(3 years, 5 months ago)
Grand CommitteeI believe I should respond to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, if I may. The noble Lord makes a very fair point. It is fair to say that this is, just by dint of the coincidence of timing, tied up with all the work we are doing on the online harms White Paper. He will know that more detailed proposals on the regulations will be released alongside the interim voluntary codes. We need to look at this in tandem with what we are doing with free trade agreements. That is the answer I can give to him at the moment. Again, I will write to him with more details on this because it is a very important subject.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for asking half of my question, but, as the Minister just said, it is tied up with online harms, we are tied up with trade—I think that is our collective anxiety, if you like. At what point do these things start impacting on each other in ways that are negative to children? The reason for having a standard going in is to make sure that children are not victims of what happens over the next months and so on. I want to make that point.
I have another question, if the Minister would be kind enough to answer. He mentioned, a couple of times, high standards of data protection, but does he mean the standards that we negotiated so long and so heavily during the passage of the DPA 2018? Are those the standards, and will those remain the standards, or are we talking about some other general high standards of data protection?
To answer the second question from the noble Baroness, we could well be. I think I have said, in other respects, when we do finally leave the EU after the transition period, because we will have left the EU it will be up to us to look at our standards and raise them if we think that is right. On the way forward on online harms, which is very close to the heart of the noble Baroness, I reassure her that there is a lot of cross-departmental work going on here. Although this is DCMS-led, I reassure her, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Grimstone, that the DIT and other departments are working together on the way forward, bearing in mind the White Paper.