Pornography

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate on securing this important debate. Before I move to the main focus of my speech, I want to say that I very much welcome the opportunity provided by this debate to stand back and look at the impact of pornography not just on adults but on society as a whole—adults and children. However, there is a growing recognition that pornography, rather like gambling, can have profoundly negative implications for some adult users as well as for children. The challenges faced by problem gamblers are very similar to those experienced by people who are addicted to pornography. In the same way that, while we do not ban gambling, the gambling industry is called to account for the very significant economic costs arising from legal, adult use of the services it provides, the time has come for the Government, similarly, to call pornographers to account.

In coming to child protection and children, I begin by congratulating the Prime Minister, ably assisted by the Minister in this House, for the leadership he has shown on this issue in relation to filtering. I do, however, have some very real concerns about the progress made, which I will set out today in the form of a number of questions to the Minister. First, I would like to echo the question that has already been asked about the implication of last week's “net neutrality” vote in the European Parliament, and the statement by the Prime Minister that he has negotiated an opt-out. Assuming that legislation is still necessary to resolve the problem, I ask the Minister to use the opportunity presented by this development to address two problems with the current voluntary arrangement.

First, approximately 10% of households are not covered by the adult content filtering agreement, which pertains only to the big four ISPs. I appreciate that some of the providers that are not subject to that arrangement have put in place similar provisions, but that is not the case across the board. When I raised the matter previously, the Minister said:

“It is important to note that … providers state at installation and on their marketing materials that they do not have child safety credentials”.—[Official Report, 17/6/15; col. 860.]

I do not find this approach very satisfactory. It rather begs the question why the other providers cannot simply do the same. If we are moving to a statutory approach, it would seem very odd to allow some providers not to be subject to the law as long as they tell customers that they are not subject to it. What kind of precedent would that set?

The second issue is the fundamental design fault with the current voluntary approach: that it is possible for anyone to elect to disable adult content filters and to opt in to adult content without any kind of prior age verification. The only safety mechanism provided is applied after the person concerned has lifted the filters, in the form of an email sent to the account holder informing them that the filters are no longer in place. This arrangement is, however, very weak. In the first instance, even if the account holder opened his or her email quickly and took immediate action, the chances are that their children would have been able to access adult content for some hours. ComRes polling for the charity CARE, however, has demonstrated that a total of 34% of British adults—some 16.3 million people—said that they would not read an email from their ISP immediately, of which a staggering 14% said that they were unlikely to read any email from their ISP at all. This would leave a significant number of children exposed to adult content, some permanently.

When I raised this point previously, the Minister suggested that she was content with this back-to-front age verification system, simply stating that,

“three-quarters of parents in the UK are confident that children are unable to bypass these tools. But to mitigate any further risk … ISPs email the main accountholder when filter settings are set or changed”.—[Official Report, 17/6/15; col. 860.]

Today, I gently press her again and say that surely she and the Government cannot be content with such a blatantly feeble approach. Even if only 25% of children seek to disable the adult content filters, this can be no justification for exchanging credible age verification procedures for a half-hearted retrospective warning mechanism that we know will not be picked up by parents in a significant number of cases.

I very much hope that the Minister will today confirm that the Government, if they have to introduce legislation to deal with the net neutrality challenge, will also use it to address these two shortcomings. If legislation is not necessary, I ask her to acknowledge that these are none the less problems that need to be addressed. Filtering requirements must apply to all ISPs servicing households with children, and anyone seeking to disable the filters must be age verified before they are lifted.

I turn to the Conservative Party’s very welcome manifesto commitment to introduce age verification checks specifically on websites carrying pornographic material. ATVOD is clear that the vast majority of the R18 material accessed in the UK comes from sites based outside the country. Some 23 of the 25 sites most accessed are located beyond the UK. Indeed, when one realises that the two sites based in the UK are already caught by our Audiovisual Media Service Regulations, it is clear that the primary function of the Government’s new age verification provision must relate to sites located outside the UK if the proposed measure is to make a significant difference. The Government are very well placed to rise to this challenge, because they have just inaugurated a means of regulating all online gambling websites that are accessed in the UK regardless of where in the world the sites are located. Indeed, my own Bill addresses this issue by drawing on the precedent of the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014.

I very much hope that the Minister will confirm today that central to the Government's proposals, as the plain words of their manifesto commitment suggest, will be the requirement that all websites accessed in the UK—regardless of whether they are based in the UK—must put in place robust age verification. I look forward to hearing how the Minister will respond to these questions. In closing, I note that my own Bill provides a means of dealing with all the problems I have highlighted and any EU requirement to make adult content filter provision statutory. If the Government wanted to adopt it as their own, I should be delighted.