Online Safety Bill [HL]

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Friday 9th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde]

My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote. It is necessary.

It is a short Bill. Clause 1 deals with opt-in and Clause 2 with filtering. I think it will be supported by parents in respect of the whole area of what, in many respects, is child ensnarement into sexually explicit services.

The article in Child Abuse Review of 2009 demonstrated clearly—and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has this morning talked about—the impact on children of some internet pornographic services. They not only affect the children being drawn into those services but they affect how they look at each other as young people—the respect that young boys have or do not have for girls in these services. That has come out in some of the cases that have been in the press recently.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked how you define these things and said that it goes back to the Lord Chamberlain deciding what is and is not acceptable. Normally, I agree very much with his views but I do not on this, because the definition of what is acceptable in any kind of statutory or non-statutory legislation will be there whether or not you have an opt-in.

What the noble Baroness proposes is not new. Some years ago, I was the chairman of the premium rate telephone industry regulator following the liberation of telephone services in the UK and we saw the emergence of adult services, which, in a growing industry, at one stage took up something like 70% of those services. The self-regulatory road was gone down and it involved opting out, but that did not work. In the end, the industry itself agreed with us as the regulator that it had to introduce an opt-in to take part in these services. The world did not fall apart, but it meant that children who would normally access the services, especially in school holidays—the call rate would go through the roof in school holidays—could not do so. One of the early measures that we took was to require that sex magazines should be put on the top shelf in newsagents, but that did not stop the proliferation of these services among young people either. They find a way and they pass the number around. In the end, the only way of dealing with these services was to say that if you wanted them from the service provider you had to opt in. Some people did, but it meant that children did not have access to them.

Really, the Bill is about child protection; it is not about censorship. I cannot find anyone who would support access to these services but they are not illegal. Therefore, if an adult chooses to use the service, that is okay and they can do that, but that does not mean that the services should be freely available to children. They are quite often in their bedrooms with no one else around. They may hear the parent coming up the stairs and bang a key, and the parent has no idea what they have been looking at.

The measure proposed in the Bill is welcome. It is a good step. It will not deal with all the problems but that is not a good enough reason not to try to deal with some of them. The Bill will not deal with texting, for example. Indeed, I gather that 02 does block adult services on its mobile phones but not on broadband. The iPad, which so many of us now have, has no provision for filtering out these services, even if people want to. Some companies have devised their own self-regulation. O2, Vodafone, Virgin and T-Mobile have all done it, but we do not have a level platform in the industry. The problem is not with the people who are trying to do the right thing in those companies but with those who do not, and they are the ones who are making children even more vulnerable at a very formative stage of their development.

I welcome the Bill and I look forward to the discussion in Committee. I am sure that there will be many interesting exchanges on the Bill. I hope that the Government will give the Bill time and that we see it on the statute book. It will not answer all the problems and there will be technical difficulties but, if the industry knows that it will have to sort those difficulties out, it will. I support the Bill.