Domestic Violence Against Children

Lord Watts Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

One of the key areas is ensuring that, through the education system, we strengthen relationship education, personal relationship education and, in particular, respect for young girls. That is a very difficult job, because there is a mass of social media that has an exact opposite approach to the type of things that we wish to see within the education system, so we are also, through the Online Safety Act, looking at what we need to do with online harm, because the world has moved on, even in the past 10 to 15 years, and will continue to do so. That is a very important point and one that the Government are very much apprised of and trying to find some resolution to.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is quite correct to say that social media has much more impact than government policy in this area, but is he confident that the regulator, which has continued to fail to do anything about this, will be up for the job that it now has, with the changes in the policy direction, and that it will do the job that it is supposed to do to protect the public?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Ofcom, which is the appropriate regulatory body, is determined to ensure that the existing Online Safety Act legislation is implemented and, in particular, that social media companies are held to account for their performance on it. Again, on the violence against women and girls strategy and other matters such as fraud, which is within my direct remit, we are looking at whether we need to give additional powers and support to Ofcom to ensure that it performs those tasks properly.