Internet Safety

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Benjamin]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what financial and other resources will be available to the UK Council for Internet Safety.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK Council for Internet Safety is a voluntary non-statutory body; it does not receive any government financial support. Members of the council, who are drawn from the public sector, the tech industry and civil society, voluntarily commit their organisations’ resource to deliver collaborative projects in support of internet safety. UKCIS is supported by a small secretariat team in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, internet safety is needed more than ever and we cannot just rely on part-time volunteers to do the job—this is what they tell me. To ensure that this new council deals with the enormous challenges of hate crime, sex abuse, fraud, and violence against women and children, will the Government properly support its work through substantial resources to initiate and pay for research and events linked to its primary objective of keeping the nation safe online, especially our children?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I completely agree that it is important that UKCIS helps to contribute to online safety. That is why we expanded its role from concentrating just on child internet safety to include, as the noble Baroness mentioned, hate crime, serious violence and extremism. As far as resources are concerned, the previous body—the United Kingdom Council for Child Internet Safety—has demonstrated that getting together a mix of tech companies, public bodies and government achieves good results. That is not the only thing we are doing. The online harms White Paper, which is coming by the end of the winter, will address some of the other issues, one of which will have to be funding.