Online Safety Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Kidron]

2: Clause 3, page 3, line 14, at end insert—
“(d) an internet service, other than a regulated user-to-user service or search service, that meets the child user condition and enables or promotes harmful activity and content as set out in Schedule (Online harms to children).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would mean any service that meets the 'child user condition' and enables or promotes harmful activity and content to children, as per a new Schedule, would be in scope of the regulation of the bill.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I refer the Committee to my interests as put in the register and declared in full at Second Reading. I will speak to Amendment 2 in my name and those of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, to Amendments 3 and 5 in my name, and briefly to Amendments 19, 22, 298 and 299 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding.

The digital world does not have boundaries in the way that the Bill does. It is an ecosystem of services and products that are interdependent. A user journey is made up of incremental signals, nudges and enticements that mean that, when we use our devices, very often we do not end up where we intended to start. The current scope covers user-to-user, search and commercial porn services, but a blog or website that valorises self-harm and depression or suggests starving yourself to death is still exempt because it has limited functionality. So too are games without a user-to-user function, in spite of the known harm associated with game addiction highlighted recently by Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones, national expert adviser on gambling harms, and the World Health Organization in 2019 when it designated gaming disorder as a behavioural addiction.

There is also an open question about immersive technologies, whose protocols are still very much in flux. I am concerned that the Government are willing to assert that these environments will meet the bar of user-to-user when those that are still building immersive environments make quite clear that that is not a given. Indeed, later in Committee I will be able to demonstrate that already the very worst harms are happening in environments that are not clearly covered by the Bill.

Another unintended consequence of the current drafting is that the task of working out whether you are on a regulated or unregulated service is left entirely to children. That is not what we had been promised. In December the Secretary of State wrote in a public letter to parents,

“I want to reassure every person reading this letter that the onus for keeping young people safe online will sit squarely on the tech companies’ shoulders”.

It is likely that the Minister will suggest that the limited- functionality services will be caught by the gatekeepers. But, as in the case of immersive technology, it is dangerous to suggest that, just because search and user- to-user are the primary access points in 2023, that will remain the case. We must be more forward thinking and ensure that services likely to be accessed that promote harm are in scope by default.

Amendments 3 and 5 are consequential, so I will not debate them now. I have listened to the Government and come back with a reasonable and implementable amendment that applies only to services that are likely to be accessed by children and that enable harm. I now ask the Government to listen and do likewise.

Amendments 92 and 193 cover the child user condition. The phrase “likely to be accessed”, introduced in this House into what became the Data Protection Act 2018, is one of the most unlikely successful British exports. Both the phrase and its definition, set out by the ICO, have been embedded in regulations in countries the world over—yet the Bill replaces this established language while significantly watering down the definition.

The Bill requires

“a significant number of children”

to use the service, or for the service to be

“likely to attract a significant number of users who are children”.

“Significant” in the Bill is defined relative to the overall UK user base, which means that extremely large platforms could deem a few thousand child users not significant compared with the several million-strong user base. Since only services that cross this threshold need comply with the child safety duties, thousands of children will not benefit from the safety duties that the Minister told us last week were at the heart of the Bill.

Amendment 92 would put the ICO’s existing and much-copied definition into the Bill. It says a service is

“likely to be accessed by children”

if

“the service is designed or intended for use by children … children form a substantive and identifiable user group … the possibility of a child accessing the service is more probable than not, taking into consideration … the nature and content of the service and whether that has particular appeal for children … the way in which the service is accessed and any measures in place to prevent children gaining access … market research, current evidence on user behaviour, the user base of similar or existing services”

that are likely to be accessed.

Having two phrases and definitions is bad for business and even worse for regulators. The ICO has first-mover advantage and a more robust test. It is my contention that parents, media and perhaps even our own colleagues would be very shocked to know that the definition in the Bill has the potential for many thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, of children to be left without the protections that the Bill brings forward. Perhaps the Minister could explain why the Government have not chosen regulatory alignment, which is good practice.

Finally, I will speak briefly in support of Amendments 19, 22, 298 and 299. I am certain that the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, will spell out how the app stores of Google and Apple are simply a subset of “search”, in that they are gatekeepers to accessing more than 5 million apps worldwide and the first page of each is indeed a search function. Their inclusion should be obvious, but I will add a specific issue about which I have spoken directly with both companies and about which the 5Rights Foundation, of which I am chair, has written to the ICO.

When we looked at the age ratings of apps across Google Play Store and Apple, four things emerged. First, apps are routinely rated much lower than their terms and conditions: for example, Amazon Shopping says 18 but has an age rating of 4 on Apple. This pattern goes across both platforms, covering social sites, gaming, shopping, et cetera.

Secondly, the same apps and services did not have the same age rating across both services, which, between them, are gatekeepers for more than 95% of the app market. In one extreme case, an app rated four on one of them was rated 16 on the other, with other significant anomalies being extremely frequent.

Thirdly, almost none of the apps considered their data protection duties in coming to a decision on their age rating, which is a problem, since privacy and safety and inextricably linked.

Finally, in the case of Apple, using a device registered to a 15 year-old, we were able to download age-restricted apps including a dozen or more 18-plus dating sites. In fairness, I give a shoutout to Google, which, because of the age-appropriate design code, chose more than a year ago not to show 18-plus content to children in its Play Store. So this is indeed a political and business choice and not a question of technology. Millions of services are accessed via the App Store. Given the Government’s position—that gatekeepers have specific responsibilities in relation to harmful content and activity—surely the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, are necessary.

My preference was for a less complicated Bill based on principles and judged on outcomes. I understand that that ship has sailed, but it is not acceptable for the Government now to use the length and complexity of the Bill as a reason not to accept amendments that would fill loopholes where harm has been proven. It is time to deliver on the promises made to parents and children, and to put the onus for keeping young people safe online squarely on tech companies’ shoulders. I beg to move.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 19, 22, 298 and 299 in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and the noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Clement-Jones. I will also briefly add at the end of my speech my support for the amendments in the name of my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. It has been a huge privilege to be her support act all the way from the beginnings of the age-appropriate design code; it feels comfortable to speak after her.

I want briefly to set out what my amendments would do. Their purpose is to bring app stores into the child protection elements of the Bill. Amendment 19 would require app stores to prepare

“risk assessments equal to user-to-user services due to their role in distributing online content through apps to children and as a primary facilitator of user-to-user”

services reaching children. Amendment 22 would mandate app stores

“to use proportionate and proactive measures, such as age assurance, to prevent children”

coming into contact with

“primary priority content that is harmful to children”.

Amendments 298 and 299 would simply define “app” and “app stores”.

Let us be clear what app stores do. They enable customers to buy apps and user-to-user services. They enable customers to download free apps. They offer up curated content in the app store itself and decide what apps someone would like to see. They enable customers to search for apps for user-to-user content. They provide age ratings; as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, they may be different age ratings in different app stores for the same app. They sometimes block the download of apps based on the age rating and their assessment of someone’s age, but not always, and it is different for different app stores.

Why should they be included in this Bill—if it is not obvious from what I have already said? First, two companies are profiting from selling user-to-user products to children. Two app stores account for some 98%-plus of all downloads of user-to-user services, with no requirements to assess the risk of selling those products to children or to mitigate those risks. We do not allow that in the physical world so we should not allow it in the digital world.

Secondly, parents and teenagers tell us that this measure would help. A number of different studies have been done; I will reference just two. One was by FOSI, the Family Online Safety Institute, which conducted an international research project in which parents consistently said that having age assurance at the app store level would make things simpler and more effective for them; ironically, the FOSI research was conducted with Google.

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[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point; they are making efforts. There is a role for app stores to play but I hope she would accept that it is qualitatively different from that played by a search engine or a user-to-user service. If we were to decide, in both instances, that we want app stores to have a greater role in online safety and a framework that allows us to look at blogs and other forms of content, we should go ahead and do that. All I am arguing is that we have a Bill that is carefully constructed around two particular concepts, a user-to-user service and a search engine, and I am not sure it will stretch that far.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I want to reassure the noble Lord: I have his blog in front of me and he was quite right—there were not a lot of children on that site. It is a very good blog, which I read frequently.

I want to make two points. First, age-rating and age-gating are two different things, and I think the noble Lord has conflated them. There is a lot of age- rating going on, and it is false information. We need good information, and we have not managed to get it by asking nicely. Secondly, I slightly dispute his idea that we have a very structured Bill regarding user-to-user and so on. We have a very structured Bill from a harms perspective that describes the harms that must be prevented—and then we got to commercial porn, and we can also get to these other things.

I agree with the noble Lord’s point about freedom of speech, but we are talking about a fixed set of harms that will, I hope, be in the Bill by the end. We can then say that if children are likely to be accessed by this test, and known harm is there, that is what we are looking at. We are certainly not looking at the noble Lord’s blog.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

I appreciate the intervention by the noble Baroness; I hope through this grit we may conjure up a pearl of some sort. The original concept of the Bill, as championed by the noble Baroness, would have been a generalised set of duties of care which could have stretched much more broadly. It has evolved in a particular direction and become ever more specific and tailored to those three services: user-to-user, search, and pornography services. Having arrived at that point, it is difficult to then open it back up and stretch it to reach other forms of service.

My intention in intervening in this debate is to raise some of those concerns because I think they are legitimate. I may be at the more sceptical end of the political world, but I am at the more regulation-friendly end of the tech community. This is said in a spirit of trying to create a Bill that will actually work. I have done the work, and I know how hard Ofcom’s job will be. That sums up what I am trying to say: my concern is that we should not give Ofcom an impossible job. We have defined something quite tight—many people still object to it, think it is too loose and do not agree with it—but I think we have something reasonably workable. I am concerned that, however tempting it is, by re-opening Pandora’s box we may end up creating something less workable.

That does not mean we should forget about app stores and non-user-to-user content, but we need to think of a way of dealing with those which does not necessarily just roll over the mechanism we have created in the Online Safety Bill to other forms of application.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay) (Con)]

My Lords, I share noble Lords’ determination to deliver the strongest protections for children and to develop a robust and future-proofed regulatory regime. However, it will not be possible to solve every problem on the internet through this Bill, nor through any piece of legislation, flagship or otherwise. The Bill has been designed to confer duties on the services that pose the greatest risk of harm—user-to-user services and search services—and where there are proportionate measures that companies can take to protect their users.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others anticipated, I must say that these services act as a gateway for users to discover and access other online content through search results and links shared on social media. Conferring duties on these services will therefore significantly reduce the risk of users going on to access illegal or harmful content on non-regulated services, while keeping the scope of the Bill manageable and enforceable.

As noble Lords anticipated, there is also a practical consideration for Ofcom in all this. I know that many noble Lords are extremely keen to see this Bill implemented as swiftly as possible; so am I. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Allan, rightly pointed out, making major changes to the Bill’s scope at this stage would have significant implications for Ofcom’s implementation timelines. I say this at the outset because I want to make sure that noble Lords are aware of those implications as we look at these issues.

I turn first to Amendments 2, 3, 5, 92 and 193, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. These aim to expand the number of services covered by the Bill to incorporate a broader range of services accessed by children and a broader range of harms. I will cover the broader range of harms more fully in a separate debate when we come to Amendment 93, but I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for her constructive and detailed discussions on these issues over the past few weeks and months.

These amendments would bring new services into scope of the duties beyond user-to-user and search services. This could include services which enable or promote commercial harms, including consumer businesses such as online retailers. As I have just mentioned in relation to the previous amendments, bringing many more services into scope would delay the implementation of Ofcom’s priorities and risk detracting from its work overseeing existing regulated services where the greatest risk of harm exists—we are talking here about the services run by about 2.5 million businesses in the UK alone. I hope noble Lords will appreciate from the recent communications from Ofcom how challenging the implementation timelines already are, without adding further complication.

Amendment 92 seeks to change the child-user condition in the children’s access assessment to the test in the age-appropriate design code. The test in the Bill is already aligned with the test in that code, which determines whether a service is likely to be accessed by children, in order to ensure consistency for providers. The current child-user condition determines that a service is likely to be accessed by children where it has a significant number or proportion of child users, or where it is of a kind likely to attract a significant number or proportion of child users. This will already bring into scope services of the kind set out in this amendment, such as those which are designed or intended for use by children, or where children form a—

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I am sorry to interrupt. Will the Minister take the opportunity to say what “significant” means, because that is not aligned with the ICO code, which has different criteria?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

If I can finish my point, this will bring into scope services of the kind set out in the amendments, such as those designed or intended for use by children, or where children form a substantial and identifiable user group. The current condition also considers the nature and content of the service and whether it has a particular appeal for children. Ofcom will be required to consult the Information Commissioner’s Office on its guidance to providers on fulfilling this test, which will further support alignment between the Bill and the age-appropriate design code.

On the meaning of “significant”, a significant number of children means a significant number in itself or a significant proportion of the total number of UK-based users on the service. In the Bill, “significant” has its ordinary meaning, and there are many precedents for it in legislation. Ofcom will be required to produce and publish guidance for providers on how to make the children’s access assessment. Crucially, the test in the Bill provides more legal certainty and clarity for providers than the test outlined in the code. “Substantive” and “identifiable”, as suggested in this amendment, do not have such a clear legal meaning, so this amendment would give rise to the risk that the condition is more open to challenge from providers and more difficult to enforce. On the other hand, as I said, “significant” has an established precedent in legislation, making it easier for Ofcom, providers and the courts to interpret.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, talked about the importance of future-proofing the Bill and emerging technologies. As he knows, the Bill has been designed to be technology neutral and future-proofed, to ensure that it keeps pace with emerging technologies. It will apply to companies which enable users to share content online or to interact with each other, as well as to search services. Search services using AI-powered features will be in scope of the search duties. The Bill is also clear that content generated by AI bots is in scope where it interacts with user-generated content, such as bots on Twitter. The metaverse is also in scope of the Bill. Any service which enables users to interact as the metaverse does will have to conduct a child access test and comply with the child safety duties if it is likely to be accessed by children.

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I hope that gives the noble Lord the reassurance that the points he is exploring through his amendments are covered. I invite him not to press them and, with a promise to continue discussions on the other amendments in this group, I invite their proposers to do the same.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I thank the Minister for an excellent debate; I will make two points. First, I think the Minister was perhaps answering on my original amendment, which I have narrowed considerably to services

“likely to be accessed by children”

and with proven harm on the basis of the harms described by the Bill. It is an “and”, not an “or”, allowing Ofcom to go after places that have proven to be harmful.

Secondly, I am not sure the Government can have it both ways—that it is the same as the age-appropriate design code but different in these ways—because it is exactly in the ways that it is different that I am suggesting the Government might improve. We will come back to both those things.

Finally, what are we asking here? We are asking for a risk assessment. The Government say there is no risk assessment, no harm, no mitigation, nothing to do. This is a major principle of the conversations we will have going forward over a number of days. I also believe in proportionality. It is basic product safety; you have a look, you have standards, and if there is nothing to do, let us not make people do silly things. I think we will return to these issues, because they are clearly deeply felt, and they are very practical, and my own feeling is that we cannot risk thousands of children not benefiting from all the work that Ofcom is going to do. With that, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

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[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendment 9, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and in particular the proposed new paragraph 10A to Schedule 1. I hope I will find myself more in tune with the mood of the Committee on this amendment than on previous ones. I would be interested to know whether any noble Lords believe that Ofcom should be spending its limited resources supervising a site like Wikipedia under the new regime, as it seems to me patently obvious that that is not what we intend; it is not the purpose of the legislation.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is right to remind us that one of the joys of the internet is that you buy an internet connection, plug it in and there is a vast array of free-to-use services which are a community benefit, produced by the community for the community, with no harm within them. What we do not want to do is interfere with or somehow disrupt that ecosystem. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is right to remind us that there is a genuine risk of people withdrawing from the UK market. We should not sidestep that. People who try to be law-abiding will look at these requirements and ask themselves, “Can I meet them?” If the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia does not think it can offer its service in a lawful way, it will have to withdraw from the UK market. That would be to the detriment of children in the United Kingdom, and certainly not to their benefit.

There are principle-based and practical reasons why we do not want Ofcom to be operating in this space. The principle-based one is that it makes me uncomfortable that a Government would effectively tell their regulator how to manage neutral information sites such as Wikipedia. There are Governments around the world who seek to do that; we do not want to be one of those.

The amendment attempts to define this public interest, neutral, informational service. It happens to be user-to-user but it is not like Facebook, Instagram or anything similar. I would feel much more comfortable making it clear in law that we are not asking Ofcom to interfere with those kinds of services. The practical reason is the limited time Ofcom will have available. We do not want it to be spending time on things that are not important.

Definitions are another example of how, with the internet, it can often be extremely hard to draw bright lines. Functionalities bleed into each other. That is not necessarily a problem, until you try to write something into law; then, you find that your definition unintentionally captures a service that you did not intend to capture, or unintentionally misses out a service that you did intend to be in scope. I am sure the Minister will reject the amendment because that is what Ministers do; but I hope that, if he is not willing to accept it, he will at least look at whether there is scope within the Bill to make it clear that Wikipedia is intended to be outside it.

Paragraph 4 of Schedule 1 refers to “limited functionality services”. That is a rich vein to mine. It is clear that the intention is to exclude mainstream media, for example. It refers to “provider content”. In this context, Encyclopaedia Britannica is not in scope but Wikipedia is, the difference being that Wikipedia is constructed by users, while Encyclopaedia Britannica is regarded as being constructed by a provider. The Daily Mail is outside scope; indeed, all mainstream media are outside scope. Anyone who declares themselves to be media—we will debate this later on—is likely to be outside scope.

Such provider exemption should be offered to other, similar services, even if they happen to be constructed from the good will of users as opposed to a single professional author. I hope the Minister will be able to indicate that the political intent is not that we should ask Ofcom to spend time and energy regulating Wikipedia-like services. If so, can he point to where in the legislation we might get that helpful interpretation, in order to ensure that Ofcom is focused on what we want it to be focused on and not on much lower priority issues?

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I will speak to a couple of the amendments in this group. First, small is not safe, and you cannot necessarily see these platforms in isolation. For example, there is an incel group that has only 4,000 active users, but it posts a great deal on YouTube and has 24.2 million users in that context. So we have to be clear that small and safe are not the same thing.

However, I am sympathetic to the risk-based approach. I should probably have declared an interest as someone who has given money to Wikipedia on several occasions to keep it going. I ask the Minister for some clarity on the systems and processes of the Bill, and whether the risk profile of Wikipedia—which does not entice you in and then follow you for the next six months once you have looked at something—is far lower than something very small that gets hold of you and keeps on going. I say that particularly in relation to children, but I feel it for myself also.

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[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on moderation, which I think are more important than he has given himself credit for—they go more broadly than just Wikipedia.

There is a lot of emphasis on platform moderation, but the reality is that most moderation of online content is done by users, either individually or in groups, acting as groups in the space where they operate. The typical example, which many Members of this House have experienced, is when you post something and somebody asks, “Did you mean to post that?”, and you say, “Oh gosh, no”, and then delete it. A Member in the other place has recently experienced a rather high-profile example of that through the medium of the newspaper. On a much smaller scale, it is absolutely typical that people take down content every day, either because they regret it or, quite often, because their friends, families or communities tell them that it was unwise. That is the most effective form of moderation, because it is the way that people learn to change their behaviour online, as opposed to the experience of a platform removing content, which is often experienced as the big bad hand of the platform. The person does not learn to change their behaviour, so, in some cases, it can reinforce bad behaviour.

Community moderation, not just on Wikipedia but across the internet, is an enormous public good, and the last thing that we want to do in this legislation is to discourage people from doing it. In online spaces, that is often a volunteer activity: people give up their time to try to keep a space safe and within the guidelines they have set for that space. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has touched on a really important area: in the Bill, we must be absolutely clear to those volunteers that we will not create all kinds of new legal operations and liabilities on them. These are responsible people, so, if they are advised that they will incur all kinds of legal risk when trying to comply with the Online Safety Bill, they will stop doing the moderation—and then we will all suffer.

On age-gating, we will move to a series of amendments where we will discuss age assurance, but I will say at the outset, as a teaser to those longer debates, that I have sympathy with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. He mentioned pubs—we often talk about real-world analogies. In most of the public spaces we enter in the real world, nobody does any ID checking or age checking; we take it on trust, unless and until you carry out an action, such as buying alcohol, which requires an age check.

It is legitimate to raise this question, because where we fall in this debate will depend on how we see public spaces. I see a general-purpose social network as equivalent to walking into a pub or a town square, so I do not expect to have my age and ID checked at the point at which I enter that public space. I might accept that my ID is checked at a certain point where I carry out various actions. Others will disagree and will say that the space should be checked as soon as you go into it—that is the boundary of the debate we will have across a few groups. As a liberal, I am certainly on the side that says that it is incumbent on the person wanting to impose the extra checks to justify them. We should not just assume that extra checks are cost-free and beneficial; they have a cost for us all, and it should be imposed only where there is a reasonable justification.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

Far be it for me to suggest that all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, are in the wrong place, but I think that Amendment 26 might have been better debated with the other amendments on age assurance.

On community moderation, I underscore the point that Ofcom must have a risk profile as part of its operations. When we get to that subject, let us understand what Ofcom intends to do with it—maybe we should instruct Ofcom a little about what we would like it to do with it for community moderation. I have a lot of sympathy—but do not think it is a get-out clause—with seeing some spaces as less risky, or, at least, for determining what risky looks like in online spaces, which is a different question. This issue belongs in the risk profile: it is not about taking things out; we have to build it into the Bill we have.

On age assurance and AV, I do not think that today is the day to discuss it in full. I disagree with the point that, because we are checking kids, we have to check ourselves—that is not where the technology is. Without descending into technical arguments, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, asked us not to, we will bring some of those issues forward.

The noble Lords, Lord Bethell and Lord Stevenson, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford have a package of amendments which are very widely supported across the Committee. They have put forward a schedule of age assurance that says what the rules of the road are. We must stop pretending that age assurance is something that is being invented now in this Bill. If you log into a website with your Facebook login, it shares your age—and that is used by 42% of people online. However, if you use an Apple login, it does not share your age, so I recommend using Apple—but, interestingly, it is harder to find that option on websites, because websites want to know your age.

So, first, we must not treat age assurance as if it has just been invented. Secondly, we need to start to have rules of the road, and ask what is acceptable, what is proportionate, and when we will have zero tolerance. Watching faces around the Committee, I say that I will accept zero tolerance for pornography and some other major subjects, but, for the most part, age assurance is something that we need to have regulated. Currently, it is being done to us rather than in any way that is transparent or agreed, and that is very problematic.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I hesitated to speak to the previous group of amendments, but I want to speak in support of the issue of risk that my noble friend Lady Kidron raised again in this group of amendments. I do not believe that noble Lords in the Committee want to cut down the amount of information and the ability to obtain information online. Rather, we came to the Bill wanting to avoid some of the really terrible harms promoted by some websites which hook into people’s vulnerability to becoming addicted to extremely harmful behaviours, which are harmful not only to themselves but to other people and, in particular, to children, who have no voice at all. I also have a concern about vulnerable people over the age of 18, and that may be something we will come to later in our discussions on the Bill.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this slightly disjointed debate. I fully accept that there will be further opportunities to discuss age verification and related matters, so I shall say no more about that. I am grateful, in particular, to the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, for supplying the deficiency in my opening remarks about the importance of Amendments 10 and 11, and for explaining just how important that is too. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. It was good of him to say, in the open approach he took on the question of age, that there are issues still to be addressed. I do not think anybody feels that we have yet got this right and I think we are going to have to be very open in that discussion, when we get to it. That is also true about what the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, said: we have not yet got clarity as to where the age boundary is—I like his expression—for the public space. Where is the point at which, if checks are needed, those checks are to be applied? These are all matters to discuss and I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I do not address each individual contribution separately.

I would like to say something, I hope not unfairly or out of scope, about what was said by the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay of Llandaff and Lady Kidron, when they used, for the first time this afternoon, the phrase “zero tolerance”, and, at the same time, talked about a risk-based approach. I have, from my own local government experience, a lot of experience of risk-based approaches taken in relation to things—very different, of course, from the internet—such as food safety, where local authorities grade restaurants and food shops and take enforcement action and supervisory action according to their assessment of the risk that those premises present. That is partly to do with their assessment of the management and partly to do with their experience of things that have gone wrong in the past. If you have been found with mouse droppings and you have had to clean up the shop, then you will be examined a great deal more frequently until the enforcement officers are happy; whereas if you are always very well run, you will get an inspection visit maybe only once a year. That is what a risk-based assessment consists of. The important thing to say is that it does not produce zero tolerance or zero outcomes.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I just want to make the point that I was talking about zero tolerance at the end of a ladder of tolerance, just to be clear. Letting a seven-year-old child into an 18-plus dating app or pornographic website is where the zero tolerance is—everything else is a ladder up to that.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I beg the noble Baroness’s pardon; I took that for granted. There are certain things—access to pornography, material encouraging self-harm and things of that sort—where one has to have zero tolerance, but not everything. I am sorry I took that for granted, so I fully accept that I should have made that more explicit in my remarks. Not everything is to be zero-toleranced, so to speak, but certain things are. However, that does not mean that they will not happen. One has to accept that there will be leakage around all this, just as some of the best-run restaurants that have been managed superbly for years will turn out, on occasion, to be the source of food poisoning. One has to accept that this is never going to be as tight as some of the advocates wanted, but with that, I hope I will be given leave to withdraw—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, it is risky to stand between people and their dinner, but I rise very briefly to welcome these amendments. We should celebrate the good stuff that happens in Committee as well as the challenging stuff. The risk assessments are, I think, the single most positive part of this legislation. Online platforms already do a lot of work trying to understand what risks are taking place on their platforms, which never sees the light of day except when it is leaked by a whistleblower and we then have a very imperfect debate around it.

The fact that platforms will have to do a formal risk assessment and share it with a third-party regulator is huge progress; it will create a very positive dynamic. The fact that the public will be able to see those risk assessments and make their own judgments about which services to use—according to how well they have done them—is, again, a massive public benefit. We should welcome the fact that risk assessments are there and the improvements that this group of amendments makes to them. I hope that was short enough.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I also welcome these amendments, but I have two very brief questions for the Minister. First, in Amendment 27A, it seems that the child risk assessment is limited only to category 1 services and will be published only in the terms of service. As he probably knows, 98% of people do not read terms of service, so I wondered where else we might find this, or whether there is a better way of dealing with it.

My second question is to do with Amendments 64A and 88A. It seems to me—forgive me if I am wrong—that the Bill previously stipulated that all regulated search and user services had to make and keep a written record of any measure taken in compliance with a relevant duty, but now it seems to have rowed back to only category 1 and 2A services. I may be wrong on that, but I would like to check it for the record.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, put her finger exactly on the two questions that I wanted to ask: namely, why only category 1 and category 2A, and is there some rowing back involved here? Of course, none of this prejudices the fact that, when we come later in Committee to talk about widening the ambit of risk assessments to material other than that which is specified in the Bill, this kind of transparency would be extremely useful. But the rationale for why it is only category 1 and category 2A in particular would be very useful to hear.