Online Safety Bill [HL]

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Friday 9th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I support the Bill and I declare an interest as I speak on behalf of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety. I have worked closely with many of its members. The charities include Barnardo’s, the NSPCC, Action for Children, Beat Bullying, the Children’s Society and Kidscape. They all strongly support the Bill. They want to make it clear and to emphasise that opt-in is needed mostly to protect the most vulnerable children, especially those in care.

However, many parents have informed the charities that when they are working on the internet with their children they have only to google a quite innocent word to go straight to a porn site. This can also happen when their children are doing homework on their own or doing research for a project. Even while playing a kids’ online game inappropriate material may pop up on the screen. This is why the NSPCC and Barnardo’s both particularly support this Online Safety Bill in order to ensure that children have the greatest possible protection from the harm they can inadvertently encounter online. The charities believe that the Bill contains a quite simple proposition, which is that all internet access providers should restrict the availability of adult content on the internet to persons who have been verified as being 18 or above.

As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, mentioned earlier, the average child spends 90 minutes a day online. While 91% of five to 15 year-olds have access to the internet at home, new findings show that 37% of three to four year-olds also use the internet at home. The number of calls to ChildLine from children who were upset after having seen adult images online has increased by 34% in the past year. This is one reason why the charities support Clause 1 of the Online Safety Bill which introduces an opt-in content filtering system where internet service providers should provide broadband connections into homes with filters already in place as the default setting to block access to adult content. This should include all age inappropriate material such as self-harm and suicide sites as well as pornography and violent online gaming.

They consider that such a measure would best support parents in offering the greatest possible protection for their children. However, educating parents and children about staying safe online is vital. For this reason, the charities recognise and emphasise that technical tools have to form part of a broader package of measures to address online safety issues. This should take place at every available opportunity, be it at the point of sale of a new piece of hardware, the point of installation of new software, or the renewal of a subscription package. For this reason, the education of retail and customer service staff involved in the sale of online services and devices for accessing the internet is also necessary.

The ideal scenario is for all parents and carers actively to monitor their children’s safety online. However, in practice, a number of barriers prevent them from doing so. The current system of parent-activated controls is not working. Only a minority of parents choose to operate them, and this number is falling. Perhaps it is because it is too complicated. An opt-in system could ensure that the responsibility for protecting children online is shared between parents and ISPs, because both have a role to play and neither one can protect children acting alone.

The best protection for children is their own knowledge and awareness, developed in the context of a supportive and engaged family environment. However, that is not always the case. There is a pressing need in the industry for more education and awareness-raising of online risk for young people, with the industry bearing a major responsibility for funding and running such campaigns.

Of course, if a parent decides to opt-in and allow adult content, and their children use the same computers as they do, children could end up seeing inappropriate material. This is why, by educating and making parents aware of the need to act responsibly, we can all ensure that kids are not getting access to stuff they were never meant to have. At the moment, if parents do nothing, the porn arrives whether they want it or not. It is just too easy. Children will always be inquisitive and try and find ways around the system, but we must not make it too easy for them to do so.

There is also great support for age verification, as outlined in Clause 1 of the Bill, because it is believed that providers of age-sensitive services and products such as social networking sites should utilise robust age-verification systems to protect children and young people from illegal activity. What is needed is a framework for classifying content as adult or universal, as well as a widely used method of age verification so that users can prove that they are old enough to access adult content. Mobile phone companies have already developed such a framework as well as an age verification process, and so we know that this is achievable.

There are a number of different ways in which people could be age verified. First, the account holder could have a password allowing access to adult content. Secondly, a system could be established involving each user having their own age-verified login. The online gambling companies have been doing something like this since 2007. A third way might be to establish portable online IDs which would be age-verified. Systems to do this already exist and could be extended. The charities accept that verifying the age of children under the age of 18 is more difficult, but this should not be used as a reason to delay the widespread rollout of age verification for content which is clearly aimed at adults.

I urge the Government to support the principle of establishing age verification as the basis for allowing access to adult content on the internet, in any and all environments, and to establish a task force to work out the mechanics and the options. Such a policy would not mean that every internet user in the UK would have to have an age-verified account. A person needs to be age verified only if they want to access adult content. The technical arrangements that would facilitate such a policy could be placed either on the ISPs’ or wi-fi providers’ network, or on the routers. Such an approach would remove the need for action to be taken by device manufacturers. The policy can work, because huge databases are available online in fast real-time with a high level of accuracy which allow access providers to confirm that someone is 18 or over. The mobile phone companies and all the online gambling companies use them already.

The focus of the Bill has been overwhelmingly around pornography. But the children’s charities are not saying ban porn from the internet altogether. What they want is for us to try to ensure that kids are not getting access to stuff they were never meant to have. Interestingly, a company is doing just that. It recently brought out a new app that blocks any pornography sites which can be accessed via an iPad. It found that there were more than 640 million pages on the web containing porn. But we also need to be concerned with other sites which can be harmful to children and young people and which parents are equally concerned about.

The charities strongly believe that sites which discuss sexual health, safe sex, sexuality and similar issues are not, and should never be classed as, adult sites or as “porn sites” and so should not be blocked or obstructed in any way within any filtering programme’s default settings. The same applies to sites which allow children to report abuse or to get information about their rights and so on. The children’s charities agree that the internet can be a positive tool for children and young people, who can use the internet to claim or assert their rights in ways which have never been possible previously. The internet can also be an important source of support and help to some young people and children, perhaps often in situations where no other sources are readily available to them.

The Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety recognises that technology is here to stay. But we as a society must ensure safe and equal access to the internet and associated digital technologies for all children and young people everywhere. We are all aware that this Bill cannot be seen as a silver bullet to solve this complex problem, but is part of a bigger package of measures that are desperately needed to protect our children and their pathway into adulthood. I wholeheartedly support the Bill and thank the noble Baroness for bringing it to the House.