Online Harm: Child Protection

Chris Vince Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Across the country, the dangerous synthetic drug Spice is being brazenly marketed to children over social media. Many vulnerable young people believe that they are buying the less harmful, though still illegal, drug THC only to discover, too late, that what they have been sold is a far more potent and unpredictable substance. In schools, the consequences are already visible. One in six vapes confiscated from pupils now contains Spice—one in six! If we walk through parts of our towns and cities, we see the human cost: Spice users slumped in doorways, trapped in a semi-conscious state, stripped of dignity and control. How terrifying it is that this drug is no longer confined to our streets and prisons, and has entered our classrooms.

Children are collapsing in school corridors. Some are rushed to intensive care and others begin a battle with addiction that may follow them for life. Spice is not simply another illegal drug. Its extreme potency and addictive grip is a fast track to exploitation and criminality. It is always a tragedy when someone falls victim to substance abuse, but when it is an uninformed child who has been misled and targeted over social media, it is not just tragic; it is a profound failure to protect.

I have raised the issue in the House and with this Government repeatedly over the past year and a half, but in that time the situation facing vulnerable children has not improved, but deteriorated. Gone are the days when a young person had to meet a dealer in a dark alley to buy drugs. Today, a child can purchase them from their bedroom, with a few taps on a phone. The marketplace has moved online and our children are paying the price. But do not just take my word for it. The Metropolitan police have warned about children accessing illicit vapes through social media platforms, such as Snapchat and Telegram. A recent BBC investigation revealed how effortlessly an illegal vape laced with Spice can be purchased over Snapchat.

This is not a few small-scale individuals. We are dealing with a global, industrial supply chain, with major chemical suppliers in China providing materials to markets in the UK, the European Union, the United States and Gulf states. Researchers at the University of Bath have identified nearly 10,000 accounts involved in the supply and distribution of Spice, many using TikTok to advertise and communicate. I have met a number of Ministers about this issue, most recently the Minister for Online Safety, who is in his place. I know he understands the scale of the problem and is sympathetic to our concerns, but words are not enough: we need action.

Selling drugs is already a priority offence under the Online Safety Act, and Ofcom has a statutory duty to enforce that. Yet despite clear, sustained evidence that these substances are being openly advertised and sold online, we have not seen the decisive enforcement that the law requires. Instead, the burden is falling on members of the public to report these accounts, effectively asking individual citizens to do the regulator’s job for them.

What happens when an account is removed? Within hours, a near identical profile reappears. An account named “Spice Sales 1” is reported and taken down, only to resurface as “Spice Sales 2”, then “Spice Sales 3” and so on. The name changes slightly, the branding shifts marginally, but the criminality remains the same. This revolving door of reactive takedowns is not a strategy—it is an admission that the current system is not working. If a shop in Bath were openly selling drugs through its front window, the police would intervene immediately. There would be no hesitation and no suggestion that the public should simply keep reporting it. So why, when the shopfront is digital and when the customers are children, are we not treating this with the same seriousness? It is time that we confronted this reality. Social media companies have developed incredibly sophisticated algorithms, as we have already heard this afternoon, that are capable of targeting advertisements to individuals with remarkable precision. They know what we watch, what we like and what we linger on, so it cannot be beyond their capability to deploy artificial intelligence to detect and prevent the sale of illegal drugs on their platforms.

Active detection must replace endless reactive reporting. The technology and resources exist, and the evidence is overwhelming; what is missing is political will and enforcement. It is time to hold social media companies to account, because the safety of our children demands nothing less.

[Chris Vince]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I was about to finish, but yes, I will.

[Chris Vince]

This is a genuinely friendly intervention. I am raising this point because I know that the hon. Member does a lot to champion and support people with eating disorders. I am completely changing the subject, but does she think that the rise of social media and online platforms has had an increased impact on people with eating disorders?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I could go on forever about online harm, particularly with regard to eating disorders. It is Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and we will be having a debate on that. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will attend that debate, as he can then raise that point again.

Today I am talking about spice and the responsibility of social media platforms and how we protect children. I therefore support the provision to bring in a Bill on protecting children from online harms, as proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson). As I have said before, it is time for action; we can no longer dither and delay. I do not accept all the debates saying, “Oh! Process this, that and the other.” If we really mean it and are really serious about this issue, we need to act now. I am pleased that my party is prepared to act and show the public that we want change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will constrain my comments to three themes, and I want to start with policy. This has been a very interesting and wide-ranging debate. We have heard from many speakers across the House who have articulated the heartfelt and thoughtful concerns that all of us have about the pervasive way in which social media can influence our children, our friends, our families and young people in our society. I am the parent of a 15-year-old. I know what that battle is like—hearing the chirp of Snapchat going off every few seconds, it sounds like, some weekends, as my daughter and her friends communicate in the modern way, and trying to understand what she is doing on Roblox, the games she is playing, who she might be interacting with and the other platforms that, frankly, are alien to me, as someone who is past the age when that stuff makes much sense or is of interest.

The simple answer is to say, “We should ban it all—just lock them all away until they’re 16, and it will all be fine.” I worry about my daughter walking down the street—I worry about who she is going to meet when she is walking to school and her interactions in the physical world—but simply saying, “Right, you’re staying in your bedroom until you’re 35”, which we discuss on occasion, is not a solution to those real-world problems. Part of it is about how we help young people to understand the misinformation and disinformation that they are coming across, and it is also about the way in which we regulate the content that platforms share.

The part that has been missed today, in the many wonderful contributions from Members across the House, is that this is about not just the platforms that share the content but the creators who make that content in the first place—the people who go online to sow the seeds of hate and division: the homophobic content, the Islamophobic content, the antisemitic content that all too often is passed off as criticism of the Israeli Government, and the many far-right commentators in this country who put out toxic masculine culture commentary as though it is a reasoned point of debate. I understand what Conservative Members say about free speech, but we have always been a country and a society where it is not consequence-free speech—there are consequences to the things we say and the actions we take, and that is how we come to understand what the social norms are. We seem to have abdicated our responsibility for that in the online world.

I turn to my second point. The 15-year-old I mentioned in an intervention earlier was, in fact, my daughter, who has now given me permission to out her in that sense. The facilities that I enjoyed when I was in my teens simply do not exist any more. My daughter’s world is as much her online friends and sphere of activity as it is the physical world in which we live. Disconnecting people from that because we think it is unsafe does a disservice to them. I am also slightly worried about the impact of the fact that we are soon to legislate, I understand and hope, on giving 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote—a policy that I think will mainly get cross-party support.

I like to think that the political literature that I push through letterboxes in my constituency is of such compelling interest that every young person will snatch it from the letterbox, read it and think, “That is why I am going to vote for Gareth at the next election.” I am sure that the Liberal Democrats’ Focus leaflets have the same impact on young people in their constituencies. The reality is, however, that young people do not read the direct mail that we send out. They do not read our leaflets, or at least not as much as they should. Many young people derive their information, news and views from social media. If we say, “You know what? We are going to cut it off”, where will we force those young people to go?

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have not mentioned Harlow yet today, so I feel that I should. When I spoke to some young people at Mark Hall Academy in my constituency of Harlow—there we are, I have done it—about the potential social media ban, I was interested to hear what they had to say. They said, “We don’t care about Facebook”—because only old people like us use Facebook—but they did not want us to ban platforms like WhatsApp, which I had not thought of as being social media, although I suppose it is. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important for young people’s voices to be heard during the Government’s consultation, so that we can understand their views on this issue?

[Gareth Snell]

Absolutely. I understand that my hon. Friend was a teacher in a previous career.

When I think of social media, I think of my Twitter account, which has been dormant for years; my Facebook account, which I use for the clips that all of us in this place are obliged to put out and then deal with the comments beneath them; and my WhatsApp, which it seems that every political party has to run with, because without it we would all stop talking to each other. My daughter would think of her Snapchat account. I too now have a Snapchat account with just one friend—her—and we use that to communicate when I am here and she is at home. It means that I get voice notes and little videos from her, and it is how we keep our weekend conversations going during the week.

We must ask ourselves where we draw the line. Members have mentioned access to YouTube. My daughter will freely use YouTube to help her with her homework. She goes to an all-iPad school, so much of the homework is set on iPads. Apparently the subject of screentime will form part of the consultation, and that should be genuinely considered. Will young people be told, “You cannot use your phone—it is the worst possible thing to have—but here is an iPad to look at for six hours a day, and if you get stuck on question 6, go to YouTube video 4 and follow the methodology”? On one hand we are sending one message, and on the other is something that is inconsistent with that approach. Let us be honest: the first job that all the children and young people we are talking about will have is going to be based on the use of some form of AI assistance, such as Copilot, and will depend almost entirely on the use of technology. We are going to have to think about how we integrate that sort of future-proofing into whatever regulation we produce.

My final point is about procedure. I am very sorry to return to that subject, because this has been an excellent debate. I went to the Public Bill Office—there is no Bill that is referenced in the motion. It is completely blank. I understand that the Liberal Democrats intend, if the motion is passed, to engage in a consensus-based process of writing a Bill in the next two weeks that we can debate and pass in one day. It is clear from what we have heard today—from the hon. Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers), who spoke so eloquently about the perils of eating disorders, from the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), who talked about the ability to sell drugs online, and from those on the Government Benches, including my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who talked about the way in which young people interact—that, as I said earlier, this will be a complex piece of legislation.

The idea that we can complete a Second Reading debate in two hours and the full Committee and Third Reading stages in two hours, on a single day, which will include the discussion of amendments, is simply impractical. I genuinely hope that the content of today’s debate will lead to better legislation, as part of the national consultation that the Ministers are leading, but I think that doing this in such a truncated way, through a single motion and on a single day, will lead to bad legislation.