Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh MacAlister]

I will get to that in my speech. I am keen to get on to those points, and I will address the questions the hon. Gentleman has asked.

The Smartphone Free Childhood campaign has grown from zero members to over 200,000 in less than a year, which shows the strength of feeling in the country on this issue.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

It would be remiss of me not to start by thanking my hon. Friend for the leadership he has shown on the issue. He has started a big conversation not just in this Chamber, but right across the country. That is certainly true in my constituency, where we have a fantastic local Smartphone Free Childhood campaign group, and lots of the young people I meet on my school visits and in campaigning conversations across the constituency have real concerns about this topic. As always, the views of parents and young people on these things tend to lead the way. Does he agree that, as well as being ambitious about gathering evidence, we will need to become more comfortable with the idea of legislating in this area with the same precautionary principle that we apply in every other aspect of children’s lives, to ensure that we protect them from the harms they are expressing to us?

[Josh MacAlister]

I completely agree that progress is inevitable, given the strength of feeling in the country on the matter.

I was grateful for the substantive research document pulled together by Rachel, Tom and the team at Nesta, which clearly demonstrates why action is needed, and for the polling and focus group research done by the New Britain Project and More in Common, which shows how popular taking action is among children themselves, as well as parents. Thanks also go to Arabella Skinner and Dr Becky Foljambe at Health Professionals for Safer Screens and all the health professionals they mobilised to engage with the development of the Bill, who witness at first hand the impacts of excessive screen time on the physical and mental health of the nation’s children.

Our teachers and school leaders are also on the frontline of seeing the impact on children in their care. I thank, in particular, the headteacher of the John Wallis academy, Damian McBeath, who organised hundreds of his colleagues in support of the Bill; Teach First; the Ambition Institute; all the school and academy trust leaders who backed the Bill; and the teaching unions the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers, NASUWT and, in particular, the National Education Union, which is leading a big campaign on social media and smartphone use, with a report out just this morning.

Children’s charities are alive to the detrimental impact of smartphone and social media use on this generation, and I have been delighted to have the backing of the big five: Barnardo’s, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Action For Children, the National Children’s Bureau and the Children’s Society. That is in addition to data and testimony provided by UK Youth, OnSide, the Scouts, Girlguiding, Coram and the King’s Trust—they have made their mark on this debate. A special mention goes to the current and former Children’s Commissioner for England for their backing.

Organisations representing parents have been vocal about the need for further action, and I record my thanks to Sue, Rhiannon and the wonderful team at Mumsnet for all their coverage and for the debate they have instigated on the topic. I also thank ParentZone and Parentkind for their contributions to the Bill hearings. I also thank all the other members of the public and professionals who came to the Bill hearing processes; there are too many to mention, but they certainly made an impact on the Members of Parliament who attended.

Finally, I thank the 5Rights Foundation and members of the Bereaved Families for Online Safety group, who I met alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy). They experienced the most devastating consequences of smartphone and social media use. They have done what many would find so difficult to do and have turned personal tragedy into a campaign for urgent change. I want to thank Ellen Roome, Mariano Janin, Lisa Kenevan, Ruth Moss, Lorin LaFave, Amanda and Stuart Stephens, and Esther Ghey for their bravery and for engaging with the development of the Bill.

With the problems so stark and the calls for change so loud, what is being done to respond to those issues around the world? Just this week, the Republican governor of the conservative state of Utah has passed America’s first law mandating age verification for app stores, to ensure that children use only age-appropriate apps, when their parents are happy for them to do so. Australia has legislated for an outright ban on social media below the age of 16, which will come into force later this year, and last week Denmark moved to ban mobile phones in schools and after-school clubs. Last year, Norway increased the minimum age limit on social media to 15 by changing the age of consent for data sharing. France has done the same, and has pushed for measures to be taken across the EU. Will it be just British children who are left unprotected against addictive harms of smartphones and social media? We cannot let that happen; we must act.

It is time that we caught up. That is why I am so pleased to be debating this issue today, following months of engagement across Government and beyond, with hundreds of health and education professionals; children’s, youth and online safety charities; parents, and young people themselves. I introduced the Bill because of the stark difference between conversations taking place out there in the country and the debates that we have here in the nation’s Parliament. It is fair to say that the public are well ahead of politicians on this issue. Today marks progress towards Parliament finally catching up with the mood of the nation.

The Bill has been drafted to secure explicit Government backing. It has been written to achieve change rather than just to highlight the issue. That is why it is narrower than where I started when this campaign began six months ago. I hope that the Minister will confirm in his response that the Government will take forward the measures in the Bill. What does the Bill do? Most importantly, it commits the Government to coming back within a year with a decision on whether to raise the digital age of consent from 13 to 16. Under general data protection regulation, the standard age of consent was set at 16. However, countries can choose to vary it to as low as 13, which is what the UK chose to do at the time. The appropriateness of that decision must be assessed, given the ways in which social media companies are now using teenagers’ data to keep them hooked to their platforms.

Online Safety Act: Implementation

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) for securing this important debate. His contribution highlighted why he will continue to be an important voice as we go forwards as a Parliament in doing everything we can to keep young people safe online.

For a long time now, Parliament has regulated to keep young people safe from a whole host of harms, which are often tangible and physical. The precautionary principle has been front and centre of our efforts—almost to a fault sometimes, people might argue—to keep young people safe from harms that they simply should not be exposed to. When we look at online harm, however, it is clear that the precautionary principle has not always been there.

There is a range of reasons for that. I hope hon. Members will not mind me highlighting that, for many of us, the online world was not quite such a big presence in our lived experience growing up. Therefore, when it comes to legislating for the online world, the more recent nature of some of the developments means that the evidence base is inherently slightly more limited. We have to be confident in the principled, risk-based approach to acting, and act when we know it is right to do so.

We have to know that more urgent action in this space is the right thing to do. It is impossible not to be moved by the testimony of parents who have gone through some of the most heartbreaking tragedies as a result of our historical inaction, just as it is impossible for me not to be stirred to act when I visit schools and pupils of all ages consistently raise their own fears and concerns about what they are being exposed to online and its impact on them and their mental health.

Other Members have rightly highlighted some of the shortcomings of the Online Safety Act, but, as the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam pointed out, it is important to note the urgency of using the tools available to us now, given our historical inaction. We must ensure that we have the strongest possible implementation of the Act, which means that the strongest possible children’s code from Ofcom will be front and centre.

As other colleagues have highlighted, there is a whole host of ways in which Ofcom has been far too conservative and limited in its interpretation of the powers that Parliament has given it in bringing forward the children’s code, as well as its wider approach to the Act. As 5rights and others have highlighted, the approach of focusing purely on content, rather than on design and features, means that a whole host of harms, which are explicitly called out in the Act, are not affected.

There is nothing more tragic than the story of Molly Rose. The foundation set up in her name is very clear on the role that algorithms, doom spiralling, and young people consistently being pushed towards some of the most harmful content for them at their age played in what happened to her, and to far too many young people right across the country. In section 11(6)(f) of the Act, Parliament very explicitly made it clear that those features should be considered. Ofcom needs to make sure that that is brought forward, and that the code explicitly considers how technology companies can ensure that safety of features and design is considered right across the age range.

Alongside that, Internet Matters and many other groups have been really clear in pointing out that the current approach to age appropriateness—the flattening when it comes to people over and under 18—and the weak guidance on age verification risks not doing justice to Parliament’s very clear steer in section 12 that content and features should be considered from a risk-based perspective right across the age range. Again, that is a clear area where I think Ofcom could and should do a lot more.

As others including the IWF have pointed out, while some consideration of technical feasibility is obviously needed, the carve-out, as currently drafted, risks being an opt-out and a dilution of the ambition of tech companies in stepping up to the plate and making sure they are playing their part in keeping young people safe online.

There is a lot more we will need to do, and I have no doubt that the curriculum review—that is a separate matter—will be important in making sure we are playing our part in empowering young people to feel more confident and safe in these spaces. I am very glad to be doing this work in a Parliament where there are so many strong voices on this issue. Given its urgency, I really do hope that we can make progress between now and the upcoming children’s code to ensure that we are meeting the need of this moment fully.

Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

The hon. Lady makes a common-sense point: if we are going to advocate for change, we have to lead by example. It might be said that the harms we are talking about are a somewhat separate issue to that. Of course we need to take responsibility, but where we have social media companies that are pushing content that is objectively dangerous, we need to have the conversation that we are having today about how the system and social media companies should be forced to ensure that that space is a safe one.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I thank the parents who have brought forward this petition—they are often way ahead of us as legislators when it comes to issues affecting children’s safety. My hon. and learned Friend is doing a very good job of setting out some possible risks that the Online Safety Act will not fully be able to mitigate some of the challenges that we are seeing. Considering robust measures on the age of access to social media is timely and important in thinking about the best way of protecting young people from possible exposure to online harm. On top of that, though, we must recognise that some exposure is always likely to be there. Would he also agree that it is important to ensure that we think how, through the curriculum review, we can best empower and set up children, young people and their parents to protect themselves from harm where they are exposed to it, even with the stronger regulations that we are looking to put in place?

[Tony Vaughan]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We will not protect children through just Government or social media while expecting parents to do nothing. Of course, we parents will have to do our part. Interestingly, on that point, I was going to say that an important potential measure is the approach put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) in his private Member’s Bill, the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill. His concept, which I hope to hear more about in the course of this debate, is about raising the age of data consent from 13 to 16, which essentially stops the social media companies being able to harvest data and keep feeding the kind of content that will be harmful. That seems to me a no-brainer.

Very briefly, I want to talk about smartphones in school, an issue closely connected to the one posed by the petitioner. Many teachers and parents who I have talked to believe that this “never seen, never heard” guidance, which was introduced by the previous Government, is not working. We have students still using phones during break time and often during lessons, and the problems that that causes are significant. I have had many teachers say to me, “This takes up so much time—it is a huge distraction and it interferes with learning.”

Children’s Social Media Accounts

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and to debate such a powerful and moving topic.

I want to start, as more or less everyone in this room has done, by paying tribute to Ellen for her tireless campaigning work. I cannot come close to comprehending the pain that the death of Jools must have caused you, even before it was exacerbated and extended by the lack of closure when social media companies refused to give you access to data that could help to explain what happened to him and when collectively, as a society, we showed ourselves impotent to compel them to do so. Your ability to turn that pain and that love into such a powerful petition and call for action, which motivated so many parents in my Hitchin constituency to sign up to it too, is a true inspiration to so many of us in the room. Just as we are inspired by you, we are inspired by the many families here with you today as part of the Bereaved Families for Online Safety support group, which has been doing so much important campaign work on the issue.

It is pretty clear to all of us who have spoken today that for far too long we have tolerated a belief that online harm is too tricky and too practically infeasible to regulate in the same way that we would regulate every other form of harm to which a young person could be exposed, often in contexts in which as legislators we have historically been more comfortable getting involved. We cannot tolerate that state of affairs any longer. Although there have been some steps forward, which are to be welcomed and which I will touch on shortly, the petition highlights several areas in which it is clear that we need to consider going further to ensure that we are all living up to our duty to do everything we can to protect young people right across society.

Both as a teacher and as a children’s social lead, I got to see at first hand some of the very real ways in which young people can be exposed to harm by our failure to act on the issue of social media and online harm over the past decade. As an MP now, I am always struck by the fact that, heartbreakingly, whenever I do an assembly, even in a lower school or a primary school, almost without fail there will be one young person, and often several, who will raise their hand and talk to me about an example where they have been made to feel unsafe or at risk online and ask what I, as their MP, am going to do about it. I know that urgency to act is felt by so many colleagues across party boundaries, both in this Hall today and across the House.

The petition focuses on particular aspects where we could do more to ensure that parents have both the right ability to provide oversight for children on social media and access to really important data after bereavement. I know that, following the petition, there has been some important progress from the Online Safety Act to give some powers to coroners and to Ofcom to ensure that in certain circumstances they can support parents’ ability to access that data, but as colleagues have pointed out, there are clear areas in which it does not go far enough.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) set out, it is pretty clear that at the moment some ambiguity in the legal position is being used as an excuse by social media companies not to act. We should not tolerate that; we should do all we can, hopefully as a Government, to clarify the position. Collectively, we should not be letting social media companies off the hook for not doing everything in their power to give the families access to the data where no right-minded individual could see any reason not to and where no right-minded individual or agency is likely to seek recourse against them for doing so. So many Members have rightly pointed out that that feels like an excuse, not a reason, to fail to disclose data. We should not tolerate that excuse from companies that we come into contact with in our work as representatives.

However, as has rightly been pointed out, it is important that we do not just look at this issue in the context of the existing legislation. We know that there are very real risks after bereavement that the data could be deleted. As my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) pointed out, thinking about ways in which we can compel earlier notification to Ofcom and to social media companies and online platforms that can have that data in order to remove that risk at source is surely a common-sense way of ensuring that that risk to getting justice and getting closure can be closed off.

Moreover, the petitioner and many others rightly point out and ask us to reflect on the fact that if we are really interested in child safeguarding and keeping young people safe, it simply cannot be only after a tragedy, after bereavement, that the opportunity for parental oversight and involvement takes place. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central rightly set out some of the very real and justified concerns that children’s charities and advocates have about unfettered and complete access, but as many other Members have set out, that should not be the case. It should not be beyond us to reason and think through how, in exactly the same way that parents provide oversight over every other aspect of a young person’s life, they can have access to the best and most sensible ways to do so on this platform, too. As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) pointed out, thinking about the age at which young people can meaningfully and rightfully consent to opting out of parental oversight has to be part of that process.

It is fair to say that a few hon. Members are concerned that the implementation of the Online Safety Act, as it is currently envisaged and as some of Ofcom’s recent publications show, may fall short of doing justice to the importance of the issues. Whether it is considering what more we can do to protect young people from imagery and content relating to suicide and self-harm on social media, ensuring that we do not tolerate technical infeasibility as an excuse for tech companies not to act on the most egregious forms of harm, or having well-intentioned and important conversations about the right age of consent, to which many Members have alluded today, there is clearly a lot more that we can do collectively.

[Monica Harding]

Will the hon. Member go further and say that Ofcom’s implementation so far has been weak, overly cautious and fundamentally disappointing? Does he concur that it is unfair to put parents in the intolerably pressured situation of being the policemen of their children’s social media activity?

[Alistair Strathern]

Some aspects of how Ofcom has said it will take these matters forward are to be welcomed, but I absolutely agree with the underlying sentiment of the hon. Lady’s comment. Currently, what has been set out does not go anywhere near far enough. As representatives of our communities and of the families who want to do everything possible to keep young people safe from online harm, it is our responsibility to ensure that we are holding Ofcom accountable for being far more ambitious about how it can most creatively and robustly deploy the powers that we are giving it to keep young people safe.

[Lola McEvoy]

I thank my hon. Friend for his impressive and articulate outlining of the debate so far. Will he join my calls for Ofcom to strengthen the upcoming children’s code and, as the code is not yet published, to use this opportunity to include functionality, a stronger dynamic risk assessment—a live document that will be constantly updated—and the measures that my hon. Friend has laid out for the smaller and riskier platforms?

[Alistair Strathern]

I concur wholeheartedly. My hon. Friend has been a tireless campaigner on this issue, both in our debate today and throughout the time I have known her—a very short time, but an impressive one none the less. As she rightly points out, the children’s code is a real opportunity to do right by the intentions of the legislation and by the collective ambition that we are discussing today. From my hon. Friend to the children’s commissioner, campaigners on the issue are pretty united about the opportunity that a more ambitious code could deliver for safeguarding young people.

For far too long, we have allowed young people to be exposed to a level of harm online that we would not tolerate in any other aspect of life. It is potentially understandable, but not excusable, that as legislators we are sometimes more comfortable imposing restrictions or acting in areas where we have more direct lived experience, as in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill or the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. Those are tangible things that we are comfortable and used to voting and making laws on, whereas online harm can sometimes feel a bit more nebulous and a bit tougher. However, that is no excuse not to act. The failure to act is written across the tragedies experienced by so many families across the country and so many campaigners in the room today. We must do better, and we have to make sure that this is the Parliament in which we do.

Online Safety: Children and Young People

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Lola McEvoy]

It is indeed prolific, for all our children—the whole generation. It is interesting that, among the different experts I have spoken to, there is consensus; the argument has been won that children are unsafe online and that is affecting them deeply, across the country. It is our job—it falls to legislators—to rectify the issue. I do not wish to defend online platforms, but they will do what the law tells them to do. They want to operate in this country. They want to make money. There is nothing wrong with that; they just have to adhere to the law. It is our job to make sure that the law is tight to protect our children. That is the crux of the issue.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is powerfully illustrating the responsibility on all of us to step up to the needs of this moment. Parents in my constituency—at schools including William Ransom and Samuel Lucas—have been leading the way in taking further proactive action, signing up to a smartphone-free pledge to delay the age at which their young people have access to smartphones. Hundreds across the constituency have already signed up to the pledge. Does my hon. Friend agree that that underlines the strength of parental feeling on online safety and some of the wider associated issues, and that it highlights our responsibility to legislate—not just to celebrate the benefits of technology, but to do all we can to protect young people from the very real dangers it presents, too?

[Lola McEvoy]

A smartphone-free pledge is a great idea, and I will take it to Darlington. Parents are further down the line than we are on this; children are further down the line than we are; campaign groups are further down the line than we are. We are lagging behind. We have taken action—the last Government passed the Online Safety Act. I think it is time for us to make sure that there is nothing missing from that Act. In my view, there are some areas where we could go further.

Children in Darlington have said to me that they are getting these unsolicited images—from the algorithms. These images are being fed to them. They are not from strangers, or bogeymen from another country, although that might happen. The most common complaint is that the algorithm is feeding them content that they did not ask for, and it is deeply disturbing, whether it is violent, explicit or harmful. Once they have seen it, they cannot unsee it.

That is why I am arguing to strengthen the codes. I am not sure that we should be retrofitting harmful apps with a code that may or may not work, and having to tweak a few bits of the algorithm to check whether it will actually protect our children. I think we can take stronger action than that.