Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Debate between Damian Hinds and Chris Bryant

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

There are four or five different areas where the legislation is not sufficient for the task. Both codes require parliamentary approval, but that process will happen in the next few weeks, with the powers coming into effect this spring. As a Government, we have to decide whether it is better to make that happen now and bed it in, or say that we will have another piece of legislation. I am not allowed to make commitments on behalf of the Government, but I would be absolutely amazed if they did not bring forward further legislation in this field in the next few years. All these issues—and the others that will come along—will definitely need to be addressed, not least because, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe said at the beginning of the debate, we need to make sure that the legislation is up to date.

My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) talked about the burden of proof, and he is quite right. Of course there should not be a one-way burden of proof. We have to bear in mind two things about proof—perhaps evidence is a better word, because it is not about criminality; it is about evidence-based policy. The first is that, as everybody has said, causation is not correlation. I apologise for the slightly flippant way of putting this, but Marathon became Snickers at the same time as Mrs Thatcher gave way to John Major. I am not aware of any causal relationship between those two events. Many people understand that, but it is often very difficult to weed out what is causation and what is correlation in a specific set of events. For instance, we have all laid out the problems in relation to mental health for children, but only one Member mentioned covid. I would argue that covid is quite a significant player. It was shocking that we strove hard as a Parliament to open pubs again before we opened schools, and that children, who were at the least risk, bore the heaviest burden and that sacrifice on behalf of others. I think we need to factor that in.

The second point is something that I have campaigned on for quite a long time: acquired brain injury. Children from poorer backgrounds are four times more likely to suffer a brain injury under the age of five than kids from wealthier backgrounds, and again in their teenage years. Acquired brain injury in schools is barely recognised. Some schools respond to it remarkably well, but it is likely that there are somewhere between one and three children with a brain injury in every single primary class in this land. Nobody has yet done sufficient work on how much that has contributed to the mental health problems that children have today. We certainly know that the use of phones and screens after brain injury is a significant added factor, but we need to look at all the factors that affect the mental health of children to ensure that we target the specific things that really will work in a combination of policy changes.

[Damian Hinds]

The Minister speaks with a great deal of knowledge and authority, particularly on acquired brain injury, but I want to come back to the covid point. Obviously, a Westminster Hall debate is not the place to establish correlation versus causality in any sense. However, if we look at a graph of what has happened with children’s and young people’s mental ill health in this country, France, Germany and the United States, while the data are not perfectly comparable, the shape of the line is not consistent with the hypothesis that it is mainly the result of covid. It predates covid, and it carries on going up afterwards.

[Chris Bryant]

I am sorry if I indicated that it was mainly covid; I was not trying to say that at all. I am simply saying that that is one factor, and there may be many others—social factors, personal factors and the structure of education. One could argue, as one of my hon. Friends did, that there are other things that kids could do in society. We might, for instance, want to intervene by having a creative education option. We hardly have a youth service in most of the country any more.

[Damian Hinds]

The Minister would be making perfectly adequate points if we were talking only about this country. We could make all sorts of points about what Government policy was and what happened to Sure Start, the curriculum and youth clubs, but those things did not happen in France, Germany or the United States.

[Chris Bryant]

I have not seen any of the statistics for what has happened to youth services and the cultural education offer in schools in France and other countries.

[Damian Hinds]

I think the Minister takes my point.

[Chris Bryant]

No, I do not. I am trying to make a very simple point: many factors have contributed to the mental health problems that many young people have, and social media is undoubtedly one. The question is, how do we rate and address all those different factors? As the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) said, we must address this from a public health angle, and that is essential. But then, when we have the whole bag of evidence, rather than just individual bits of evidence, the question is, what is the most useful intervention that we can make?

I want to come on to the definition issues. Several Members raised the issue of what social media is. That is partially addressed by the Online Safety Act, but we may want to go further. As to the reason why the previous Government landed on 13 rather than 16—which was an option available to them—the consultation at the time came back with 13. It is interesting that Members referred to content availability and to there being two ages in the UK that are generally reckoned to be part of the age of majority: 16 and 18. Actually, for film classification, it is 12 and 15. There is an argument for saying that we ought to look at film classification because it is long established and—although the issues are different in many regards—some of them are similar. We might want to learn from that—I say this from my Department for Culture, Media and Sport angle—to inform the debate on this matter.

On enforcement, several Members referred to the fact that there is no point in just changing the law; if we do that but have no form of enforcement, that is worse than useless. That is one of the Government’s anxieties, and we need to make sure that the enforcement process works properly. I take the point that there are two areas where Ofcom feels it is unable to act, because the law does not allow it to do so, and we will need to look at that. That is why we are keen to get to the moment in April when the two codes will be voted on in Parliament. We will then make sure that Ofcom has not just the powers but the ability to enforce. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs Russell) said, Ofcom has the power to fine up to £18 million, or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue in the relevant year, which could be a substantial amount, but it needs to ensure it is in a legally effective position to do so.

My final point is that the Secretary of State has made it clear that nothing is off the table. We are keen to act in this space. The question is, how do we act most proportionately and effectively in a way that tackles the real problem? Some of that is about how the evidence stacks up, and some of it is about when the right time to legislate is. But, as I said earlier, I do not think for a single instant that this debate or the Online Safety Act will be the end of the story. I would be amazed if there were not further legislation, in some shape or other, in this field in the next two or three years.

With that, I once again thank Kim Campbell for bringing the petition to us, and I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe for introducing the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee.