Online Safety Bill

Debate between Viscount Colville of Culross and Lord Bishop of Chelmsford

Committee stage
Thursday 25th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I have put my name to Amendments 195, 239 and 263. I also strongly support Amendment 125 in the name of my noble friend Lady Kidron.

During this Committee there have been many claims that a group of amendments is the most significant, but I believe that this group is the most significant. This debate comes after the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Science and Technology met the heads of leading AI research companies in Downing Street. The joint statement said:

“They discussed safety measures … to manage risks”


and called for

“international collaboration on AI safety and regulation”.

Surely this Bill is the obvious place to start responding to those concerns. If we do not future-proof this Bill against the changes in digital technology, which are ever increasing at an ever-faster rate, it will be obsolete even before it is implemented.

My greatest concern is the arrival of AI. The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, has reminded us of the warnings from the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton. If he is not listened to, who on earth should we be listening to? I wholeheartedly support Amendment 125. Machine-generated content is present in so much of what we see on the internet, and its presence is increasing daily. It is the future, and it must be within scope of this Bill. I am appalled by the examples that the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, has brought before us.

In the Communications and Digital Committee inquiry on regulating the internet, we decided that horizon scanning was so important that we called for a digital authority to be created which would look for harms developing in the digital world, assess how serious a threat they posed to users and develop a regulated response. The Government did not take up these suggestions. Instead, Ofcom has been given the onerous task of enforcing the triple shield which under this Bill will protect users to different degrees into the future.

Amendment 195 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford will ensure that Ofcom has knowledge of how well the triple shield is working, which must be essential. Surveys of thousands of users undertaken by companies such as Kantar give an invaluable snapshot of what is concerning users now. These must be fed into research by Ofcom to ensure that future developments across the digital space are monitored, updated and brought to the attention of the Secretary of State and Parliament on a regular basis.

Amendment 195 will reveal trends in harms which might not be picked up by Ofcom under the present regime. It will look at the risk arising for individuals from the operation of Part 3 services. Clause 12 on user empowerment duties has a list of content and characteristics from which users can protect themselves. However, the characteristics for which or content with which users can be abused will change over time and these changes need to be researched, anticipated and implemented.

This Bill has proved in its long years of gestation that it takes time to change legislation, while changes on the internet take just minutes or are already here. The regime set up by these future-proofing amendments will at least go some way to protecting users from these fast-evolving harms. I stress to your Lordships’ Committee that this is very much precautionary work. It should be used to inform the Secretary of State of harms which are coming down the line. I do not think it will give power automatically to expand the scope of harms covered by the regime.

Amendment 239 inserts a new clause for an Ofcom future management of risks review. This will help feed into the Secretary of State review regime set out in Clause 159. Clause 159(3)(a) currently looks at ensuring that regulated services are operating using systems and process which, so far as relevant, are minimising the risk of harms to individuals. The wording appears to mean that the Secretary of State will be viewing all harms to individuals. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain to the Committee the scope of the harms set out in Clause 159(3)(a)(i). Are they meant to cover only the harms of illegality and harms to children, or are they part of a wider examination of the harms regime to see whether it needs to be contracted or expanded? I would welcome an explanation of the scope of the Secretary of State’s review.

The real aim of Amendment 263 is to ensure that the Secretary of State looks at research work carried out by Ofcom. I am not sure how politicians will come to any conclusions in the Clause 159 review unless they are required to look at all the research published by Ofcom on future risk. I would like the Minister to explain what research the Secretary of State would rely on for this review unless this amendment is accepted. I hope Amendment 263 will also encourage the Secretary of State to look at possible harms not only from content, but also from the means of delivering this content.

This aim was the whole point of Amendment 261, which has already been debated. However, it needs to be borne in mind when considering that harms come not just from content, but also from the machine technology which delivers it. Every day we read about new developments and threats posed by a fast-evolving internet. Today it is concerns about ChatGPT and the race for the most sophisticated artificial intelligence. The amendments in this group will provide much-needed reinforcement to ensure that the Online Safety Bill remains a beacon for continuing safety online.

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I shall speak in favour of Amendments 195, 239 and 263, tabled in the names of my right reverend friend the Bishop of Oxford, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, who I thank for his comments.

My right reverend friend the Bishop of Oxford regrets that he is unable to attend today’s debate. I know he would have liked to be here. My right reverend friend tells me that the Government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, of which he was a founding member, devoted considerable resource to horizon scanning in its early years, looking for the ways in which AI and tech would develop across the world. The centre’s analysis reflected a single common thread: new technologies are developing faster than we can track them and they bring with them the risk of significant harms.

This Bill has also changed over time. It now sets out two main duties: the illegal content duty and the children duty. These duties have been examined and debated for years, including by the joint scrutiny committee. They are refined and comprehensive. Risk assessments are required to be “suitable and sufficient”, which is traditional language from 20 years of risk-based regulation. It ensures that the duties are fit for purpose and proportionate. The duties must be kept up to date and in line with any service changes. Recent government amendments now helpfully require companies to report to Ofcom and publish summaries of their findings.

However, in respect of harms to adults, in November last year the Government suddenly took a different tack. They introduced two new groups of duties as part of a novel triple shield framework, supplementing the duty to remove illegal harms with a duty to comply with their own terms of service and a duty to provide user empowerment tools. These new duties are quite different in style to the illegal content and children duties. They have not benefited from the prior years of consultation.

As this Committee’s debates have frequently noted, there is no clear requirement on companies to assess in the round how effective their implementation of these new duties is or to keep track of their developments. The Government have changed this Bill’s system for protecting adults online late in the day, but the need for risk assessments, in whatever system the Bill is designed around, has been repeated again and again across Committee days. Even at the close of day eight on Tuesday, the noble Lords, Lord Allan of Hallam and Lord Clement-Jones, referred explicitly to the role of risk assessment in validating the Bill’s systems of press reforms. Surely this persistence across days and groups of debate reflects the systemically pivotal role of risk assessments in what is, after all, meant to be a systems and processes rather than a content-orientated Bill.

But it seems that many people on many sides of this Committee believe that an important gap in risk assessment for harms to adults has been introduced by these late changes to the Bill. My colleague the right reverend Prelate is keen that I thank Carnegie UK for its work across the Bill, including these amendments. It notes:

“Harms to adults which might trickle down to become harms to children are not assessed in the current Bill”.


The forward-looking parts of its regime need to be strengthened to ensure that Parliament and the Secretary of State review new ways in which harms manifesting as technology race along, and to ensure that they then have the right advice for deciding what to do about them. To improve that advice, Ofcom needs to risk assess the future and then to report its findings.