Online Safety Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, following on from the excellent points that the noble Baroness has made, I want to pursue the same direction. In this group of amendments we are essentially trying to reduce the incidence of tragedies such as those that the families there in the Gallery have experienced and trying to ensure that no one—that is probably unrealistic, but at least far fewer people—will have the same experience.

I particularly want to focus the Minister and the Bill team on trying to think through how to ensure that, as and when something tragic happens, what happens to the families faced with that—the experience that they have and the help that I hope in future they will be able to receive—will make it a less traumatic, lonely and baffling experience than it clearly has been to date.

At the heart of this, we are talking about communication; about the relationship between Ofcom and the platforms; probably about the relationships between platforms and other platforms, in sharing knowledge; about the relationship between Ofcom and government; about the relationship between Ofcom and regulators in other jurisdictions; and about the relationship between our Government and other Governments, including, most importantly, the Government in the US, where so many of these platforms are based. There is a network of communication that has to work. By its very nature, trying to capture something as all-encompassing as that in primary legislation will in some ways be out of date before it even hits the statute book. It is therefore incredibly important that there is a dynamic information-sharing and analytics process to understand what is going on in the online world, and what the experience is of individuals who are interacting with that world.

That brings me neatly back to an amendment that we have previously discussed, which I suspect the noble Viscount sitting on the Front Bench will remember in painful detail. When we were talking about the possibility of having an independent ombudsman to go to, what we heard from all around the House was, “Where do we go? If we have gone to the platforms and through the normal channels but are getting nowhere, where do we go? Are we on our own?”. The answer that we felt we were getting a few weeks ago was, “That’s it, you’ve got to lump it”. That is simply not acceptable.

I ask the Minister and the Bill team to ensure that there is recognition of the dynamic nature of what we are dealing with. We cannot capture it in primary legislation. I hope we cannot capture it in secondary instruments either; speaking as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, we have quite enough of them as it is so we do not want any more, thank you very much. However, it is incredibly important that the Government think about a dynamic form of having up-to-date information so that they and all the other parties in this area know what is going on.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support this group of amendments. I pay tribute to the families who I see are watching us as we debate this important group. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Newlove, who has just given one of the most powerful speeches in the full 10 days of Committee.

The real sadness is that we are debating what happens when things go horribly wrong. I thank my noble friend the Minister and the Secretary of State, who is currently on leave, for the very collaborative way in which I know they have approached trying to find the right package—we are all waiting for him to stand up and speak to show us this. Very often, Governments do not want to give concessions early in the process of a Bill going through because they worry that those of us campaigning for concessions will then ask for more. In this case, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell, has just pointed to, all we are asking for in this Bill is to remember that a concession granted here helps only when things have gone horribly wrong.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, what we really want is a safer internet, where fewer children die. I reiterate the comments that she made at the end of her speech: as we have gone through Committee, we have all learned how interconnected the Bill is. It is fantastic that we will be able to put changes into it that will enable bereaved families not to have to follow the path that the Russells and all the other bereaved families campaigning for this had to follow—but that will not be enough. We also need to ensure that we put in place the safety-by-design amendments that we have been discussing. I argue that one of the most important is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, has just referenced: when you already know that your child is in trouble but you cannot get help, unfortunately no one wants then to be able to say, “It’s okay. Bereaved families have what they need”. We need to do more than that.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a very moving debate for a very important cause. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for introducing it in the way that she did, along with those who have spoken in the debate.

The good news is that this is very much a cross-party and cross-Bench debate. It clearly appears to be a concern that the Government share, and I appreciate that. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, that it is not a weakness for the Government to concede here but very much the logic of where we have now got to. Compared with what is in the Joint Committee report on the draft Bill, what seems to be proposed—and I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say—goes further than what we were proposing, so it may be that we have reached another milestone. However, we wait to hear the detail.

Like other noble Lords, I pay tribute to the bereaved parents. We heard from parents during our consideration of the draft Online Safety Bill and we have heard further since then, particularly as a result of the two notable inquests into the deaths of Frankie Thomas and Molly Russell, which highlighted the difficulties that families and coroners face. Both families talked about the additional toll on their mental health as they battle for information, and the impossibility of finding closure in the absence of answers.

The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, said in her very moving speech that a humane process must be established for bereaved families and coroners to access data pertinent to the death of a child. That is what we have been seeking, and I pay tribute to the relentless way in which the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has pursued this issue on behalf of us all, supported by 5Rights and the NSPCC. We must have a transparent process in which bereaved families and coroners can access information from regulated services in cases where social media may have played a part in the death of a child.

My noble friend Lord Allan—who I am delighted is so plugged in to what could be the practical way of solving some of these issues—expertly described how Ofcom’s powers could and should be used and harnessed for this purpose. That very much goes with the grain of the Bill.

I shall repeat a phrase that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, used: the current situation is immoral and a failure of justice. We absolutely need to keep that in mind as we keep ourselves motivated to find the solution as soon as we possibly can. I look forward to good news from the Minister about the use of information notices for the purpose that has been heralded by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, but of course the devil is in the detail. We will obviously want to see the detail of the amendment well before Report.