Online Safety: Children and Young People

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered online safety for children and young people.

Just give me one second to get my notes in order, Mr Dowd.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lola McEvoy]

I will!

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

The hon. Lady has called a debate on a really important issue. Could she set out why she thinks that now is a really important time to discuss this vital topic?

[Lola McEvoy]

I will—and I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. It is my great honour to open this debate on online safety for our children. I welcome the Minister answering for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), answering for the official Opposition. I tabled this as my first debate in Westminster Hall, because I believe this issue is one of the most defining of our time. I promised parents and children in my constituency of Darlington that I would tackle it head-on, so here I am to fulfil that promise.

I would like to put on the record that I have long been inspired by the strength of the parents of Bereaved Families for Online Safety—a group of parents united by the unbearable loss of their children and by their steadfast commitment to get stronger online protections to prevent more children’s deaths. I say to Ellen, who is here with us this afternoon: thank you for your courage—you have experienced unimaginable pain, and I will do everything I can to prevent more parents from going through the same.

The consensus for action on this issue has been built, in no small part due to the incredible drive of parents to campaign for justice. It is felt in every corner of the country, and it is our job as a Government to step in and protect our children from online harm. In my constituency of Darlington, at door after door right across the town and regardless of background, income or voting intention, parents agreed with me that it is time to act to protect our children. I am taking this issue to the Government to fight for them.

I am standing up to amplify the voice of the girl who sends a picture of herself that she thought was private but arrives at school to find that it has been shared with all her peers; she is not only mortified but blamed, and the message cannot be unsent. I am standing up to amplify the voice of the boy who gets bombarded with violent, disturbing images that he does not want to see and never asked for, and who cannot sleep for thinking about them. I am standing up for the mother whose son comes home bruised and will not tell her what has happened, but who gets sent a video of him being beaten up and finds out that it was organised online. I am standing up for the father whose daughter refuses to eat anything because she has seen video after video after video criticising girls who look like her. I say to all those who have raised the alarm, to all the children who know something is wrong but do not know what to do, and to all those who have seen content that makes them feel bad about themselves, have been bullied online, have seen images they did not want to see or have been approached by strangers: we are standing up for you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), who made really powerful and impactful comments, as have all those who have spoken today. I join her tribute to the bereaved families who have done such incredible work to campaign on this vital issue. I should, before anything else, direct everybody to the work of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who was the architect—the genesis—behind the Online Safety Act. I was one of the many Ministers who took over that baton for a couple of years and pulled the Act together.

As the hon. Member for Darlington said, only when we meet families who have been deeply impacted by online dangers and online harms does the impact of this really land with us. For me, meeting Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 as a result of the content that she had seen online, underlined how incredibly disastrous for young and vulnerable people the harms of the internet can be.

As the hon. Lady said, it is not just about the sites that are hosting inappropriate content; it is about the algorithms that take someone’s fears and anxieties and put them into an echo chamber where they are normalised and reinforced, which is the most dangerous part of this. Unfortunately, it is the algorithms that social media companies prize above everything else; they are the most jealously guarded parts of their organisations. Molly was one example resulting from that, but there are so many other examples of suicide, self-harm, anxiety, eating disorders and body image issues that come out of that world.

A year on from the Online Safety Act, it is interesting to see how it is fully implemented, particularly against the backdrop of the speed at which technology is evolving. It is frightening because, virtually every week in our constituencies, we see examples of the harms that are out there. In my constituency, just in the last couple of weeks, junior-age children were using the online world to bully and harass each other. That is something that used to stay within the school gates. Bullying still happened—I am so elderly, and it happened when I was at school—but it was something that was left behind at the school gates; it did not follow you home. Also, 27% of children have seen pornography by the age of 11, which brings a very toxic view of sex and relationships.

The Online Safety Act will hopefully encourage providers to do what they say they are doing when it comes to protecting children online, but the Minister has a huge responsibility to make sure that that happens, and to hold not just them but Ofcom to account to make sure that it is robustly implementing the guidelines that it is setting up. There are some amazing champions of that—Baroness Kidron has made incredible strides in the other place—but we need to make sure that Ofcom has not only the powers but the capacity. It has a huge amount under its jurisdiction and there is a huge amount of pressure. I know that the Minister will work very hard to ensure that it is held to account and equipped with what it needs.

Edinburgh Festivals: Cultural and Economic Contribution

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

It is a huge pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh (Chris Murray) on securing the debate and on the excellent way in which he championed his city. As someone who has visited the festivals during August many, many times over the years, he has made a fine case for the value of them and makes me want to go back again.

Anyone who has visited Edinburgh at any time of the year will say what a wonderful, vibrant and historic city it is. I was not at all surprised to find out that of all the cities in the UK, Edinburgh receives the highest proportion of international visitors to the UK: 68% of the total. The challenge for policymakers is how to grasp the strong pull factors and turn them into gold dust that benefits not only Edinburgh but the rest of Scotland and indeed the rest of the UK. The festivals play a massive part in that.

How can we best use our cultural heritage to further our soft power abroad and promote prosperity at home? The 11 major festivals that comprise the Edinburgh festival are a perfect tool to do it. The international festival, the Fringe and the tattoo always get the limelight, but of course 11 festivals make up the complement. The Edinburgh international book festival, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned, remains the biggest in the world, with more than 900 authors in attendance.

However, the reports that have been released by the festivals lay bare some of the significant challenges, including the rise in the cost of living accommodation and security expenses, and the costs are being exacerbated by the frustrating, restrictive and punitive bureaucracy that has been imposed on Edinburgh’s landlords by the Scottish Government. I also have concerns about the future of funding for acts at festivals such as the Fringe. Both those issues tie into the all-important question of how and why the Government should and could be stimulating cultural activity, specifically to develop artists, actors and creators.

This issue is too big for Edinburgh council to deal with alone: it has an impact on the whole of Scotland and the whole of the UK. In short, it is for all of us to work out how the various festivals can continue to play a role as the incubator—a sort of research and development department for world-class artistic talent—and a role in tourism, expanding the horizons of those who come along and see them. That is why, despite the fact that both culture and tourism are devolved, the previous Government spent £1 million supporting the festivals with their digital offer.

It is the talent that brings visitors in their hundreds of thousands. There were 700,000 unique visitors last year alone, and that number does not account for the many artists who require somewhere to live. They are the up-and-comers who are looking for their big break. They are young, not well off and looking for somewhere cheap to stay, but for many the heavy-handed licensing and prohibitive legislation around short-term lets is destroying any chance of their being put up for the night. Gone are those days when a well-meaning, friendly person who wanted to support aspiring artists could just give over their spare bedroom for a few weeks.

New regulations require landlords to be compliant with rigorous safety rules, fit and proper person tests and assurances that the let will not adversely affect the community. The measures have adversely impacted the availability of short-term lets, which is especially ironic considering the fact that 72% of locals say that the festivals make Edinburgh a better place to live. If my local city was inundated with people every year and I could not find a table to go out and eat, I am not sure whether I would feel the same way, but people do feel the benefit of the festivals.

I urge anyone with a stake in the future of Edinburgh festivals to engage with Edinburgh council’s consultation on the scheme, which closes on Monday. The Scottish Government would do well to review the 2022 regulation and ask themselves why they have decided to restrict access to one of our most successful cities and festival programmes at a time when the events are inevitably finding it more expensive and difficult to operate.

I hope the Minister will have a conversation with his counterpart in Holyrood and emphasise the benefits not just to Scotland but to the nation as a whole, and the need to cut through the bureaucracy and enable the market to work a lot more effectively. I am worried about the effect of the Scottish Government’s budget cut to Creative Scotland. The almost £700,000 fund was a vital resource for participants in the festivals. It was already extremely over-subscribed, so it is difficult to rationalise the decision by both the Scottish Government and Creative Scotland. Artists cannot rely on pots of money such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Keep it Fringe” fund. We need artists whose careers have started at the festivals to pay into support to help others coming up behind them, but we also need all the authorities to feed in and support them.

Festivals such as the Fringe are often the first big test for an emerging artist. They are a way for people to have the most amazing experiences, and the cultural contribution is second to none. They also bring the world and its cultural wonders to Scotland, whether that is through the Tattoo or the international festival. It is vital that the Scottish Government recognise the part that they can play, and I hope the Minister will do his bit to encourage co-operation with the festivals in future years.

Dynamic Ticket Pricing

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister to his place and very much look forward to working with him to promote our world-class creative industries, including our music industry and all the other fantastic sectors that his Department promotes.

Today, I want to talk about music ticketing and recognise the remarkable circumstances that have provoked this debate. News of the Oasis reunion has dominated the news cycle for the last week or so, but some might say for all the wrong reasons. What should have been a moment to celebrate one of the UK’s most significant cultural exports—and the chance to revisit the music that, for many, me included, was the soundtrack to our youth—has morphed into a conversation about exploitative practices in the music industry that hurt fans and the grassroots sector. Some of the issues have been rumbling away for years. In fact, earlier this year, the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport published a report on grassroots music that outlined some of the major challenges facing the live music ecosystem and suggested some ways forward.

The Minister knows the facts. On 31 August, some 14 million people from 158 countries logged on to a digital queue to buy tickets to the Oasis Live 25 reunion tour, 15 years after the band broke up and 30 years on from their seminal first album, “Definitely Maybe”. Fans were locked in an online queue for up to 10 hours and, when many of them, it seemed almost at random, made it to the front of the queue, the tickets were in many cases more than double the price that had been advertised. The dynamic pricing mechanism employed by Oasis, their promoters and management via Ticketmaster served to increase the price of tickets in line with demand, but in reality it resulted in a kind of lucky dip game in which the price got worse and worse by no clear mechanism except the secret and opaque rules of a computer algorithm in the hands of Ticketmaster.

I should declare an interest: after four hours of queuing, I had become wistful about the halcyon days of real-life physical box offices, where we queued almost overnight to get our tickets, but at least we could see the queue in front of us and we knew how long we would have to wait.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Member for bringing this debate. She is right and many of my constituents experienced the issue that she mentions. We understand the economic principles of supply and demand, but we also understand the principle of price gouging. For those who believed they would be charged one price to have just a few moments to decide whether they would be prepared to pay double is unfair pressure. We must always encourage free trade, but we must also be mindful of consumer protection in Strangford, Gosport or any part of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I could not have said it better myself—that is exactly what it is. We understand the laws of supply and demand, but we also understand the laws of transparency and fairness. What is more, once ticket purchasers were through to the payment screen, fans realised that they only had a very limited time to decide whether the hugely inflated prices were worth paying. Someone compared the ticket purchase after such a long wait to the dopamine rush of a gambler. The £150 to £400 price increase meant that the transaction was no longer a choice, but more of an impulse buy.

I have heard many people say that the dynamic pricing method is used effectively in other sectors, and that the technology is a perfect demonstration of the dynamism of a free market. Even within the music industry itself, there is dispute as to whether dynamic pricing has a place and is an acceptable way forward.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. I was hoping to secure a debate on the subject myself but she beat me to it. There seems to be an issue about who is to blame for all of this—no one is taking responsibility for the issue of dynamic pricing. Ticketmaster is blaming the management and artists, and they are blaming those who were promoting the events. As she is now the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, will she look into this on behalf of the House and find out exactly why this has happened, with a view to having it stopped and outlawed entirely?

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I am very fortunate to have been re-elected as the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, but we do not have any members of the Committee yet. Any decisions about what the Committee will look at will very much be a group decision jointly taken, but this is certainly something I will be putting forward. I know the Minister has already announced some consultation of his own.

To return to dynamic pricing and the laws of supply and demand, mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), this is something that is used across different marketplaces. Uber employs a smart dynamic pricing mechanism that adjusts the cost of journeys in line with changing variables, such as traffic and current rider-to-driver demand. Hotels and airlines are another market that uses dynamic pricing, but they are very different. If people are stuck at Waterloo station, as I sometimes am, an Uber is not the only option of travel and, when people go on holiday, multiple airlines offer flights to the same city and different hotel options, but when it comes to live music, particularly in cases such as this one, there is one artist and one opportunity to buy a ticket.

The imperfections of the dynamic pricing mechanism were obvious to anybody who attempted to buy a ticket on this occasion, but whatever the rights and wrongs of its suitability for music ticketing and this market place, the most important issue is that fans were not warned about the use of dynamic pricing before they entered the digital queue. Those are the faults that led the Competition and Markets Authority to open its investigation into this debacle. It meant that people had no idea how much a ticket would cost when they logged in. Many fans ended up paying at least double the original listing price of £148, so four standing tickets could cost an eye-watering £1,400 once service and order processing fees were included. The CMA says that it will investigate whether fans were given “clear and timely information”.

Any free market economist would call this a classic case of information asymmetry. There was certainly a lack of clarity over how high ticket prices might eventually go, with the additional chaos of a time limit putting pressure on fans to make an imminent decision about whether they were going to buy.

Ticketmaster claims that the dynamic pricing mechanism is the best way to deter ticket touts, the logic being that any tout buying tickets in bulk would increase demand and therefore see his or her prices and margins slashed. The Guardian has already said that secondary ticketing platforms are advertising more than 4,500 tickets for this tour already, including from one tout who claims to have at least 33 tickets for Cardiff, Wembley and Murrayfield listed, for a combined price of over £26,000.

I am glad that this summer the Government announced a consultation on the secondary ticketing market, where tickets are sold in bulk by touts who often use bots to scout for tickets at face value and sell them well beyond the market value, but will the Minister set out the parameters and timescales for the work? When will it happen and what is it likely to include? He has now announced that the investigation will be widened to consider dynamic pricing and what happened in the Oasis situation, so can we have a reassurance that the eye will not be taken off the ball of the original consultation that he announced in the summer?

There are so many aspects at play. This method of resale is also the culprit for a large amount of money lost to fraud, with Lloyd’s estimating that £1 million was lost to scammers during Taylor Swift’s Eras tour alone. Will the Minister tell me whether the secondary market consultation will include conversations with digital search engines that are signposting customers into the hands of touts and not doing enough to get them direct to principal sales sites?

There is scope for an entire primary market review and for ticketing to be reviewed on a much wider scale. The Oasis episode has opened the eyes of fans to potential anti-competitiveness within the industry. As complaints about the ticketing process began to flood in, Oasis said it was their management and promoters who had agreed a dynamic pricing strategy with Ticketmaster. But, of course, their three tour promoters all have links to Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company and, in effect, they are all the same party. So that party is making money hand over fist through the system, which keeps everything under the Live Nation umbrella.

For a typical tour, a Live Nation subsidiary promoter might take 10% of the face value of a ticket. A service charge of perhaps a quarter of that face value will then be applied, and some of that money will be going to Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster. The venue will take a cut at this stage, which, in all likelihood, will be a Live Nation-owned venue, too, as it owns 28 festivals and venues UK-wide. The process is repeated at resale, if people go through Ticketmaster at a higher cost than before, leaving Live Nation with an even greater cut.

The Minister does not need to be a public intellectual to see that there is a real perverse incentive for Ticketmaster to see tickets in the hands of touts. He will know that the US Department of Justice has slapped Live Nation with a lawsuit, citing anti-competitive conduct, while it is now well established that the company has a near monopoly in the UK.

Dynamic pricing is quite an effective way of rewarding a near-monopoly, with no upper limit on ticket prices, meaning a greater cut for the parent company. The great sadness of all this is not only that the system is punishing the fans—in this case, those Oasis fans for whom the music was so totemic, so life changing back in the ‘90s—but that, to add insult to injury, there is no trickle down to the live music ecosystem, like the grassroots music venues that Oasis first played in while honing their skills, the venues that made them, such the Boardwalk in Manchester and King Tut’s in Glasgow.

Although Oasis have since announced further tour dates, tickets to new dates will be sold at face value via invitation-only ballot. I cannot help feeling that the fans who paid through the nose via dynamic pricing are going to feel very hard done by.

I encourage the Minister to look at ways to amplify fans’ voices within the live music ecosystem. He might start by responding to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report into grassroots music, which I have already mentioned. It was published in May. I know that we have had the small matter of a general election since then, but I would like to know when the response is likely to be forthcoming and whether the Government are minded to accept its recommendations. The recommendations include one for a fan-led review of music—something like the fan-led review of football that was led by my still friend, my former hon. Friend, the former Member for Chatham and Aylesford, Tracey Crouch—to look at how the music pyramid functions and how the money trickles down from the big players to those small venues and fledgling songwriters and artists.

The recommendations included a targeted VAT cut, which to grassroots venues would have represented a final hour of salvation in a sector that is widely accepted to be in crisis, and a live music levy, which would take a small proportion of the service fee from the pockets of the big venues and bring them right down to the struggling businesses at the grassroots. What is most pertinent to me about all this is that, while many of the 28 venues and festivals in which Live Nation owns a stake are flourishing, grassroots music venues are closing at a rate of two a week.

I am sure that the Minister is aware that, of the 34 music venues in which Oasis played on their first tour back in 1994, only 11 are still open today. And those venues are so crucial. They are absolutely fundamental to incubate our world-renowned talent. They are the R&D department for the music industry. They are a massive feeder into something that is fundamental to the UK economy and crucial to our soft power around the world. In a ticketing market gone wrong, there might have been a gram of comfort to some of the fans paying through the nose for their ticket if they knew that, in paying it, some of the money was protecting grassroots music venues in their communities and germinating the Oasis of the future.

I know that, like me, the Minister wants nothing more than to see our musical talent continue to thrill fans both at home and around the world, but behind every great act is a chance performance at a low-capacity venue that is struggling to keep the lights on, that is at financial breaking point, and that is a hair’s breadth away from closing its doors.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Minister.

Online Safety Bill

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I welcome the return of the Online Safety Bill from its exhaustive consideration in the other place. As the Minister knows, this vital legislation kicked off several years ago under the leadership of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), with the ambitious aim of making the UK the safest place in the world to go online. While other countries picked at the edges of that, we were the first place in the world to set ourselves such an ambitious task.

The legislation is mammoth in size and globally significant in scope. Its delivery has been long-winded and I am so pleased that we have got to where we are now. As one of the Ministers who carried the baton for this legislation for around 19 months, I understand the balance to be struck between freedom of speech campaigners, charities and the large pressures from the platforms to get this right.

[Sir William Cash]

I commend my hon. Friend for her remarks. May I point out that there is a provision in European legislation—I speak as Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee—called the data services protection arrangements? They have nothing to compare with what we have in the Bill. That demonstrates the fact that when we legislate for ourselves we can get it right. That is something people ought to bear in mind.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point that out. Much of the European legislation on this was taken from our own draft legislation, but has not gone anywhere near as far in the protections it offers.

We know that the internet is magnificent and life changing in so many ways, but that the dark corners present such a serious concern for children and scores of other vulnerable people. I associate myself with the comments of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) on the child protection campaigners who have worked so incredibly hard on this issue, particularly those who have experienced the unimaginable tragedy of losing children as a result of what they have seen in the online world. To turn an unspeakable tragedy of that nature into a campaign to save the lives of others is the ultimate thing to do, and they deserve our massive thanks and gratitude.

I am also grateful to so many of our noble colleagues who have shaped the Bill using their unique knowledge and expertise. I would like to mention a few of them and welcome the changes they brought, but also thank the Minister and the Government for accepting so many of the challenges they brought forward and adapting them into the Bill. We all owe a massive debt of gratitude to Baroness Kidron for her tireless campaign for children’s protections. A children’s safety stalwart and pioneer for many years, virtually no one else knows more about this vital issue. It is absolutely right that the cornerstone and priority of the Bill must be to protect children. The Minister mentioned that the statistics are absolutely horrible and disturbing. That is why it is important that the Secretary of State will now be able to require providers to retain data relating to child sexual exploitation and abuse, ensuring that law enforcement does not have one hand tied behind its back when it comes to investigating these terrible crimes.

I also welcome the commitment to the new powers given to Ofcom and the expectations of providers regarding access to content and information in the terrible event of the death of a child. The tragic suicide of Molly Russell, the long and valiant battle of her dad, Ian, to get access to the social media content that played such a key role in it, and the delay that brought to the inquest, is the only example we need of why this is absolutely the right thing to do. I know Baroness Kidron played a big part in that, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid).

I am still concerned that there are not enough protections for vulnerable adults or for when people reach the cliff-edge of the age of 18. People of all ages need protection from extremely harmful content online. I am still not 100% convinced that user empowerment tools will provide that, but I look forward to being proved wrong.

I welcome the news that Ofcom is now required to produce guidance setting out how companies can tackle online violence against women and girls and demonstrate best practice. I am thankful to the former Equalities Minister, Baroness Morgan of Cotes, for her work on that. It is a vital piece of the puzzle that was missing from the original Bill, which did not specifically mention women or girls at all as far as I can remember.

It is important to stay faithful to the original thread of the Bill. To futureproof it, it has to be about systems and processes, rather than specific threats, but the simple fact is that the online world is so much more hostile for women. For black women, it is even worse. Illegal activity such as stalking and harassment is a daily occurrence for so many women and girls online. Over one in 10 women in England have experienced online violence and three in 10 have witnessed it. We also know that women and girls are disproportionately affected by the abuse of intimate images and the sharing of deepfakes, so it is welcome that those will become an offence. I also welcome that controlling and coercive behaviour, which has been made a recognised offence in real life, will now be listed as a priority offence online. That is something else the Government should take pride in.

I thank Baroness Merron for bringing animal welfare into the scope of the Bill. All in-scope platforms will have proactive duties to tackle content amounting to the offence of causing unnecessary suffering of animals. I thank Ministers for taking that on board. Anyone who victimises beings smaller and weaker than themselves, whether children or animals, is the most despicable kind of coward. It shows the level of depravity in parts of the online world that the act of hurting animals for pleasure is even a thing. A recent BBC story uncovered the torture of baby monkeys in Indonesia. The fact that individuals in the UK and the US are profiting from that, and that it was shared on platforms like Facebook is horrifying.

In the brief time left available to me, I must admit to still being a bit confused over the Government’s stance on end-to-end encryption. It sounds like the Minister has acknowledged that there is no sufficiently accurate and privacy-preserving technology currently in existence, and that the last resort power would only come into effect once the technology was there. Technically, that means the Government have not moved on the requirement of Ofcom to use last resort powers. Many security experts believe it could be many years before any such technology is developed, if ever, and that worries me. I am, of course, very supportive of protecting user privacy, but it is also fundamentally right that terrorism or child sexual exploitation rings should not be able to proliferate unhindered on these channels. The right to privacy must be trumped by the need to stop events that could lead to mass death and the harm of innocent adults and children. As my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said, that is also against their terms of service. I would therefore welcome it if the Minister were to make a couple of comments on that.

I also welcome the changes brought forward by Baroness Morgan of Cotes on the categorisation of harm. I, too, have been one of the long-standing voices over successive stages of the Bill saying that a platform’s size should not be the only measure of harm. Clearly, massive platforms, by definition of their reach, have huge potential to spread harmful content, but we know that online platforms can go viral overnight. We know there are some small but incredibly pernicious platforms out there. Surely the harmful content on a site should be the definer of how harmful it is, not just its size. I welcome the increased flexibility for the Secretary of State to set a threshold based on the number of users, or the functionality offered, or both. I would love to know a little more about how that would work in practice.

We were the first country in the world to set out the ambitious target of comprehensive online safety legislation. Since then, so much time has passed. Other countries and the EU have legislated while we have refined and in the meantime so much harm has been able to proliferate. We now need to get this done. We are so close to getting this legislation over the finish line. Can the Minister assure me that we are sending out a very clear message to providers that they must start their work now? They must not necessarily wait for this legislation to be in place because people are suffering while the delays happen.

I put on record my thanks to Members of this House and the other place who have worked so hard to get the legislation into such a great state, and to Ministers who have listened very carefully to all their suggestions and expertise. Finally, I put on record my thanks to the incredible Government officials. I was responsible for shepherding the Bill for a mere 19 months. It nearly finished me off, but some officials have been involved in it right from the beginning. They deserve our enormous gratitude for everything they have done.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Julia Lopez]

I appreciate that a number of cases recently have caused concern; I am happy to take those up with the Home Office, including the case of Trigger Cut. I know there was also an issue in relation to the Khmelnitsky Orchestra from Ukraine, which was unblocked with help from ambassadors. There are creative routes to come here, but if there are any frictions, my Department is eager and happy to resolve them.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

Touring musicians from overseas and our home-grown talent need venues in which to perform, yet many brilliant grassroots music venues up and down the country are really struggling. They are so important because they are effectively the research and development department of our music industry, which is our global superpower. The cultural recovery fund enabled many of those venues to survive, but how will we ensure that they are not destroyed by the cost of living crisis?

[Julia Lopez]

My hon. Friend has tremendous passion and expertise in this area and I know that, like me, she recently met Mark Davyd from the Music Venue Trust, a grassroots music venue organisation. I discussed with him a range of issues facing the sector, including energy costs and ticketing, and various proposals that involve both Government and the private sector. We are exploring how we can help those critical grassroots music venues to survive because, as my hon. Friend recognises, they are vital to the development of talent in our wider music industry.