Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Ben Spencer Excerpts

Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak on behalf of His Majesty’s official Opposition on this important topic. Thank you for calling me now, Madam Deputy Speaker; I will not speak for too long, because there are so many Government Members who are keen to take part in this important debate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) on bringing this private Member’s Bill to the House and all the different people, companies, charities and organisations that he has worked with as part of the campaign to drive it forwards. I do feel for him, as I know what it is like for a Back Bencher in the party of Government to navigate the challenges of trying to use a private Member’s Bill—I have had two ballot Bills myself—as a campaign vehicle to drive change. I therefore hope that he will forgive me for some of the comments I shall make about the content of this Bill.

We can only deal with the text of the Bill before us, which was only published in the past few days, so my comments will necessarily reflect the detail of the hon. Member’s proposals. In a sense, this debates reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat, in that Members have made equally reference to a former Bill and a current Bill in their speeches. It feels like we are having a debate on a Bill that could have been and a debate on the Bill in front of us. Indeed, the hon. Member’s speech spoke to the lack of a need for further research, but equally the Bill calls for further research to take place.

We have heard some fantastic contributions from all parts of the House. I would like to note the contributions from my right hon. Friends the Members for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) and for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), and my hon. Friends the Members for Reigate (Rebecca Paul), for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) and for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking), who reiterated the importance of driving forward change. Many stories and personal declarations have been shared about the impact of social media and the difficulty of parenting at this time. I should declare that I am also a parent, although thankfully my children are not at the stage when they have started consuming social media in the way that I have heard others talk about today.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

The hon. Member is making a powerful point about the debate and how it has dwelled in part on the importance of evidence and research. Does he agree that the reason we have so much evidence is that, as MPs, we speak with so many children? I have in my hand letters from children in years 5 and 6 at St James’ Church of England primary academy, and if I may quote briefly from Eleanor and River, they say

“kids will also be exposed to inappropriate content such as unsuitable videos and pictures. They could feel unsafe, discouraged or exposed, and then they would not be able to unsee the images again.”

Does the hon. Member agree that we should be shielding children from that sort of content?

[Dr Spencer]

I am going to resist the temptation to be drawn into a discussion about research methodology in this area, although I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that I am very tempted to talk about the importance of case series data and qualitative data in terms of what people are telling us and what we are seeing ourselves, compared with cross-sectional or longitudinal studies or cluster studies looking at the impact of different schools. What I will say is that the stories of what children are being exposed to that we have heard in this debate and that we have all heard from our constituents are horrific—I do not think anyone would disagree with that. Clearly, we need to protect children from that.

At the heart of the Bill is the desire to drive forward our scientific understanding of the effects of smartphone and social media use on children’s mental health, learning and social development. I hope we hear a commitment from the Minister that the Government will conduct a detailed review in this complex area where so much is at stake, but I would also expand it further. Any analysis must take a clear-eyed approach to both the advantages and disadvantages offered by technological developments such as smartphones and internet access, looking at both the benefits to young people of increased connectivity and access to information, and even apps that help to manage health conditions such as diabetes at school and away from home, which will transform the lives of children and young people, and the increasing body of research that demonstrates the damaging effects of excessive smartphone and social media use on children and adolescents.

[Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me on the importance of moving towards smartphone-free schools? I welcome the work being done at Monmouth comprehensive in my constituency, where the headteacher is pushing forward a smartphone ban, because grades increase by almost two levels where schools have banned mobile phones.

[Dr Spencer]

I will come on to that a little later in my speech. Perhaps Government Members will have the chance to express their view on this matter on Report of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in a couple of weeks’ time.

Turning back to the research, a longitudinal study in the US of more than 6,500 children aged between 12 and 15, adjusted for baseline mental health status, found that adolescents who spent more than three hours a day on social media faced double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety. These findings have been brought into sharp focus by recent tragic cases of children taking their own lives after being the subject of online bullying or encountering harmful material online. Clearly, that weighs on all of us as legislators.

In government and now in opposition, the Conservatives have pursued measures to make the online world a safer place for children and young people. I am proud that the previous Government passed the Online Safety Act, among other measures, to make the online world safer. The Act requires platforms to take measures to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content, particularly relating to pornography, suicide and self-harm, serious violence and bullying. The Act further requires platforms to remove illegal content quickly and prevent it from appearing in the first place, and to use and enforce age-checking measures on platforms where content harmful to children is published through the adoption of highly effective age assurance technologies. In January, Ofcom published industry guidance on how it expects age assurance to be put into effect, including deadlines for platforms to conduct risk assessments and put certain safety measures in place. We can expect to see further developments in this area as the protections envisaged by the OSA are rolled out.

However, parents, including many in my constituency, are rightly concerned about the addictive nature of smartphones themselves and the impact on attention span and social development. According to polling by Parentkind in 2024, 83% of parents felt that smartphones are harmful to children and young people, while research carried out by Policy Exchange across more than 200 schools at the end of 2023 found that schools with strict mobile phone bans achieved, on average, better Progress 8 scores and better GCSE grades, despite the fact that the schools with highly effective bans had a higher proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals than the schools with less restrictive policies.

In February, the shadow Secretary of State for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to require all schools in England to ban the use of mobile telephones during the school day. That, however, was rejected by the Government. I wonder how Labour Members feel about that. Should the Government decide to do so, perhaps further to the chief medical officers’ review, Opposition Members will work constructively with them to seek practical and effective solutions that enable children to continue to benefit from the opportunities offered online, while protecting them from those harmful effects.