Baroness Howe of Idlicote
Main Page: Baroness Howe of Idlicote (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted that today we are able to proceed with the Second Reading of my Online Safety Bill. It is just over a year since we gathered here on 9 November 2012 for the Second Reading debate on my previous Bill on this subject. In the intervening period there have been some significant changes. A month after our previous debate, the Department for Education published its response to the parental internet controls consultation that was held over the summer of 2012. Many found that very disappointing, including, it would seem, the Prime Minister, because he intervened a week later with an article in the Daily Mail, in which he pledged himself to the introduction of an online safety mechanism which he described as “default on”. Things then went very quiet until 22 July this year, when the Prime Minister gave his seminal NSPCC speech on child safety online. In this address, among other things, Cameron gave the four big internet service providers until the end of the year to introduce his definition of “default on” for all new customers. Then, just last month, he hosted a major summit in Downing Street in which TalkTalk and Sky claimed to have already provided “default on” for all new customers, and BT and Virgin claimed that they would do so from January. This is clearly very encouraging.
I put on the record my thanks to the Prime Minister for all his work on this crucial subject during the past 12 months. Having said that, there is still a long way to go and I firmly believe that the Online Safety Bill has a very important role to play in building on this very welcome progress. I will, first, highlight the key challenges that remain outstanding, explaining how these are dealt with in my Bill. I will then provide a more detailed clause-by-clause analysis. However, before doing either, I wish to make clear the Bill’s basic purpose. It is fundamentally about making provision to help parents to parent their children in the context of online safety challenges. It does this through two main provisions.
First, the Bill introduces an opt-in system that requires those selling access to the internet, be they internet service providers—ISPs—or mobile phone operators—MPOs—to provide people with an internet service that is free of adult content, but with the option of accessing such content, subject to age verification demonstrating that the person concerned is, indeed, 18 or over. This provision is to help parents make it less likely that their children will stumble across inappropriate material, either accidentally or deliberately. Secondly, the Bill also makes provision for parents to be empowered with information about all online safety challenges. This will include making them aware of how to make the most of the opt-in tool and information about online behavioural challenges that cannot be addressed by filters, such as cyberbullying and sexting. I believe that, in providing these two services, the Bill would help to make the online world safer for the children of this country.
Having defined the basic rationale for my Bill, I now address those areas where, despite all the positive developments in the past year, there is a need for significant change. The first key challenge is age verification. Noble Lords will remember the very great concern expressed by speaker after speaker during last year’s Second Reading about the fact that age verification was not mentioned once in the Government’s parental internet controls consultation. We raised this point, drawing attention to the important fact that British law already makes provision for online age verification.
In the early part of the previous decade, children’s charities were made aware of children developing gambling problems as a result of being able to gamble online. The Government expressed their concern and the industry expressed its concern, but nothing happened. It was only when the Gambling Act 2005 mandated statutory age verification that there was a change. Since the Act came into force, children’s charities have not been made aware of any children developing an online gambling problem. This provided, and continues to provide, a clear, robust example of the use of statute to deliver child protection online. The fact that it has been done in relation to online gambling proves that legislation has an important role to play in delivering online verification.
I was also very pleased that the Department for Education’s response to that consultation mentioned age verification. I was even more pleased by what the Prime Minister said when presenting his preferred solution, “default on”, in his online safety article in the Daily Mail on 20 December 2012. He said:
“We’ve also said that providers need to work to verify the age of the person setting the controls—meaning that children can’t set up the filters themselves”.
Moreover, he made a similar point in his speech in July this year to the NSPCC. He said:
“Now, once those filters are installed it should not be the case that technically literate children can just flick the filters off at the click of the mouse without anyone knowing, and this, if you’ve got children, is absolutely vital. So, we’ve agreed with industry that those filters can only be changed by the account holder, who has to be an adult. So an adult has to be engaged in the decisions”.
This was all excellent news. The difficulty is, however, that although some parts of the internet industry have made it clear that they are willing to introduce “default on” by the end of the year, they are not prepared to back it up with robust age verification. Proper age verification, as defined by us in online gambling, takes place at the point at which a person confirms that they wish to access adult content.
The ISPs, however, have proposed an alternative approach that they have dignified with the name, “the closed-loop system”. While this name sounds reassuring, when one looks at the small print one discovers that it is anything but. Rather than age-verifying the person who elects to disable filters, the industry wants to age-verify the person in whose name the account is held. This is a problem because evidence suggests that parents often leave the set-up stage to their more technologically literate children. The industry has said that it will deal with this problem by sending the account holder an e-mail informing them if ever the filters are changed. It may come as a shock to ISPs but the truth is that customers do not read all their e-mails. Even if they get round to reading them, it could be some days after filters have been lifted. I can understand that this system will be attractive to the industry because e-mails are cheap, but it seems very Heath Robinson to me. If it is true, as the Prime Minister says, that few things are more important than our children’s safety online, then they are certainly worth more than this. In contrast to industry self-regulation, our Bill makes provision for there to be clear standards on how age verification should work and stipulates that these standards should be used to ensure that the age verification is of the person electing to disable default filters—not simply their mother or father.
My second major concern pertains to those customers who are not provided with access to the internet by the big four ISPs involved in the Prime Minister’s self-regulatory venture. The big four cover 95% of the market, but that leaves as many as 1 million households beyond this agreement. My Bill covers 100% of the market, including the 1 million households whose internet service is not provided by the big four. It also covers all the MPOs, not just those who signed up to the code of practice on mobile content. Two weeks ago, I was approached by a lady who told me that she had just bought a Tesco phone for her teenager and that she had been horrified to discover that it had no default filters in place. She was able to download anything and everything. When she went back to Tesco, it confirmed that this was deliberate but pointed out that customers can ask for filters to be turned on. This is entirely contrary to what the Prime Minister told us in his NSPCC speech in July. He said that,
“it’s great to report that all of the operators have now agreed to put adult content filters onto phones automatically. And to deactivate them you have to prove you’re over 18 and operators will continue to refine and improve those filters”.
This demonstrates so clearly why we need to adopt a legal framework rather than one that is merely self-regulatory, so that the law can be properly enforced. Some may say that the situation I described was a one-off, but it was not. Blackberry was found to be doing exactly the same thing, even though it was a signatory to the self-regulatory code.
Finally, what I am proposing is a statutory law. In his Daily Mail article, the Prime Minister said that few things are more important this issue. If that is correct, and I certainly agree, why do we have laws covering everything under the sun but not child protection online? The subject, the Prime Minister admits, is one of the most important issues. How is it that we have laws to protect copyright, the interests of shareholders and so on, but not age-verified, “default on” online child protection?
I am of course aware that, in the current context of a Prime Minister with three small children who is personally committed to online safety, we are seeing significant political pressure placed on the industry to comply with online safety requirements. However, David Cameron will not be Prime Minister for ever. If we leave everything to self-regulation agreements, we cannot know with any confidence where we will be in five, 10 or 20 years’ time. By contrast, if we make this a matter of law, it will rest on a very much more secure foundation. If we really believe that protecting children online is important, then leaving it to voluntary agreements seems very odd.
Having set out those three concerns, I shall now briefly go through the Bill clause by clause. Clause 1 introduces an opt-in system with respect to adult content online. Both internet service providers and mobile phone operators are required by Clause 1 to provide an internet service that is free from adult content but with people being able to opt in to access such content, subject to submitting to age verification to demonstrate that they are 18 or over.
Clause 2 gives Ofcom responsibility for setting standards regarding filtering and age verification, and for reviewing the operation of the Bill when enacted. Crucially, Clause 2(5) requires Ofcom to,
“establish procedures for the handling and resolution of complaints in a timely manner about the observance of standards set under this section”.
This is to provide a mechanism for addressing concerns that those operating some websites may have about over-blocking.
Clause 3 requires manufacturers of electronic devices to provide customers with a means of filtering internet content at an age-appropriate level at the time the device is purchased. The rationale for this clause arises from the fact that, while it is very helpful to have an opt-in mechanism for a household, there is a need for a greater level of sophistication. For instance, you may be happy for a 16 year-old to download information about the Holocaust for homework purposes but you may not want your five year-old to have access to the same material. Manufacturers need to provide parents with filtering options which mean that they can cater for the needs of their children across the age spectrum.
Clause 4 requires those providing customers with access to the internet to provide them with information about online safety. Its purpose is to empower those paying for access to the internet, who ultimately are parents, by providing them with information about the key online safety issues and about how to cope with that type of thing.
Clause 5 introduces a new provision to the Bill placing a duty on the Secretary of State to make the parents of children under 18 aware of the online safety challenges.
In conclusion, we require a robust system that affords children the same legal protection online as they enjoy offline, that delivers credible age verification, that covers 100% of ISPs and MPOs, that, crucially, is based on law rather than mere voluntary agreement and that delivers proper education about online safety. This is what my Bill provides for and I strongly commend it to the House. I very much look forward to listening to what noble Lords have to say and, in particular, the reply from the Minister. I beg to move.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the Minister for both the time which he has already given me and what he said today. Indeed, I am extremely grateful to everybody in the Chamber today who has given up time and for the passion and commitment of their speeches in support of the Bill. The range of experience and expertise that has been brought to the debate today is very moving.
I hope that we will make more progress than is perhaps expected with the Bill, because I strongly believe that its narrow direction is still important. Of course, I understand that there is limited time but it has given the Government the opportunity to explain just how far they are moving in the right direction. As we have heard from so many noble Lords today, there is much concern about the likely effect of pornography. We are all seeking to protect our children.
I was particularly grateful not just for the support of the two Bishops who are here but for a supportive letter from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, who was totally behind what we are trying to achieve but who, sadly, could not be here with us today.
I just make one small point about which I remain unhappy. The Minister did not say much, if anything, about the rather weak way that age verification is being applied by the industry—the closed loop, as it is called. Perhaps he will agree to a meeting to discuss the problem of the closed loop system with other concerned people.
I put on record my thanks to a number of outside organisations and experts. John Carr, the secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, has of course been mentioned. He is a huge expert in this area. I also give thanks to the NSPCC, Mediawatch, Safermedia and Care, which have done a huge amount of background work in this whole area.