Online Harms Consultation

Clive Efford Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Oliver Dowden]

I pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend and other former Culture Secretaries represented in the House, all of whom have played a decisive role in helping to shape this important legislation. My right hon. and learned Friend rightly raises the point about smaller platforms. What we have sought to do with these proposals is to exclude very small enterprises—for example, a cheese retailer that allows its customers to leave comments on its site. Strictly speaking, that is user-generated material, but I think we would all agree that we would not want that to be within scope. However, at the same time, some smaller sites can be used as a back route— for example, for paedophiles to exchange information. We will design the legislation proportionately so that we can upscale the regulation in those sorts of cases.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab) [V]]

I welcome the legislation as far as it goes, and agree with the Secretary of State that it is landmark legislation, rather like the Gambling Act 2005, which was put through the House by the previous Labour Government. I remind him that it was largely the things that were not covered by that legislation that came back to be the most challenging issues to confront us all. Given that, let me ask the Secretary of State about the scope of the legislation: will it cover online harms such as the targeted advertising of gambling at young people, gambling through social media or even loot boxes in online gaming, whereby young people are asked to pay for boxes of which they do not know the content?

[Oliver Dowden]

As the hon. Gentleman may know, we have already issued a call for evidence in respect of loot boxes, and will take appropriate action in response. Many of the issues that he has raised are covered by our call for evidence on gambling. The scope of this legislation will cover any platform that allows self-generated content to be on it; to the extent that gambling websites have user-generated content on them, they will fall within the scope of this legislation, potentially.