Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Our children’s use of phones and social media give us many things to worry about, but broadly speaking they are grouped into three categories.

The first is about content, going from pornography and violence and the insidious effects of curated lives, influencers and celebs on our children and their sense of self-worth, their body image and so on through to dodgy news and views propagated across the internet not by worth, let alone veracity, but by engagement and likes. All of those things have vortexes that children can get sucked deeper and deeper into.

The second is about contact. Contact includes, in the worst cases, child abuse and the generation of child sexual abuse material, and goes through to, at a lower level, contact that can be from other children, such as what we call in this House cyber-bullying, although no child ever uses that phrase; they just talk about people being very mean to each other online.

The third is about the sheer amount of children’s time that gets sucked into these activities. It is the compounding factor, because it is the thing that makes the other two things, content and contact, worse and more risky. It also has an effect on children’s sleep, on their concentration and even on their physical development, and it crowds out the other things that we want children to be doing and that children themselves want to be doing, when they do actually do them. If we ever do get a child away from their phone for a full weekend, they talk about how wonderful the experience was with their friends.

The Online Safety Act 2023 did some good things on content and on contact. There was more to do, but it made some good progress. We have a lot more to do, in particular on the topic of time and the addictiveness of social media, and that is where I think the work of the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) has been incredibly valuable. I commend him on all his work in the lead up to this point and his use of convening power to bring together so many individuals and organisations. Those conversations, some of which I had the opportunity to attend, covered a huge range. Obviously the Bill we have in front of us today is, shall we say, somewhat thinner than the Bill envisaged.

[Kit Malthouse]

I also attended events that the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington pulled together. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the strong characteristic that came out of all of them was deep and profound anger among parents about what has been allowed to develop?

[Damian Hinds]

I think that is right. The other thing I was struck by in some of the sessions was the great unity of views. Whether it was trade unions, charities, parent groups, doctors or parents, there was a great commonality of view about what needed to be done.

I understand what happens sometimes with private Members’ Bills and the need to make progress and to have Government support, but I say to the Government that this is a huge missed opportunity. If the Minister looks behind him, he will see all his colleagues who have rearranged their Fridays and rearranged their surgeries and all their appointments because they believe in this subject. He should heed the list that his hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington read out of all the organisations that came together in support of action in this area. It is so worth doing, and we have made good progress with the Online Safety Act, but there is further to go.

There are things we can do with a private Member’s Bill that it is harder sometimes to do with Government legislation, because of the party political controversies that come in. This is a missed opportunity, because this may well be the only private Member’s Bill with a good chance of success in this area, being at the top of the ballot, in this entire Parliament.

The Bill as drafted is unlikely to require this House to divide, because there is not much in it that anyone could disagree on. I will, if I may, focus my comments on the things that the Bill envisages, such as the CMO’s advice for parents on the use of smartphones and social media, and the plan for research that the Secretary of State will prepare on the effect of the use of social media on children and the appropriateness and effectiveness of the so-called digital age of consent. I will say one very simple thing to the Minister about that research: the evidence is not perfect today; it will not be perfect in one year; it will never, ever be perfect. If we hang around waiting for perfect evidence, we will never act in the way that we should. Why is it not perfect? Because this is a phenomenon that has happened across the entire world at the same time. There is no control group.

Given that this is such a huge topic, the studies that there are, which try to narrow it down to something manageable, tend to end up looking at either Facebook or Twitter, neither of which is particularly relevant for teenagers. When we have proxy studies, they are generally inadequate. For phone use in schools, studies tend to look at a school that has a phone ban and a school that does not. That is a totally invalid scientific comparison, because there could be all sorts of other things going on, and the sort of school that is likely to do well in GCSEs is also likely to bring in a phone ban, so we cannot prove the direction of causality.

People will also tell us that there has not been enough time, because the technology is constantly developing. It may have been around for 20 years or so, but the current version of it has only been around for 18 months, so there has not been time to say conclusively what the effects are. None of that is about to change. The evidence will continue to be imperfect.

However, the evidence that we do have is pretty clear. We know, as the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who chairs the Education Committee, mentioned, that there can be some benefit from relatively small amounts of screen time. The 2019 programme for international student assessment—PISA —study covered this in some detail, looking at multiple countries. It talked about a “Goldilocks” effect, whereby about an hour of screen time a day seemed to be correlated with increased wellbeing. But the same study found that in almost every country studied, with the fascinating exception of the Dominican Republic, high levels of internet usage were associated with lower levels of life satisfaction. There are lots of other studies, which colleagues have referred to, that look at happiness, quality of relationships, eyesight, sleep, concentration and so on.

Then there is the rising prevalence of mental ill health in young people. Often, when people look at the numbers on mental ill health, particularly in teenagers, they reach immediately for their preferred explanation for why teenagers are having these difficulties, and sometimes it gets quite political. It is important to note that the rise in teenage mental ill health is not a uniquely British phenomenon. On the two main measures of mental wellbeing used in the 2021 UNICEF-Gallup “Changing Childhood” study—“How often do you experience feeling worried, nervous or anxious?” and “How often do you experience feeling depressed or having little interest in doing things?”—the UK was broadly in line with the average of 21 countries, including France, Germany and the US. Actually, it was slightly better on most of the measures.

There are ample other studies from around the world, including the World Health Organisation’s multi-country “Health Behaviour in School-aged Children” study, France’s EDC—I will not attempt the language—study, which is quite a long time series, and the shorter time series in the United States, “Trends in Mental Wellbeing”. The best study of all is the NHS’s “Mental Health of Children and Young People in England”. I say in passing to the Minister that I do not think we have yet had a commitment from the Department of Health and Social Care to carry on with that time series. It is incredibly valuable, and that is a relatively simple thing that the Government could do.

I have said that the rise in teenage mental ill health is not a uniquely British phenomenon. It is also not only about covid. A lot of the studies in recent years have set out to answer the question, “What happened to children’s mental health during covid?” That is a perfectly legitimate question, but if we look at the shape of the curve, it looks very unlikely that it started in covid, and in the NHS study, it carries on growing long after covid, up until the most recent wave.

The Minister said this in a debate in Westminster Hall the other day, and he is right that it is entirely invalid to infer causality from correlation, but the Bradford Hill criteria, which his hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington mentioned, are relevant, particularly the criteria of consistency, strength, plausibility, coherence and analogy, as well as temporality. In any event, it seems odd that we allow something to happen to our children because we cannot 100% prove that it causes harm, rather than because we can prove that it is safe. That is not the way in which we deal with children’s toys, food or medicine.

I turn the question around and say to people who query the direction of causality: with something like self-harm, are you honestly trying to tell me that incidents of self-harm in our country are nothing to do with the prevalence and normalisation of imagery around self-harm on social media? As I say, I worry that if we continue to seek perfect information, we simply will not act as we should. I have pages more to say, but I will not say them, because I know that many colleagues wish to speak.