Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Bob Stewart and Claire Perry

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

I rise with great satisfaction to welcome both new Ministers to their places and to welcome the Bill. There is much in it to be applauded. Let me focus on two quick points before moving on to the provisions for reducing the amount of adult material that children can see online, which other Members have spoken about.

Digital access is vital for those who represent rural constituencies. I know how much the previous Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey), had worked on this issue, and I agree with him that enormous progress has been made in providing high-speed access across many parts of the country that were ignored in commercial contracts. It is now a question of how we provide services for the last 5%. I welcome the definition in the Bill of what “fast” actually looks like, which I know the current Minister has been keen to establish.

I also welcome the universal service obligation. It seems bizarre, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage mentioned, that we do not have broadband provision built into the building code along with the provision of electricity and water services as a fundamental utility that every householder should have.

I welcome, too, the direct marketing code that is covered in clause 77. I suspect that many Members have been shown the difficulties, the traumas, the feeling of invasion that people suffer when there is a direct marketing call or letter going to their homes again and again. I really welcome the provision that will put the direct marketing code on a statutory footing, which should make it easier for prosecutions to be brought and for penalties to be applied. Ministers are to be commended for this.

I shall spend the majority of my speech talking about part 3, which is designed to improve internet safety for young people by introducing an age verification mechanism. It seems odd how life goes full circle. It was the Minister of State who sat on the Benches with me all those years ago when I brought this topic up in an Adjournment debate. It was, I think, the first thing I did in the House, and it was the then Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage, who responded. We set out a series of requests that seemed to be very sensible, but to which the response was in some ways hysterical. I remember people telling us that we wanted censorship. The right hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who did so much with me on this topic, will remember that we were somehow supposed to be about burning books because we wanted ISPs to do some simple things, such as provide filtering that was already on, so that it would not be incumbent on parents alone to protect their children; the internet service providers would help them to do that. My goodness, how far we have come since then. We now have ISPs that behave incredibly responsibly in this country, and we have filters whose default setting is “on”.

In this context, I must pay tribute to the former Prime Minister. I believe that without his leadership, we might still be arguing with the industry about these matters. It was his seeing the rationale behind this, and seizing on it, that really got officials and industry to move. I remember that when I was his special adviser on online safety, I was asked to meet the parents of April Jones, who was murdered so cruelly by someone in her area. They could not understand how the man who had killed their daughter had been able to put into the internet search terms such as “naked little girls in glasses” and receive returns from Google, served up for his pleasure and, potentially, for his stimulation. That was a very hard question to answer. It was absolutely right that we persuaded search engines, including Google, not to return results against a whole series of search terms, but it took intervention from the highest level of Government to make that happen.

It was absolutely brilliant that the Government moved even further, and produced a series of definitions of illegal material. Posting revenge porn is now a criminal offence, as is stalking in the online world, and the Government have also outlawed the depiction of violent rape in either absolute or cartoon form. I am delighted that they have made so much progress, and I know that there is strong cross-party support for what they have done.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

It would be really good if, in much the same way, depictions of beheadings and other monstrous acts were banned from the internet and never seen in this country, in Europe, or indeed anywhere.

[Claire Perry]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. During that long process of conversation, legislation and lobbying, we all discovered that it was very hard to get internet service providers, content providers and search engines to think in this way, because they took a different view. Their view was that they would serve up whatever people wanted, everywhere. If things are made illegal, it is a different matter, so it all came down to a question of legality rather than morality. However, I think we have made enormous progress, and I am proud that we can call Britain one of the most family-friendly places in the world to access the internet. All this has been done, by the way, without any materialisation of the doom-and-gloom scenarios of internet shutdown. My hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), who chairs the Select Committee—he is no longer in the Chamber—spoke of our dynamic digital economy, which is perceived to be a high-growth, high-innovation area; and while all that has been achieved, we have also established some family-friendly guidelines.

Let me now urge the Minister and his officials to pay particular attention to two aspects of the Bill which concern me, and which others have also raised. The first is the definition of content that is captured by the age verification mechanism. I know that the Bill is quite loosely drafted, and I know that the intention is to capture both commercial material and material that is provided free on commercial sites, but there is a real question about peer-to-peer sites and live streaming. As we all know, the internet is not accessed through the mainstream hub sites, and there is now far more peer-to-peer and free content exchange. I should be interested to know how further drafting would address that problem.

It is encouraging that commercial providers of pornography support these proposals. They think it absolutely right for there to be some degree of age verification, because they are not interested in children viewing their material, and they recognise the commercial benefits of the Bill. That is very notable.

The second aspect that I want to raise is the role of the regulator, and what teeth the regulator can have. Concerns have been expressed today about enforcement. In the light of my association with the British Board of Film Classification, it occurs to me that there may be a role for that organisation in a regulatory structure. It is a trusted brand when it comes to regulating content; its definitions are widely accepted, and it is considered to be highly robust. I have met BBFC representatives and talked to them about the possibility, and they have agreed that there could be a role for them. However, the BBFC’s current enforcement is carried out not through its own powers, but through trading standards or the police, so the question of enforcement still needs to be addressed. However, it does concern me that, as we have heard, while the intention is there to have a level of enforcement—a civil enforcement, perhaps, relating to fines—it is difficult to establish a qualifying turnover and indeed bank account details for many of these overseas sites that are generating and posting content. I would be interested to have further details, perhaps in Committee, as to how those sites could be captured and, of course, what happens if nothing happens. What happens if a site flagrantly disregards this, and refuses to put in place a robust verification mechanism? We should explore the possibility of ISPs being asked to block sites that are effectively contravening UK law.

I urge the Minister to look at what happened with the gambling industry. The right hon. Member for Slough—I like to call her my right hon. Friend—and I could not understand why there was such a disparity. Of course, the gambling industry set up very early on robust age verification mechanisms that blocked under-18s from accessing their sites. There is a mechanism in place, and it has been achieved without any howls of privacy invasion.