Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall briefly add to the eloquent contribution made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I recognise that all parties have moved and that the groups of amendments are much closer than they were when we last debated this topic. However, I worry that the pressure is still on the child, not on the tech companies.

I too will support my noble friend Lord Nash should he choose to divide the House, but I ask the Government to think carefully, when they bring back the next group of amendments—as I suspect they will need to—about what the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just said about setting up a regime that, in technical economist-speak, internalises the risks within the company so that the company has to bear the cost to work out how its products are safe enough for our children to use. That is what we do in the physical world. We do not ban children using toys; we enforce health and safety legislation so that toys cannot be sold to children unless they are safe. Unfortunately, I fear too much of this is banning children and not enough is holding executives and businesses to account to make their products suitable for children.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I largely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, who brings all the rigour that you would expect from an MBA from Harvard Business School to the analysis of this problem. Ultimately, it is a business issue. These companies are making a vast amount of money from, basically, monetising the time that these children are spending on what are designed to be addictive products. That is the simple truth. Until and unless we find a way of disrupting the business models of the companies behind those platforms in such a way that it hurts them—the point at which individual directors and senior executives know they will be held personally accountable and may well go to jail, as well as the companies being fined vast amounts of money—there will really not be a tipping point. This often feels like pushing water uphill.

I want to make a point about educational technology. We are focusing very much on smartphones and the terrible effects they are having on so many young people. Simultaneously, the Government have been promoting, quietly but overtly over many years, the increased use of technology in schools, from primary schools onwards, partly as an understandable result of Covid, when your Lordships’ House even managed to embrace technology to a degree that many of us would have thought completely unthinkable. Schools have indeed been embracing technology, and in many cases the effects on the young people in those schools that have done so are not good.

Many countries of the world have recognised this and are doing a complete U-turn on their previous eagerness to get children in front of touchscreens and computer programs. They are trying to reverse the effects because they have been doing it for long enough that they have seen the evidence produced of the effect that it has on children: reduced attention spans and reduced vocabulary. In Scandinavia—surprise, surprise—libraries are doing the unthinkable: they are bringing back books, having largely decided to no longer invest in them five or six years ago.

I appeal to the Government, and particularly to the Department for Education, to look carefully at what is going on in schools. Schools need advice from the Government about how to deal with this issue. The blandishments of these companies, which are large, sophisticated and profitable in selling their products to schools, have all the smoothness of a tobacco or asbestos salesman, but in many cases their terms and conditions mean they are monetising those children and their details, along with the schools’ details, and the educational product they are producing is substandard.