Online Safety Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 6th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 1, to which I was happy to add my name alongside that of the Minister. I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for tabling the original amendment, and my noble and learned friend Lord Neuberger for providing his very helpful opinion on the matter.

I am especially pleased to see that ensuring that services are safe by design and offer a higher standard of protection for children is foundational to the Bill. I want to say a little word about the specificity, as I support the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, in trying to get to the core issue here. Those of your Lordships who travel to Westminster by Tube may have seen TikTok posters saying that

“we’re committed to the safety of teens on TikTok. That’s why we provide an age appropriate experience for teens under 16. Accounts are set to private by default, and their videos don’t appear in public feeds or search results. Direct messaging is also disabled”.

It might appear to the casual reader that TikTok has suddenly decided unilaterally to be more responsible, but each of those things is a direct response to the age-appropriate design code passed in this House in 2018. So regulation does work and, on this first day on Report, I want to say that I am very grateful to the Government for the amendments that they have tabled, and “Please do continue to listen to these very detailed matters”.

With that, I welcome the amendment. Can the Minister confirm that having safety by design in this clause means that all subsequent provisions must be interpreted through that lens and will inform all the decisions of Report and those of Ofcom, and the Secretary of State’s approach to setting and enforcing standards?

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend the Minister for tabling Amendment 1, to which I add my support.

Very briefly, I want to highlight one word in it, to add to what the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has just said. The word is “activity”. It is extremely important that in Clause 1 we are setting out that the purpose is to

“require providers of services regulated by this Act to identify, mitigate and manage”

not just illegal or harmful content but “activity”.

I very much hope that, as we go through the few days on Report, we will come back to this and make sure that in the detailed amendments that have been tabled we genuinely live up to the objective set out in this new clause.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I too support the Minister’s Amendment 1. I remember vividly, at the end of Second Reading, the commitments that we heard from both Front-Benchers to work together on this Bill to produce something that was collaborative, not contested. I and my friends on these Benches have been very touched by how that has worked out in practice and grateful for the way in which we have collaborated across the whole House. My plea is that we can use this way of working on other Bills in the future. This has been exemplary and I am very grateful that we have reached this point.