Representation of the People Bill

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the director of the Free Speech Union.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said earlier that he was looking forward to my remarks, seemingly under the impression that the Free Speech Union would be within scope of the new regulations in the Bill. But the Free Speech Union is not a think tank; nor is it regulated by the Charity Commission. So, unless there is an amendment in the flurry of government amendments we are anticipating which somehow brings campaigning membership organisations within scope but nevertheless exempts trade unions, I think the Free Speech Union is probably safe. I share the reservations of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, about that practice, and I will be voting for his amendment shortly.

I note that the party of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, received a £2.4 million donation in 2005 from a company called 5th Avenue Partners, owned by Michael Brown, who was based in Spain at the time and was later convicted of fraud. So while I do not think the Bill will affect donations to the Free Speech Union, it may well affect donations to the Liberal Democrats.

I want to talk about the impact that lowering the voting age to 16 will have on the regulations that are due to be brought before both Houses by the Secretary of State for DCMS later this year, restricting or preventing children from accessing social media. I share the same concerns as those articulated by my noble friend Lord Markham. If you are going to lower the voting age to 16, it makes a blanket ban on under-16s accessing social media less sensible. According to Ofcom, among 12 to 15 year-olds, individual social media platforms are the most used single news sources. To impose a blanket ban on under-16s accessing social media in the forthcoming regulations would make it much harder for children—when they reach the age of 16, they cannot access social media platforms before that point—to make informed decisions about who to vote for.

There is an obvious solution to this problem, which is not to restrict access for under-16s to content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. There are duties in the Online Safety Act that require social media companies and other providers designated as category 1 providers to protect all three types of content, set out in Sections 17 to 19 of the Act. But these duties have not yet been activated, despite assurances from Ofcom that they would be activated this summer. It perhaps will not surprise noble Lords to discover that all the take-down duties in the Online Safety Act have been activated, but some of the keep-up duties—the duties inserted to safeguard freedom of expression—have not yet been activated, including the duties to protect content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. My question to the Minister is: will she assure the House that, when those duties are activated, under-16s will not be restricted from accessing the kind of information they will need if they are going to make informed choices about who to vote for when they reach the new, lower voting age?

There is another, related concern: what content social media platforms are obliged to age-gate, because the content is supposedly harmful to children. These child safety duties in the Online Safety Act kicked in in July 2025, meaning that in order to access supposedly harmful content, you needed to be able to prove that you were 18 or over. But some of the content that was age-gated included a speech by Katie Lam in the House of Commons about the grooming gangs, footage of anti-immigration protests outside asylum hotels and, ironically enough, a video made by Spiked about online censorship. I ask the Minister whether she will make it clear to Ofcom that it should no longer insist that social media companies age-gate this type of content to those aged 18 and above, if the voting age is going to be lowered to 16. That is precisely the kind of content covered by Sections 17 to 19, so the simplest remedy would be to not restrict children’s access to those types of content. If that is a step too far for the Government, will the Minister at least assure the House that speeches made in here and the other place will not be restricted for 16 and 17 year-olds, as some of them are at present? To paraphrase Robert Lowe in the context of the Reform Act 1867: we must educate our masters.

Local Councillors: Recruitment, Retention and Well-being

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I am at a slight disadvantage in this debate. I am one of the few participants who has not served as a local councillor, so I do not have the coalface experience that others do. I will talk about this issue from the point of view of my work as director of the Free Speech Union. Since I set it up six years ago, we have taken 317 cases—I checked yesterday—coded “local government” in our case database. Of those, 141 were about members of the public who had been complained about by councillors or council employees.

The pattern we encounter again and again is that when members of the public say things that councillors find disagreeable but that would nevertheless be protected speech under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, they are complained about, sometimes with devastating consequences, on the grounds that what they have said constitutes harassment, misinformation or hate speech, even though it is clear-cut that their comments are protected.

I have time, so I will give one or two examples of people we went to bat for. Last year, two police officers from Greater Manchester Police paid a visit to a grandmother in Stockport who had posted in a Facebook group calling for the resignation of two local Labour councillors, after the Mail on Sunday had exposed comments in a WhatsApp group in which they expressed the hope that a troublesome member of the public in their ward would die. This scandal involved Andrew Gwynne when he was a Health Minister, and he had to resign as a result. Nothing she said could possibly have been perceived as meeting the threshold for harassment, yet two police officers, having been tipped off by the partner of one of these councillors, paid a visit to her house. There are countless such cases. In another case we are dealing with at the moment, a member of the public objected at a meeting of his parish council to the imposition of a 20 mph zone in his village. Two Green councillors promoting this proposal complained that they felt his comment was harassment.

We have to be careful in creating the various mechanisms that the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, proposed in his opening speech. How do we safeguard against them being weaponised for political purposes to suppress legitimate criticism of elected officials?

Social Cohesion Action Plan

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend not just for his very important question but for all his work on this during his career. We are setting out a bold new approach here, not just tackling hate speech but countering extremism by adopting and implementing definitions of extremism. We will publish the annual state of extremism report. That is one way of making sure that we are keeping a focus on the issue. We are strengthening Charity Commission powers to tackle extremist abuse, including the power to shut down charities and suspend trustees—and there are the measures I have already mentioned on tackling extremism on university campuses and in health.

We will work to implement the definition to make sure it has real effect, making sure that public bodies do not confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups. We will work with the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to ensure robust use of existing legislation on that harmful extremist conduct. As my noble friend said, the consequences of not taking action here are critical and dangerous. We will make sure that all organisations, now that they have this definition, can take action and monitor what is happening.

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. It is not particularly helpful to accuse those who have expressed concern that this definition will operate like a Muslim blasphemy law by the backdoor of spreading dangerous disinformation, not least because knowingly spreading dangerous disinformation is a criminal offence under Section 179 of the Online Safety Act. Suggesting that those who raise the alarm about the chilling effect of this definition on free speech should be prosecuted makes the point far more eloquently than we could.

I note that when the Communities Secretary unveiled the definition of anti-Muslim hatred in the other place, he said that he hoped it would be taken up by the police; the Minister just expressed the same view. Is it the Government’s intention that when someone is found to have said or done something that meets the definition of anti-Muslim hostility, it will be recorded by the police? Could it then be disclosed in an enhanced criminal record check if that person applies for a job as, say, a teacher at a school in a Muslim neighbourhood?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I set out very clearly that this is a non-statutory definition. It is there to assist organisations to understand what we mean by anti-Muslim hostility. I remind the noble Lord that there is no blasphemy law in this country and that this Government have no intention of introducing one.