Consumer Rights Bill

Debate between Baroness Benjamin and Lord Cormack

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I have put my name to Amendment 50D because I am concerned about the easy accessibility of adult material to children online. It is that simple. Recently, a parent contacted me to inform me about their eight year-old son who was, quite innocently, led into accessing many pornographic images, unknown to them. They have now activated a block which bars such material, but, like so many other parents in this country, they wish it had been on by default. Their son now has unwanted memories of what he saw popping into his mind. Childhood lasts a lifetime and those early memories will lay the foundation that stays with that child for ever. They cannot be erased. How can we sit back and let that happen?

This year, the Authority for Television on Demand published a report entitled For Adults Only? which revealed that, in the space of just one month, at least 44,000 primary school children and more than 200,000 under-16s accessed adult content, including hardcore pornography. If we are serious about caring for our children, we must do far more to protect them online before more tragic, heartbreaking, life-damaging sexual, mental and emotional abuse takes place. There is a series of problems with the current voluntary approach deployed to keep children safe online. These are all addressed by Amendment 50D.

I congratulate the Government on all the progress they have made on this issue but, as has been said before, more needs to be done. In terms of internet service providers, the current voluntary approach to default adult content filters is inadequate and does not constitute a credible, long-term solution, for several reasons. It leaves 10% of the market uncovered. This represents several thousand children. It fails to provide any form of age verification before someone seeks to opt in to access adult content. You have to do this before you access gambling and other online activities, why not for accessing online pornography? It involves different companies applying different standards about what does and does not constitute adult content, so there is no consistency. Children like consistency. It helps with their development. There is no central mechanism for efficiently addressing the problem of overblocking. No one wants to block unnecessarily.

There have been two high-profile cases, as we have heard, of mobile phone operators not abiding by their code: BlackBerry and Tesco Mobile. The operator Three does not even claim to be compliant with the code. This is what self regulation allows. All these problems are addressed by Amendment 50D. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will give careful consideration to this amendment and I look forward to her response, in the hope that it will show that the Government truly care about our children’s holistic, long-term well-being.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I put my name to this amendment. I am also speaking later in the debate secured by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, which I do not wish to delay unduly. I put my name to this amendment because there is no greater crime than the destruction of childhood innocence—and we are in danger of doing that on a very large scale indeed.

I believe that the day will come when we make the provision of pornographic services online a criminal offence. No one benefits from watching them, whatever his or her age, and I think that they tend to deprave—but I am absolutely convinced that our children must be protected. Speaking as a grandfather and as one who has many friends who have younger children, I do not like to think of the future into which they are growing up, in which they are led to believe that it is better to have 100 virtual friends than one real one and that whatever they watch does not really matter because it cannot change their character. It can, as the noble Baroness indicated in her speech. It is for that reason that I support the amendment.