Online Safety Bill [HL]

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Excerpts

Friday 17th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to support the Online Safety Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, at its Second Reading. I thank her for her sterling efforts in continuing to bring this very important issue to the attention of both Parliament and the public. It cannot be right that we live in a society where nearly one in 10 children aged between 12 and 13 is worried that they have become addicted to online porn, with 18% having seen shocking or upsetting images according to a recent ChildLine poll.

The fact that pornography on the internet is so widely available poses a challenge to all who are concerned about our children’s welfare. No one thinks that it can easily be dealt with, but this Bill goes a good way towards finding a workable solution.

Today, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has pointed out, we find ourselves in an odd situation where, offline, child protection provisions are statutory and robust, but, online, they are voluntary, incomplete and very weak. Although the Conservatives rightly promised to force hardcore pornography websites both in the UK and overseas to put in place age restriction controls or face being shut down during their election campaign, they did not follow through in their Queen’s Speech, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said. The voluntary approach promoted by the previous Government during the last Parliament leaves out 10% of the market. Therefore, thousands of children remain at risk without a robust form of age verification. Filtering can be credible only if age verification is employed to check that those electing to lift filters and opt in to adult content are indeed 18 years of age or older. The Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, addresses these problems and proposes effective methods of control, because it is increasingly obvious that voluntary restraint has not worked and we can wait no longer.

This is a serious problem and even those who believe any regulation of services provided by the internet could be a threat to personal choice must surely be concerned by the recent Europe-wide research project on violence and abuse in teenage relationships published in February this year which found that 39% of boys in England aged 14 to 17 regularly viewed pornography, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has already mentioned.

As NSPCC chief Peter Wanless has warned:

“The easy availability to children of online pornography, much of it extreme, violent and profoundly degrading, is of deepening concern. It can leave them feeling frightened, confused, depressed or upset. The number of Child Line counselling sessions regarding pornography more than doubled last year to over 1,100 with some young girls revealing they were being pressured to mimic scenes from adult films”.

The acting director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Sarah Green, has recently said:

“Surveys have shown that more than half of young people have seen online pornography by the age of 14, and that many see it without even seeking it out as links are shared on social networks. Research has found that young people’s exposure to porn is linked to beliefs that women are sex objects and to negative and even fearful attitudes towards sex”.

The NSPCC would like to see the Bill include social media platforms as well as ISPs and mobile phone operators. It believes that such sites should be held to account for the content transmitted and take more seriously their safeguarding duties to protect children and young people.

We know that the UK is facing a worrying increase in mental health conditions among the young, and the failure to regulate their access and exposure to extreme pornography can only increase the crisis. I hope that the Government can support this important Bill, as the Conservative manifesto proposals were in keeping with many of the ideas of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. I shall quote it again, as other noble Lords have done. It states that,

“we will stop children's exposure to harmful sexualised content online, by requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material”.

There must be an independent regulator with the power to compel internet service providers to block sites which fail to include effective age verification. This Bill requires the Secretary of State to designate a body to be the licensing authority to license foreign pornographic services, gives the ability to set fees and other licensing conditions, and allows the authority to revoke a licence and direct financial transaction providers not to conduct transactions between people in the UK and websites which fail to obtain a licence. It is believed that credit card companies would be happy to withdraw payment facilities from non-compliant sites. Only by financially threatening such sites can the authority have a real impact. So far, providers have shown no desire to accept responsibility, and self-regulation cannot be relied upon.

It is now time to act, for every civilised society acknowledges its primary and overwhelming obligation to the security and nurturing of its young, and any policies or practices in any field which are inconsistent with that obligation fall outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour. We as parliamentarians have a duty to support this Bill.