Alun Cairns
Main Page: Alun Cairns (Conservative - Vale of Glamorgan)Department Debates - View all Alun Cairns's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Helen Goodman
My hon. Friend is obviously doing great work in her constituency and what she says is truly shocking. It is confirmed by the statistics which the NSPCC has been collecting.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
Reference has been made to Google. I do not defend that or any other search engine other than to say that this debate is highly technical and we need to be accurate. Google does not host anything; nor does any other search engine. Google merely provides the means of finding a site, and the hosting, which is an international problem, needs to be addressed appropriately.
Helen Goodman
This is not an occasion for nit-picking—[Interruption.] It is important to take an international approach and I am disappointed in the Government for, among other things, not taking any international initiatives.
The police say their resources are inadequate to the task. Peter Davies, the head of CEOP, said that the police are aware of 60,000 people swapping or downloading images over peer-to-peer networks but they lack the resources to arrest them all. In any case, the IWF currently deals only with images on the web, not peer-to-peer images.
In answer to my parliamentary question last week, the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne) revealed that in 2012, despite the fact that the police are aware of those 60,000 people, only 1,570 were convicted of such offences. What do Ministers intend to do about the problem? I hope that in his winding-up remarks the Home Office Minister will tell us. There is no point huffing and puffing about the problem if Ministers do not take the necessary action. It is obvious to the whole country that the current situation is totally unacceptable. It is obvious that Ministers have not got a grip. It is obvious that we need a change.
That is why our motion proposes a complete shift in approach from a reactive stance to a proactive strategy. We are calling for three things—first, safe search as the default option. The industry has already made the filters that are needed to screen out not just child abuse but pornography and adult content generally. We are saying that the filters should be the default, either on all computers and devices connected to the internet or by requiring internet service providers to install them by default. Then we can institute the second part of an effective system: robust age verification. A person seeking to cross the filter would be asked to confirm their name, age and address, all of which can be independently checked. Again, we know that this works. It is what Labour did for gambling sites in 2005. It is what mobile phone companies do when someone opens an account and gets a SIM card. It is what people do when they get a driving licence.
Fiona O'Donnell
I would have welcomed more of an indication of regret from the hon. Lady at the words that she used. If she had experience of working in child protection, she would know that those words should be used very carefully.
I welcome the Minister’s comment that this issue is about much more than just child protection and includes child abuse. Sadly, in this day and age, it is also a matter of life and death. Fortunately, children can and do use the internet safely, and we must not lose sight of that.
Although I might not have been active on this issue in the House, I have been in my constituency. Last Friday, I went to Burgh primary school in Musselburgh, where the children recently took part in a competition to talk about and devise ways of keeping themselves safe when using the internet. That is a great example of how we can empower children. I do not want children to be frightened of using the internet. It is an incredible resource that allows them to socialise, learn, have fun and access entertainment. We must be clear that we do not want to put children off. At Burgh primary school, I saw children being empowered to keep themselves safe. They even taught me a few lessons about how I could be safer. The head teacher and Mrs Gilbert, who leads the IT group, have the children running the school website. That is a great way to show children that the internet is a tool that could be useful to them at any point in their life and, at the same time, to ensure that they are aware of the risks.
Ofcom recently released figures showing that 91% of five to 15-year-olds have access to the internet at home. On average, they access the internet for about 90 minutes a day. A survey of 851 young children in 2012 by the ChildLine website also provided some interesting information. It was clear that what children really enjoyed was the fun, games, information and opportunities for social networking that they could access. What really concerned me, however—I hope the Minister or a Front-Bench Member will respond to this point—was that the survey showed that 69% of children are now accessing the internet through mobile phones, making it far more difficult for parents to supervise what they are saying and how they are interacting. I would be interested to hear whether the Government have any proposals for how we can deal with mobile phone companies and keep children safe, given that that is the way they are increasingly accessing the internet.
We all know horrific stories of bullying and of children accessing inappropriate material, and I have seen first hand through my work the impact that can have on children’s lives, development and their ability to become parents. I remember one child saying to me, “Fiona, I don’t think I should be a parent.” He had suffered such horrific abuse and seen such awful images that at the age of 10, this boy did not think he should be trusted to be a parent. We are discussing the most serious issues of children’s right to a childhood and a healthy adulthood.
We must do more to protect children, and this debate has caused me to reflect on an experience that I had around the age of 16—this was before the age of computers, certainly in the highlands of Scotland. I was getting ready for bed one night and I suddenly caught sight out of my bedroom window of a flashing light. I realised there was a man in the kitchen that overlooked my bedroom who had been watching me undress, and he was flicking the light to let me know that he was doing that. This is the first time I have ever shared that experience, because at the age of 16 I was too scared to tell anyone. I thought I had done something wrong; I was scared to tell my parents. My father had warned me that I should shut my bedroom curtains when getting ready for bed, and I was scared that he might go down and confront the man, or that my father—a very peace-loving man—might be hurt. I just did not feel I could do that, and I lived in fear for many months that the man was going to approach me or tell people what he had seen. We must remember just how difficult it is for young people to tell their stories—it has taken me until the age of 53 to tell that story.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children supports many of the recommendations in the motion, in particular having an opt-in option so that adults must choose if they wish to access adult material. That is the stage we have reached. I am no Mary Whitehouse, but I think we have reached a stage where so many children are at risk that we must do more.
Alun Cairns
I accept the hon. Lady’s thrust of where we need to get to. However, with such a relatively simplistic approach to an opt-in, how would we overcome encryption methods that would simply get around that?
Fiona O'Donnell
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I confess that that is well beyond my level of knowledge. In this day and age we must at least challenge the issue, and I am grateful that the Government have called a summit next week, which will be a great opportunity. I hope we give a clear steer and that there will be time scales for internet service providers as well. I confess freely to the hon. Gentleman that I do not have the answer to his question, but we must set that challenge and tell the sector that it must get its house in order. It is clear that we must do more.
Not so long ago, we in this House took the decision to make it illegal to carry a child in a car without them being safely secured in an appropriate way. At this time I think there is a greater risk to children’s safety from accessing the internet than from getting into a car, and if we can intervene in such circumstances that will be absolutely in order. It is early in the debate but I am glad that so far we have not heard talk of the nanny state. We must act on this matter to keep children safe.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
This is an extremely important debate, which deserves wide and thorough consideration in this House. It is right that in recent years much attention has been given to this subject. I pay tribute to the Minister for the way he has responded to the debate, to the Prime Minister for the interest he has shown, and to his adviser, my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), who has driven the agenda from quite an early stage and to whom credit should be given.
It is also important to give credit to the press, which has fed back persistently and consistently on this subject. I have no doubt that the Daily Mail’s campaign and active interest have contributed to encouraging politicians’ attention on to something that is obviously very important to the public in general, and, dare I say it, to its readers.
I must say, however, that the motion, as it is phrased, is not very helpful. It conflates child sexual abuse content, which is illegal, and adult content which is legal but from which we need to protect children. The actions needed to tackle these different types of content are different and it is very unhelpful to confuse and conflate the two.
This is one of the most dynamic problems we face as a society. As soon as one issue seems to have been dealt with, another problem emerges. That is the nature of today’s fast moving society, but this area of policy is certainly at the leading edge of the speed of change. Technology is developing faster than any Government can legislate, and avoidance measures lead to anti-avoidance measures, which in turn go on in a cycle. This throws up the risk of Members and individuals believing that there are straightforward solutions. That is not the case, and I pay tribute to the Government for stating on the record that their policies will develop. That is the pragmatic approach we need to take. We need to develop clear principles: focusing on helping parents to introduce safety features; offering a choice of filters available from internet service providers; prompting parents towards security features; making it easier for parents to take charge; challenging the industry, which is exceptionally important; and working with law enforcement organisations to combat illegal content.
Jim Shannon
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making such a balanced contribution. He will be aware that many companies have a zero-tolerance policy on child sexual abuse. One of those companies is Google, which helps fund and is a member of the IWF. Does he think it is now time that companies that are not members of the IWF joined and helped to fund it and adhered to its policies and principles?
Alun Cairns
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for highlighting the IWF—I should declare an interest as one of its champions—and would encourage all the industry to join and support its greater funding in the way that Google announced earlier today.
Before the Government’s welcome statement in response to their consultation on the debate over opting in and opting out of adult content, we ran the risk of presenting the situation as one that was relatively simple and where responsibility to protect ourselves could be conveniently passed over to others—for example, to ISPs. In reality, it is not that straightforward; it is far more complicated, and that is my issue with the motion, which, rather than helping, confuses the subject. Thankfully, however, the evidence to the consultation was clear.
I pay tribute to Reg Bailey, the chief executive officer of the Mothers’ Union, who recognised that complexity, against the general direction of the debate at the time and against those calling for a simple opt in/opt out approach—or an appropriate variant of it. A filter not only passes responsibility from parents to large organisations, whose judgments might be completely different from those of individual families, but makes false promises, because of the avoidance measures I mentioned earlier. Encryption, for example, is a typical problem that an ISP filter would not overcome, but a parent would not necessarily understand that.
At the moment, about 30% of customers choose to have an ISP opt-out. If the policy was reversed—so that people had to opt into adult content—the proportion would likely be much higher, which would run the risk of legal adult content providers using common avoidance techniques, such as encryption or proxy servers, which create further problems. Web proxies, which are a more recent development, and peer-to-peer networks are also not covered by ISP-level filters, but, believing their household computer to be safe, parents would be led into a false sense of security.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
Would the hon. Gentleman not admit that some of these measures would make it safer for the average parent than the present situation?
Alun Cairns
I am coming to that very point. Challenges remain, but the last thing we want to do is create the impression that this is a simple issue and that children and families can be protected at the flick of a switch; it is much more complicated than that and deserves an intelligent debate. We need to recognise the differences in these areas, rather than giving the impression, as some Members have, that the flick of a switch will make the difference. An ISP filter would be oblivious to the very risks from which we need to protect children. Furthermore, such filters would not protect against bullying, grooming or other serious risks, but at the same time they would give parents a false sense of security.
One of the most effective answers—there will be several answers, and filters have a part to play, but they are not the only solution—is for a parent to show a genuine interest in what is being viewed online. I am pleased that the debate over the past year or so has focused the minds of technology providers on making device-level and even profile-level security features and filters easier to use and understand. Google has its SafeSearch, for example, while Windows 8 has made significant steps: it can e-mail parents a list of all the sites viewed by a householder so that they can check themselves what the child has been looking at. Furthermore, now when someone signs up to an ISP or sets up a new router, they are asked what settings they want, not only for the household, but for each computer. It needs to go even further, however, down to profile level, because the same computer can be used by different people. It is important, therefore, that we have the right profile filter settings to protect the children using the computer. Clearly, technology companies need to do more to communicate that message and help parents further.
My comments so far have related to legal adult content, but we would all agree that the far more serious issues surround illegal content, particularly that involving the abuse of children—the area on which most of the recent public debate has focused. It is extremely important that we distinguish between legal and illegal content. This should not be a party political issue and there are no easy solutions. Some content might be distasteful, but might well be available on shelves of newsagents or shops in Soho.
Alun Cairns
I am running short of time, but if the hon. Lady will allow me to make my point, I might answer her question.
We need to recognise, however, that the policing of such shops is relatively straightforward and that in general children cannot access or stumble across such material. Appropriate filters should stop the “stumbling across” element, but that leaves us with the policing. We need to publicise the work of the IWF and reassure people who might report issues to it that they will not necessarily be compromised. Much attention is focused on search engine companies, and it is important that they play their part—they have a responsibility here—but having researched their activities, I am aware of some of the technology they use to identify illegal content. They can claim to be playing a part, therefore, but search engines need to be at the cutting edge of image analysis and coding—they need to be one step ahead of the perpetrators of these terrible offences.
By focusing the debate on search engines, as some Members did earlier, we are forgetting that hosting is where the offence effectively lies. If a website has been scratched from the search engine, the URL still exists and those seeking to view illegal content can go straight to that address. The IWF, which has been mentioned several times—I welcome the extra money made available to it today—has made a huge difference. Some 1% of the content it removes from the internet is hosted in the UK; 54% is hosted in north America; 37% is hosted across the rest of Europe and Russia; the figure for Asia is only 1%; and for South America it is even smaller. Those are the issues. It is an international problem.
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)
I am pleased to take part in this debate. I congratulate the Labour party on calling it and using up one of their Supply days to raise a serious and important matter to us all.
It seems that every great invention that we make as human beings brings both benefits and disbenefits. I think of the internal combustion engine, which led to the car, which gives us all great mobility but creates pollution and kills 3,500 of our citizens on the roads every year. Now we have the internet, which gives us amazing access to information and the ability to interact socially, but can allow access to all kinds of unsavoury and potentially harmful material. It is vital that we do a better job of protecting our children, and I congratulate the Government on the steps they have taken so far.
I have just two points to make in this debate. I do not pretend to be an expert and I certainly do not follow my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) in his technological knowledge. These points have been drawn to my attention by the British Board of Film Classification, which I would describe as a trusted and familiar friend to most of us, as we see its image before films. I think back to the first film I went to see, the James Bond film “Thunderball”, in 1965—obviously I was a baby.
Mr Streeter
I do not know what the certificate was, but may I just get on with my speech?
My point is that we trust the BBFC’s classifications. When the Video Recordings Act 1984 was passed, more than 25 years ago, certain video works—I will come to online content in a second—were made exempt from classification because they were considered unlikely to be harmful. However, the content of exempt works has changed beyond recognition since 1984, which means that inappropriate and potentially harmful content can be legally supplied to children. On 24 May 2013, the Government announced that it planned to lower the exemptions threshold in order to prevent children from accessing potentially harmful material, so well done to the Government. This is a most welcome decision, for which the BBFC—along with the home entertainment industry, the recorded music industry, retailers and law enforcement bodies—had argued for some time.
Once implemented, the decision will improve the protection that children enjoy from potentially harmful media content by ensuring that video content such as drug misuse, strong violence, racist language and certain sexual content can no longer legally be freely supplied to children. Instead, the BBFC will classify such content to keep it away from vulnerable and impressionable children. The Government have said that they hope to have the new regime in place by April 2014, and I very much hope—I know that the Minister is listening carefully—that the Government will keep to that timetable, which requires secondary legislation. However, the legislation has never covered online content, and there is now particular concern about the content of online music videos.
Fiona Mactaggart
I do not think that that is what is happening in this debate. I will come to that point in a moment, as it has also been raised by other hon. Members.
The conclusion of our cross-party report was that parents need help, a topic that has been dealt with to some extent already in the debate. We need to think of better ways of helping parents, because what we have is not enough. I genuinely think that home-level security controls can make a huge difference. The technocrats on the Conservative Benches might suggest that such controls are much less powerful than we think, but they are much more powerful than what is often used currently. We must not make the best the enemy of the good.
Companies need to step up to the mark, and we have been able to put pressure on some of them to do so. During our inquiry, TalkTalk showed how it would be possible to have home-level security arrangements, even though other companies said that it would not be possible to do it in that way. Now, those other companies are beginning to face up to the fact that it is possible.
Alun Cairns
I still want to underline the point that there are relatively easy ways of getting around some of those filters. We must not give the impression that having such filters will protect families and individuals.
Fiona Mactaggart
The hon. Gentleman might well be right. Most filters are too complicated for someone like me to implement—a point that I kept making during the inquiry. I simply cannot do that thing where you have to type in about 25 digits and letters in order to make a filter work; and that is chronically true of mums.
Sheila Gilmore
In many ways, I would hope that that was not the case. I do not know where the ISPs make their money, but many of us are critical of their reluctance in this matter. One or two Members have suggested today that, because some of the proposals would not be perfect and would not screen out everything and because some organisations and people might be clever enough to get around them in various technical ways that we do not necessarily fully understand, we should not take those steps. As in so much of our political and social lives, we should not make the best the enemy of the good. If we can do something to improve things, we should do it.
Alun Cairns
I want to highlight that I am a strong advocate and fan of filters, but I think it is very dangerous to give the impression that they are the whole answer. The solution is far more complicated than that and we must be clear about it.
Sheila Gilmore
We must not approach this at cross purposes. I do not think that anyone is saying that any of the proposals are perfect; we are merely seeking to improve the situation and to give greater protection. I have no doubt that there will be some very clever people who can find ways around all sorts of things—we know that that happens—but to say that we should not put such measures in place for that reason would be wholly wrong.
Let me address some of what the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) said. He seemed, perhaps surprisingly, to be setting the state against the parent in a way that is not helpful. Of course parents should be making decisions for their children, but there are many circumstances in which we have to rely on others in schools and in the wider world to protect our children. That is not an abdication of parental responsibility, because parents cannot be with their child all the time. They will not be able to supervise every social contact they have. As a parent, I would certainly prefer to be confident that I could let my children out into a world that I could regard as reasonably safe—whether that was the physical or virtual world—than to be unable to do so. Perhaps that is not what the hon. Gentleman was suggesting, but that was how it came across to me. Suggesting that such an approach somehow does not leave things to the parents and that it wants the state to step in is a wholly wrong way of considering the matter.