Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I add to the many tributes to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. She is basically reminding us all of our duty to protect the most vulnerable in society. I have the great privilege of sitting on the board of 5Rights, her foundation, which does so much work in this area. I stand in awe of her commitment and the incredible changes she is effecting.

I watched with horror and sadness as the revelations from the Facebook whistleblower unfurled. Frances Haugen, with other brave ex-Silicon Valley employees, confirmed what we all already knew: children are being put in harm’s way by big tech companies that place profit before safety. This is systemic negligence by the technology sector, which for too long has turned a blind eye to children and failed to respond to their rights and needs. It is gross negligence, and I have no doubt that lawyers in law firms in the United States, and probably here, are already looking at potential litigation and class actions. But we do not have time to wait for that. The law moves slowly. Even getting a Bill through this House normally takes a very long time, so I hope the Minister is not going to come back and tell us that the online harms Bill will deal with all this, because we need to do something more urgently.

The world is watching as the United Kingdom Government take the first strides into new legal territory with legislation to tackle online harms. I pay tribute to that; we can expect to debate the details of that Bill in this House in the next few months. The new online safety regime will no doubt make a number of positive changes to the experiences of children online, not only in this country but around the world because we will undoubtedly effect change there too. But those changes will not be felt unless and until services recognise the presence of children to a standard of accuracy laid down by the regulator. The age-assurance standards in this modest Bill seek to fix a problem that should have been fixed long ago: that of identifying children in a way that is private, transparent and secure but also trusted. It is required by existing legislation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, documented, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron.

I am a barrister, as your Lordships know. I am concerned with preventing children being exposed to illegal activity—heinous acts of violence, hate speech and child sexual exploitation and abuse. However, I also want an online environment that helps children to flourish: to thrive and be free from the pressures of everyday commercial surveillance; to be free from the pressure to look or behave in certain ways; and to avoid routine exposure to content and activity that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, just described, they do not have the developmental capacity to navigate. We make these provisions for children in the offline world, with lower speed limits outside schools to protect them and opaque packaging on porn magazines on the top shelves of newsagents. We do all that and accept it as normal in the offline world, so we should be doing the same online.

It is not just parents who want a safer, less adult world for children online. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, described, the children themselves want it too. I remind noble Lords of the promises we have made in this House over and over again. It is time to make good on those promises, and do so with speed, not wait. We must ask ourselves how it is that four in five pornography sites have no form of age-gating whatever, not even a box to ask “Are you over 18?”. How can we sit by while over half of 11 to 13 year-olds who come across pornography do so accidentally and unintentionally? It just pops up. How is it that nearly half of five to 15 year-olds have seen content online that they would rather avoid? Older siblings show it to younger ones, not realising how damaging this stuff is.

I make clear to all your Lordships that, as a lawyer, I frequently engage with libertarians who want less law and, when I first read the Bill, I looked at it with those sorts of eyes. I say pointedly to those who insist that we have to protect privacy and so on: age assurance does not mean identifying everyone who goes online. It does not mean that a pornography site will know the full name, address and inside leg measurements of adult users. It does mean, however, that children will be protected. Most importantly, it does not mean that we give up our hard-won rights to privacy. Age assurance, subject to minimum standards, can—indeed, must—be privacy-preserving and rights-respecting. I say that as a lawyer very much involved in those issues. All age assurance does is allow a service to know that a child is there or, perhaps more accurately, to prevent it pretending that a child is not there. Its value lies not in the act of verifying or estimating age but in the enormous opportunity it brings once children have been recognised.

So, I support the Bill brought by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and I hope that the Government will support it too. It is critical for the safety of children and the privacy of adults that the bar is set by Parliament, not left to self-regulation by the big tech companies. We have to be the institutions that set the age-assurance standard. My time is up. I just want to say that this should be done here and now. I urge the House to support the Bill.