1982 graduate trainee scheme was brutally rejected without even the offer of an interview. Some 40 years on, I will try not to let this affect my own impartiality; instead, I will focus on two key metrics from last year’s BBC annual report.

The first, as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, told us, is that the BBC’s global weekly audience sits at 453 million. That is, in fact, down from its highest ever global audience of 486 million back in 2020, but still an impressive reach in an increasingly crowded and partial market. Secondly, if we dig deeper, we see that, despite all the cuts, BBC News accounts for 418 million—that is over 90% of the corporation’s global audience—and of that, the World Service delivers 313 million. This global reach is vital for the UK’s soft power and influence, as we have heard. It is hugely helpful to our Foreign Office, to diplomatic relations and to our trade and investment. What is often less understood is that it is also helpful to UK multinationals and indeed SME exporters, as I discovered in my days as a publisher. You could argue that that alone represents good value for money for the £3.8 billion a year we pay in licence fees, before we look at all the domestic benefits of information, education and entertainment.

It is therefore encouraging to see that the BBC’s commercial revenues, which have not been mentioned today, have grown to over £2 billion annually from around £1.2 billion five years ago, despite its current trading restrictions. Yet, with that global audience of 450 million, it represents just 40p per viewer per month—so there is significant scope for growth.

We need to allow the BBC to harness this global opportunity for changes to its business model, particularly in the area of partnerships, tiered subscriptions, paywalls and content licensing. Does the Minister agree that that requires greater investment, and not cost-cutting, in its news and factual departments, particularly for the World Service?

A coherent business strategy to grow commercial revenues to what I believe could be £5 billion per annum would enable a reduction in the TV licence over time to below £100 per household, which would be a good thing. Crucially, this could be done without over-reliance on advertising and sponsorship, which would threaten the very thing that the BBC is still most valued for: independence and impartiality.

Football Governance Act 2025: Implementation

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

Clearly, we are really proud of the Premier League and of English and British football. It is our national game. However, the genesis of the Football Governance Act was based on some real issues within the game of football and the entire pyramid, and I expect and anticipate that the chair of the regulator will see these as a key priority, while not undermining the competitiveness of the Premier League.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that it would be wrong to single out clubs such as Morecambe and Sheffield Wednesday as outliers or exceptional? I say that because, in the last two seasons, all 24 clubs in our second tier—the EFL Championship—have generated operating losses, with wage bills continuing to spiral. The clubs together now carry a debt of £1.5 billion. Time is surely not on the regulator’s side.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

This is exactly why we intend to get the regulator up as quickly as possible.

Community Sports: Impact on Young People

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Hannett and Lord Shamash, on making their maiden speeches—or, to use sporting parlance, on getting off the mark in such spectacular style. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wood of Anfield, for securing this critical debate. I note that, as a Liverpudlian, he took the opportunity to salute Jürgen Klopp before his final match so, declaring my interest as a West Ham supporter, I feel it is only right to tip my hat to David Moyes, our outgoing manager, just days before his final match—if, indeed, David is watching this debate alongside Jürgen.

This debate comes a year after some of us here debated the Select Committee’s report A National Plan for Sport, Health and Wellbeing. As I did then, I will focus today on the rather grim subject of inactivity, because this is a huge and troubling issue, not just for our mental and physical health but for society and the economy, including the health and well-being of our workforce. This is a topic of great significance to the Economic Affairs Committee, on which I now sit.

The UK has suffered a disturbing increase in the number of economically inactive people since 2019. This threatens to become the single biggest drag on our economy, in terms of both productivity and growth. In just five years, some 900,000 people of working age have been signed off as long-term sick, taking the total up to 2.8 million. On top of that, short-term sickness is also growing fast, while thousands of 50 to 64 year-olds have opted to retire early and become economically inactive. As we know, inactivity in all its forms drives up obesity, particularly among the young, which is now reported to be costing the UK more than £100 billion a year, so it is all the more concerning that levels of physical activity have fallen in recent years, replaced in part by increasing sedentary behaviour fuelled by smartphones, social media, video gaming, online shopping, multichannel TVs and general screen addiction. Working from home is another unhelpful trend.

I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned the Government’s policy paper, Get Active: A Strategy for the Future of Sport and Physical Activity. It was published last year, after several delays, and has some very good intentions. It was described by our Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport as “unapologetically ambitious”. I point out that this is our eighth Secretary of State in the last six years. The key objectives are to see 2.5 million more adults and 1 million more children in England being classed as “active” by 2030. But let us put that in perspective, because the Government report that 12 million adults are “inactive”, doing less than 30 minutes’ activity a week—in other words, less than five minutes a day. On top of that, we have another 5 million adults deemed by our CMO to be “fairly active”, meaning they do between 30 and 150 minutes a week, a bizarrely broad bracket with a misleading label. So we have 17 million adults in the UK, 37% of our population, who are either inactive or what I would call underactive, which is a shockingly high number.

As we have heard, when it comes to children it is no better: 53% are doing less than the recommended 60 minutes of activity a day. History shows that the vast majority of these underactive children will become low-activity adults, storing up further trouble down the road.

This drop in activity has happened in spite of the legacy of such events as the London Olympics in 2012, or indeed the billions spent since then by Sport England. As we have heard many times today, Sport England estimates that for every £1 spent on community sport and physical activity, a return on investment of £3.91 has been created for individuals and society. That is a really important claim. Can the Minister explain how that figure is calculated? I am not sure we are seeing the sum of the parts.

In my former life, I was an information and data entrepreneur, brought up on concepts such as statistical significance and returns on investment. They are all highly relevant here, not just for sport and recreation but for the Treasury, health, social security, and work and pensions. We are struggling with a multiplicity of players and stakeholders, both national and local, while the health and well-being remit runs across all these departments, to which we have now added levelling up.

I conclude by calling for much greater cross-departmental collaboration and, possibly, the creation of a new ministerial role to tackle our growing inactivity crisis. If there is room for a Minister of common sense, surely there is room for a Minister of activity.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, as a former journalist and online publisher, I welcome this Bill. It is imperfect, of course, but it is much needed, as can be seen by the deeply disturbing data around online media and its impact on the young and vulnerable.

I believe that the free-for-all nature of the digital age requires us to build far more rigorous layers of protection and regulation than ever before. I say this having benefited myself hugely as an entrepreneur both from freedom of expression and information and from the extraordinary reach of online media. However, in this digital era of business to consumer as well as consumer to consumer—whether via social media or user-generated content—we cannot let freedom of expression trump all else. Users need protection from not just unscrupulous organisations but each other.

This is about addressing damaging behaviour and unhealthy lifestyles that the digital world has engendered, especially among the young—and not just in the well-documented areas of online hate, abuse and bullying but around increasing obesity, falling levels of exercise, declining levels of academic performance and, some argue, lower economic productivity. The need for teaching media literacy could not be any more clear.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, pointed out, children come across pornography online from as young as the age of seven and more than 50% of 11 to 13 year-olds in the UK have accessed pornography. Even more staggering to me is that, by the age of 18, 79% of young people have been exposed to violent porn. Such exposure has contributed to surging increases in mental ill-health, child abuse, bullying, violence and sexual assault. The evidence is overwhelming—just read the research from the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Parent Zone and many others.

This issue is so serious and widespread that, like the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and many others, I believe that, although it is well intentioned, the tightening regulation and guidance in Part 5 of the Bill do not go far enough. We must grasp the nettle and insist that all pornography sites, without exception, adopt robust, and ideally standardised, age-verification technology, as we have for online gambling. Given the nature of many of these sites, can we really trust them to abide by a new code of practice and expect Ofcom to enforce it effectively?

I accept that social media is a much more complex beast, but here too I believe the time has come for age verification. TikTok claims to have a minimum age requirement of 13, yet Ofcom reports that 42% of our eight to 12 year-olds are on that platform. Much of the content is unsuitable for children, but TikTok monetises traffic whatever your age. Elon Musk take note: more than 40% of young people in this country have accessed porn via Twitter.

The majority of our children and grandchildren are being exposed to a barrage of disturbing content at the most formative stages of their lives. They need protection. Yes, the implementation of mandatory AV will depress audiences and revenues. It will raise privacy issues and there will be loopholes. But in my view the social benefits far outweigh the costs.

Football: Abuse and Violence

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

These issues were looked at as part of the fan-led review conducted my honourable friend Tracey Crouch, and it was clear that the Government need to take action. Leaving certain things to the sector has not worked for decades, and fans have been let down by certain owners not acting responsibly. We will be setting out our plans to reform club football governance in the White Paper that is coming soon.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I understand that body cameras worn by referees are being trialled by some leagues in adult grass-roots fixtures. It sounds like a sensible initiative. Can the Minister update us on it?

Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Viscount for securing this debate at such a critical time for the arts and creative industries in the UK, as we head into a recession, perhaps followed by years of low growth. As we know, Governments often suffer what I call a macrotemptation to cut support for the arts and creative sectors when money is tight, as it undoubtedly is, in the mistaken belief that it makes sound economic sense—and never mind the cultural implications.

It was especially disappointing to see the Government’s sector vision for the creative industries being delayed yet again and the new Chancellor not including this dynamic sector as one of the five priority areas for growth. I find that strange because, cultural issues to one side, there is a compelling economic argument for prioritising the creative industries. I will focus on the business arguments. I do this having worked as an entrepreneur in this sector for 30 years. I declare that I am an active investor in theatre, film and online information—and still bear the scars to prove it.

First, we need a discriminating rather than flat approach to economic growth, which means identifying sectors where GDP growth is above the national average and, crucially, where there is considerable scope for future growth. As we have already heard, the creative industries contributed £116 billion to the UK economy in 2020. Importantly, that is an average 4% per annum growth over the last decade, whereas the economy in general struggled to reach 2%.

Secondly, when domestic demand is weak, as it is, we need export-led growth. The UK creative sector generated $57 billion in exports in the pandemic year of 2020—the fifth-largest such exporter in the world. There is clearly an appetite for UK content overseas and the weak pound makes this an even bigger opportunity, especially outside Europe. We need to grasp it.

Thirdly, productivity is the only realistic way we can generate economic growth, given demographic trends and our shrinking workforce. The technological enablement and digitisation of content has led to some hugely important productivity gains. I witnessed this first-hand over the last 30 years as a journalist turned publisher: first, it was desktop publishing transforming laborious editorial and typesetting practices; then the internet came along, which forced us to digitise our content and become a real-time online information provider, rather than a staid print publisher delivering reports by airmail across the world. The digital revolution is not just about speed and productivity; it allows content producers to reach audiences across the world at a fraction of the cost and, of course, to boost export revenues. The BBC is a good example.

It is often overlooked that the creative sector now employs more than 2 million people across the UK. An increasing proportion of that number are technical and scientific staff—a vital subsector. We have an exciting fusion, known as createch, between the content creators and those who structure and engineer, or write or promote code through multimedia channels, yet this growing intersection between creative skills and technology is in spite of, not because of, our stubborn, rigid approach to education, as the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, just highlighted. We see it at schools with A-levels and universities at degree level, dividing pupils between the arts and the sciences. This in no way reflects the real world. I believe it was a young James Dyson, the British inventor, who after much agonising opted to go to art school, and received a letter of condolence from his headmaster. We need much stronger links between universities and businesses in the creative industries, to drive innovation and indeed make courses much more relevant to careers in this sector. Media studies, take note.

Given the limits on time, I shall finish by making three quick observations to the Minister. The first is on freelancers: a huge number of the 2 million people are freelance and therefore self-employed. I should declare that my daughter is one of them. Please can we stop discriminating against them? The furlough scheme and the flawed off-payroll working rules are two cases in point. They deserve our support for creating their own jobs, showing flexibility at the price of job security, and for being paid on results, unlike many other permanent jobs I could mention.

Secondly, on tax relief, yes, national finances are incredibly tight at the moment, but if we want to boost productivity and innovation in this country, now is surely not the time to slash R&D tax credits for the creative sector.

Finally, I have a word on levelling up. As my noble friend Lady Bull points out, it is formidably difficult to balance the desire to spread opportunities geographically and maintain our national cultural icons which, as in other countries, tend to be concentrated around capital cities. But in the interest of balance I, like many other noble Lords today, question the wisdom of the Arts Council axing entirely its grants for institutions such as the ENO, the Barbican and the Donmar.

UEFA Euro 2020 Final

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

There were lessons for a number of parties in the noble Baroness’s report. The action taken by the Government includes extending football banning orders in the way that I have described and commissioning the Sports Grounds Safety Authority to conduct and act on research about stewarding capacity throughout the live events sector. We have led the relevant authorities in considering the recommendations that the noble Baroness made on “Zone Ex” and designations.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, one of the conclusions of the independent review was the over-reliance on inexperienced and poorly paid stewards. What is the Government’s response to this now that the UK and Ireland are pitching for the Euro 2028 tournament, which requires safety and security for 10 stadiums across five countries?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The Sports Grounds Safety Authority commissioned on behalf of DCMS research on the sustainability of stewarding—not just in relation to football matches but live events more generally—looking at challenges such as recruitment and retention as well as training and experience, as the noble Lord mentioned. The authority is now working with football’s governing bodies and others to address the challenges identified in the research, and the Government continue to review challenges in the stewarding sector in light of the successful summer of sport that we have just enjoyed.

Freedom of Expression (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and members of the committee on producing such a thorough and thought-provoking report. I refer to my interests as set out in the register and declare that I spent some 20 years building a digital information company where freedom of expression—in our case, views and analysis on Governments around the world—was our lifeblood.

That said, my focus today is online safety, particularly for the young, among whom evidence shows that mobile access to digital media has led to deeply disturbing patterns of behaviour—not just in the well-documented areas of online hate, abuse and bullying but in the unintended contributions to increasing obesity, falling levels of physical activity and, in certain areas, declining levels of academic performance. This also raises a key question: has social media led to a decline in workplace productivity? It is debatable, but many employers, like me, believe that it has.

I believe we must go further and much faster than the draft Online Safety Bill suggests in providing stronger and more effective levels of protection to children. Yes, some of these measures will cause friction, a pet hate of digital platforms; some will restrict freedom of speech; some will impact revenues and profits; and some will depress usage, which is no bad thing in my view. However, the damage to both the mental and physical health of the young is the absolute priority.

The ONS reports that 75% of our children spend three or more hours online a day at the weekend, with 22% spending more than seven hours a day. On school days, almost half spend more than three hours a day online. Allied to that, just 23% of boys and 20% of girls in this country meet the national recommended level of physical activity. One in five children starts primary school overweight or obese, rising to more than a third by the time they leave. More time online, less physical activity—what an unhealthy start to life.

As we know, anxiety and depression among both boys and girls has risen sharply over the last 20 years, as have self-harm and suicide rates. The young and vulnerable continue to have almost unfettered access to menacing websites promoting self-harm or “taking control of your life”, and this is not just reserved to the dark web. The need to protect our children is beyond question. How you do so is complex and challenging, and it ultimately requires a global set of principles for digital safety, because this is very much a multinational issue.

I will finish by touching on two further points raised in this report. First is the urgent need for age assurance and age verification technologies, as others have flagged up today, which the draft Bill should address much more forcefully. Responding to a Question in this place yesterday, the Minister suggested that we should not rush in because these technologies are developing so rapidly. With respect, I find that a defeatist excuse for inertia. We should have acted in this area five years ago. TikTok is a prime example: it has a minimum age requirement of 13, which is laughably unenforced. Ofcom reports that it is used by 42% of our eight to 12 year-olds, which is almost certainly an underestimate. The British Board of Film Classification found that a deeply disturbing 51% of 11 to 13 year-olds have accessed pornography online.

Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree with noble Lords that digital citizenship, annoying though that term is, should be a central part of the Government’s media literacy strategy, but it requires structure and funding, as indeed does the equally important related need for health education. Teaching appropriate behaviour online—focusing on civility, inclusion and respect—has become a critical life skill, not just at primary and secondary school but at university and in the workplace. Let us embark on a joined-up and properly financed strategy to address this.