Online Safety Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak on this group, but I was provoked into offering some reflections on the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, especially his opening remarks about cars and planes, which he said were designed to be safe. He did not mention trains, about which I know something as well, and which are also designed to be safe. These are a few initial reflective points. They are designed in very different ways. An aeroplane is designed never to fail; a train is designed so that if it fails, it will come to a stop. They are two totally different approaches to safety. Simply saying that something must be designed to be safe does not answer questions; it opens questions about what we actually mean by that. The noble Lord went on to say that we do not allow children to drive cars and fly planes. That is absolutely true, but the thrust of his amendment is that we should design the internet so that it can be driven by children and used by children— so that it is designed for them, not for adults. That is my problem with the general thrust of many of these amendments.

A further reflection that came to mind as the noble Lord spoke was on a book of great interest that I recommend to noble Lords. It is a book by the name of Risk written in 1995 by Professor John Adams, then professor of geography at University College London. He is still an emeritus professor of geography there. It was a most interesting work on risk. First, it reflected how little we actually know of many of the things of which we are trying to assess risk.

More importantly, he went on to say that people have an appetite for risk. That appetite for risk—that risk budget, so to speak—changes over the course of one’s life: one has much less appetite for risk when one gets to a certain age than perhaps one had when one was young. I have never bungee jumped in my life, and I think I can assure noble Lords that the time has come when I can say I never shall, but there might have been a time when I was younger when I might have flung myself off a cliff, attached to a rubber band and so forth—noble Lords may have done so. One has an appetite for risk.

The interesting thing that he went on to develop from that was the notion of risk compensation: that if you have an appetite for risk and your opportunities to take risks are taken away, all you do is compensate by taking risks elsewhere. So a country such as New Zealand, which has some of the strictest cycling safety laws, also has a very high incidence of bungee jumping among the young; as they cannot take risks on their bicycles, they will find ways to go and do it elsewhere.

Although these reflections are not directly germane to the amendments, they are important as we try to understand what we are seeking to achieve here, which is a sort of hermetically sealed absence of risk for children. I do not think it will work. I said at Second Reading that I thought the flavour of the debate was somewhat similar to a late medieval conclave of clerics trying to work out how to mitigate the harmful effects of the invention of movable type. That did not work either, and I think we are in a very similar position today as we discuss this.

There is also the question of harm and what it means. While the examples being given by noble Lords are very specific and no doubt genuinely harmful, and are the sorts of things that we should like to stop, the drafting of the amendments, using very vague words such as “harm”, is dangerous overreach in the Bill. To give just one example, for the sake of speed, when I was young, administering the cane periodically was thought good for a child in certain circumstances. The mantra was, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, though I never heard it said. Nowadays, we would not think it morally or psychologically good to do physical harm to a child. We would regard it as an unmitigated harm and, although not necessarily banned or illegal, it is something that—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I respond to the noble Lord in two ways. First, I ask him to reflect on how the parents of the children who have died through what the parents would undoubtedly view as serious and unbearable harm would feel about his philosophical ruminations. Secondly, as somebody who has the privilege of being a Deputy Speaker in your Lordships’ House, it is incumbent and germane for us all to focus on the amendment in question and stay on it, to save time and get through the business.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Well, I must regard myself as doubly rebuked, and unfairly, because my reflections are very relevant to the amendments, and I have developed them in that direction. In respect of the parents, they have suffered very cruelly and wrongly, but although it may sound harsh, as I have said in this House before on other matters, hard cases make bad law. We are in the business of trying to make good law that applies to the whole population, so I do not think that these are wholly—

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

If my noble friend could, would he roll back the health and safety regulations for selling toys, in the same way that he seems so happy to have no health and safety regulations for children’s access to digital toys?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, if the internet were a toy, aimed at children and used only by children, those remarks would of course be very relevant, but we are dealing with something of huge value and importance to adults as well. It is the lack of consideration of the role of adults, the access for adults and the effects on freedom of expression and freedom of speech, implicit in these amendments, that cause me so much concern.

I seem to have upset everybody. I will now take issue with and upset the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, with whom I have not engaged on this topic so far. At Second Reading and earlier in Committee, she used the phrase, “childhood lasts a lifetime”. There are many people for whom this is a very chilling phrase. We have an amendment in this group—a probing amendment, granted—tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, which seeks to block access to VPNs as well. We are in danger of putting ourselves in the same position as China, with a hermetically sealed national internet, attempting to put borders around it so that nobody can breach it. I am assured that even in China this does not work and that clever and savvy people simply get around the barriers that the state has erected for them.

Before I sit down, I will redeem myself a little, if I can, by giving some encouragement to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on Amendments 28 and 32 —although I think the amendments are in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool. These amendments, if we are to assess the danger posed by the internet to children, seek to substitute an assessment of the riskiness of the provider for the Government’s emphasis on the size of the provider. As I said earlier in Committee, I do not regard size as being a source of danger. When it comes to many other services— I mentioned that I buy my sandwich from Marks & Spencer as opposed to a corner shop—it is very often the bigger provider I feel is going to be safer, because I feel I can rely on its processes more. So I would certainly like to hear how my noble friend the Minister responds on that point in relation to Amendments 28 and 32, and why the Government continue to put such emphasis on size.

More broadly, in these understandable attempts to protect children, we are in danger of using language that is far too loose and of having an effect on adult access to the internet which is not being considered in the debate—or at least has not been until I have, however unwelcomely, raised it.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I assure your Lordships that I rise to speak very briefly. I begin by reassuring my noble friend Lord Moylan that he is loved in this Chamber and outside. I was going to say that he is the grit in the oyster that ensures that a consensus does not establish itself and that we think hard about these amendments, but I will revise that and say he is now the bungee jumper in our ravine. I think he often makes excellent and worthwhile points about the scope and reach of the Bill and the unintended consequences. Indeed, we debated those when we debated the amendments relating to Wikipedia, for example.

Obviously, I support these amendments in principle. The other reason I wanted to speak was to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—Beeban—a happy birthday, because I know that these speeches will be recorded on parchment bound in vellum and presented to her, but also to thank her for all the work that she has done for many years now on the protection of children’s rights on the internet. It occurred to me, as my noble friend Lady Harding was speaking, that there were a number of points I wanted to seek clarity on, either from the Minister or from the proponents of the amendments.

First, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, mentioned the age-appropriate design code, which was a victory for the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. It has, I think, already had an impact on the way that some sites that are frequented by children are designed. I know, for instance, that TikTok—the noble Baroness will correct me—prides itself on having made some changes as a result of the design code; for example, its algorithms are able, to a certain extent, to detect whether a child is under 13. I know anecdotally that children under 13 sometimes do have their accounts taken away; I think that is a direct result of the amendments made by the age-appropriate design code.

I would like to understand how these amendments, and the issue of children’s rights in this Bill, will interact with the age-appropriate design code, because none of us wants the confetti of regulations that either overlap or, worse, contradict themselves.

Secondly, I support the principle of functionality. I think it is a very important point that these amendments make: the Bill should not be focused solely on content but should take into account that functionality leads to dangerous content. That is an important principle on which platforms should be held to account.

Thirdly, going back to the point about the age-appropriate design code, the design of websites is extremely important and should be part of the regulatory system. Those are the points I wanted to make.