Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard and Claire Perry

Wednesday 26th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Elliott]

I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman—he has my full support in his attempts to resolve that matter.

I will give hon. Members an example. My young son got a new PlayStation 4 for Christmas 16 months ago, and I promised to download him a game for Christmas. I gave him the voucher on Christmas morning in the hope that the game, which was some sort of simulator, would have downloaded by lunchtime, but it had not even downloaded by new year’s day—it took 10 days to download. Such things are frustrating for young people. They also have to be able to do their classwork and their student work, so they rely on being online. There is now a great deal of reliance on being online.

I want to put on record my appreciation for the fact that the Government have introduced this important Bill and ensured that it has made progress. I accept the Minister’s suggestion that Lords amendment 1 was not future-proofed, but I emphasise that we must continue to look at the matter regularly, because changes will be required.

[Claire Perry]

I want to make three points, and I will not detain the House for too long. First, I want to set out for the benefit of the Front Benchers the concern that I still feel about some definitional points; secondly, I want to talk about how far we have come; and, thirdly, I want to echo what has been said about how cross-party working can deliver in this place.

Both Ministers have received a letter from me on the part 3 amendments. I understand how we have reached the current position. We expressed concern during various briefings about the fact that definitional questions about the difference between “prohibited” and “extreme” were not thrashed out in Committee. I commend Ministers for the very productive Committee proceedings. Despite what the Opposition Front-Bench team have said, I think that the Bill was greatly improved by the current ministerial team, who showed a real willingness to engage, listen and improve the Bill. I feel strongly that we are in a much better place after Committee than we were when we started.

We have had concerns about the definition of “prohibited material”, which is now a clear, appropriate and workable definition guided by five different statutes, one of which is the Obscene Publications Act 1959. That Act gave rise to the concern about whether certain acts—I will not trouble Hansard to check whether certain terms are permissible; I will simply not use them—that were once considered to be illegal are no longer considered to be so, and thus should not be captured by the definition of “prohibited”. I think that the concern over those very specific items led the Government to narrow the focus too much to a definition of extreme pornography. That definition leaves in the middle a lot of material that is not currently captured by statute, but is considered to be anything from life-threatening, at worst, to damaging at best.

By my reading, the definition of extreme pornography makes space for two things: all but the most extreme forms of sexual violence—by that I am referring to choking pornography and multiple sexual acts on one woman or man—and non-photographic child sexual images, including animation. The latter particularly concerns us, because we have all worked hard to ensure that this whole area is outlawed, without any discussion of what is permissible. I think we would all support the complete removal of that whole area from the internet.