Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

1. What progress her Department has made on expanding broadband coverage in rural areas.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

10. What progress her Department has made on expanding broadband coverage in rural areas.

[The Minister of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Julia Lopez)]

I wish to echo your words about the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s important work, Mr Speaker.

We are investing £5 billion through Project Gigabit to deliver lightning-fast broadband to hard-to-reach areas across our country. Last week, we announced that thousands of people living in rural Cornwall will benefit from a £36 million contract. We have now awarded six such contracts, covering up to 681,000 premises. More procurements are in the pipeline and we have also upped our voucher scheme so that more premises can benefit.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. Obviously, I am delighted that last week we secured nearly £19 million from the levelling-up fund for Shrewsbury town centre, but we will never really have levelling up across the whole of the United Kingdom unless rural parts of our constituencies have broadband coverage commensurate with metropolitan areas in coverage and speed. What is she doing specifically to make sure that improvements are made in the county of Shropshire?

[Julia Lopez]

My hon. Friend is right to talk about the importance of digital connectivity to the whole levelling-up agenda, which is why we are prioritising our procurement to some of the really tough-to-reach parts of the country that have been poorly served by broadband previously. I know that he has been campaigning hard on these issues since 2015. He has good superfast coverage now in his constituency, but I appreciate that gigabit is not where it should be in his county. I am pleased to say that our Mid West Shropshire procurement is going to be awarded in April to June this year, and I hope that his constituents will benefit from that.

Online Safety Bill

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Dorries]

We have already done that—it is already in the Bill.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Ms Dorries]

No, I have to continue.

Not only will the Bill protect journalistic content, democratic content and democratic free speech, but if one of the tech companies wanted to take down journalistic content, the Bill includes a right of appeal for journalists, which currently does not exist. We are doing further work on that to ensure that content remains online while the appeal takes place. The appeal process has to be robust and consistent across the board for all the appeals that take place. We have already done more work on that issue in this version of the Bill and we are looking to do more as we move forward.

As I have said, we will not allow the web to be a hiding place or safe space for criminals and when illegal content does slip through the net—such as child sex abuse and terrorist content— online platforms will need to have in place effective systems and processes to quickly identify that illegal content and remove it from their sites.

The third measure will force the largest social media platforms to enforce their own bans on racism, misogyny, antisemitism, pile-ons and all the other unacceptable behaviours. In other words, we are asking the largest platforms to do what they say they will do, just as happens with all good consumer-protection measures in any other industry. Should platforms fail in any of their basic responsibilities, Ofcom will be empowered to pursue a range of actions against them, depending on the situation, and, if necessary, to bring down upon them the full weight of the law. Such action includes searching platforms’ premises and confiscating their equipment; imposing huge fines of up to 10% of their global turnover; pursuing criminal sanctions against senior managers who fail to co-operate; and, if necessary, blocking their sites in the UK.

We know that tech companies can act very quickly when they want to. Last year, when an investigation revealed that Pornhub allowed child sexual exploitation and abuse imagery to be uploaded to its platform, Mastercard and Visa blocked the use of their cards on the site. Lo and behold, threatened with the prospect of losing a huge chunk of its profit, Pornhub suddenly removed nearly 10 million child sexual exploitation videos from its site overnight. These companies have the tools but, unfortunately, as they have shown time and again, they need to be forced to use them. That is exactly what the Bill will do.

Before I move on, let me point out something very important: this is not the same Bill as the one published in draft form last year. I know that Members throughout the House are as passionate as I am about getting this legislation right, and I had lots of constructive feedback on the draft version of the Bill. I have listened carefully to all that Members have had to say throughout the Bill’s process, including by taking into account the detailed feedback from the Joint Committee, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee and the Petitions Committee. They have spent many hours considering every part of the Bill, and I am extremely grateful for their dedication and thorough recommendations on how the legislation could be improved.

As a result of that feedback process, over the past three months or so I have strengthened the legislation in a number of important ways. There were calls for cyber-flashing to be included; cyber-flashing is now in the Bill. There were calls to ensure that the legislation covered all commercial pornography sites; in fact, we have expanded the Bill’s scope to include every kind of provider of pornography. There were concerns about anonymity, so we have strengthened the Bill so that it now requires the biggest tech platforms to offer verification and empowerment tools for adult users, allowing people to block anonymous trolls from the beginning.

I know that countless MPs are deeply concerned about how online fraud—particularly scam ads—has proliferated over the past few years. Under the new version of the Bill, the largest and highest-risk companies—those that stand to make the most profit—must tackle scam ads that appear on their services.

We have expanded the list of priority offences named on the face of the legislation to include not just terrorism and child abuse imagery but revenge porn, fraud, hate crime, encouraging and assisting suicide, and organised immigration crime, among other offences.

If anyone doubted our appetite to go after Silicon Valley executives who do not co-operate with Ofcom, they will see that we have strengthened the Bill so that the criminal sanctions for senior managers will now come into effect as soon as possible after Royal Assent— I am talking weeks, not years. We have expanded the things for which those senior managers will be criminally liable to cover falsifying data, destroying data and obstructing Ofcom’s access to their premises.

In addition to the regulatory framework in the Bill that I have described, we are creating three new criminal offences. While the regulatory framework is focused on holding companies to account, the criminal offences will be focused on individuals and the way people use and abuse online communications. Recommended by the Law Commission, the offences will address coercive and controlling behaviour by domestic abusers; threats to rape, kill or inflict other physical violence; and the sharing of dangerous disinformation deliberately to inflict harm.

This is a new, stronger Online Safety Bill. It is the most important piece of legislation that I have ever worked on and it has been a huge team effort to get here. I am confident that we have produced something that will protect children and the most vulnerable members of society while being flexible and adaptable enough to meet the challenges of the future.

Let me make something clear in relation to freedom of speech. Anyone who has actually read the Bill will recognise that its defining focus is the tackling of serious harm, not the curtailing of free speech or the prevention of adults from being upset or offended by something they have seen online. In fact, along with countless others throughout the House, I am seriously concerned about the power that big tech has amassed over the past two decades and the huge influence that Silicon Valley now wields over public debate.

We in this place are not the arbiters of free speech. We have left it to unelected tech executives on the west coast to police themselves. They decide who is and who is not allowed on the internet. They decide whose voice should be heard and whose should be silenced—whose content is allowed up and what should be taken down. Too often, their decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent. We are left, then, with a situation in which the president of the United States can be banned by Twitter while the Taliban is not; in which talkRADIO can be banned by YouTube for 12 hours; in which an Oxford academic, Carl Heneghan, can be banned by Twitter; or in which an article in The Mail on Sunday can be plastered with a “fake news” label—all because they dared to challenge the west coast consensus or to express opinions that Silicon Valley does not like.

It is, then, vital that the Bill contains strong protections for free speech and for journalistic content. For the first time, under this legislation all users will have an official right to appeal if they feel their content has been unfairly removed. Platforms will have to explain themselves properly if they remove content and will have special new duties to protect journalistic content and democratically important content. They will have to keep those new duties in mind whenever they set their terms and conditions or moderate any content on their sites. I emphasise that the protections are new. The new criminal offences update section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which were so broad that they interfered with free speech while failing to address seriously harmful consequences.

Without the Bill, social media companies would be free to continue to arbitrarily silence or cancel those with whom they do not agree, without any need for explanation or justification. That situation should be intolerable for anyone who values free speech. For those who quite obviously have not read the Bill and say that it concedes power to big tech companies, I have this to say: those big tech companies have all the power in the world that they could possibly want, right now. How much more power could we possibly concede?

That brings me to my final point. We now face two clear options. We could choose not to act and leave big tech to continue to regulate itself and mark its own homework, as it has been doing for years with predictable results. We have already seen that too often, without the right incentives, tech companies will not do what is needed to protect their users. Too often, their claims about taking steps to fix things are not backed up by genuine actions.

I can give countless examples from the past two months alone of tech not taking online harm and abuse seriously, wilfully promoting harmful algorithms or putting profit before people. A recent BBC investigation showed that women’s intimate pictures were being shared across the platform Telegram to harass, shame and blackmail women. The BBC reported 100 images to Telegram as pornography, but 96 were still accessible a month later. Tech did not act.

Twitter took six days to suspend the account of rapper Wiley after his disgusting two-day antisemitic rant. Just last week, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate said that it had reported 253 accounts to Instagram as part of an investigation into misogynistic abuse on the platform, but almost 90% remained active a month later. Again, tech did not act.

Remember: we have been debating these issues for years. They were the subject of one of my first meetings in this place in 2005. During that time, things have got worse, not better. If we choose the path of inaction, it will be on us to explain to our constituents why we did nothing to protect their children from preventable risks, such as grooming, pornography, suicide content or cyber-bullying. To those who say protecting children is the responsibility of parents, not the job of the state, I would quote the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, one of the staunchest defenders of individual freedom. He wrote in “On Liberty” that the role of the state was to fulfil the responsibility of the parent in order to protect a child where a parent could not. If we choose not to act, in the years to come we will no doubt ask ourselves why we did not act to impose fundamental online protections.

However, we have another option. We can pass this Bill and take huge steps towards tackling some of the most serious forms of online harm: child abuse, terrorism, harassment, death threats, and content that is harming children across the UK today. We could do what John Stuart Mill wrote was the core duty of Government. The right to self-determination is not unlimited. An action that results in doing harm to another is not only wrong, but wrong enough that the state can intervene to prevent that harm from occurring. We do that in every other part of our life. We erect streetlamps to make our cities and towns safer. We put speed limits on our roads and make seatbelts compulsory. We make small but necessary changes to protect people from grievous harm. Now it is time to bring in some fundamental protections online.

We have the legislation ready right now in the form of the Online Safety Bill. All we have to do is pass it. I am proud to commend the Bill to the House.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)]

What recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the Crown Prosecution Service in tackling fraud cases.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

What recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the Crown Prosecution Service in tackling fraud cases.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Attorney General]

We are aware that cyber-criminals and fraudsters are attempting to exploit opportunities around the pandemic, as I have said. That is why the Government have invested in the National Economic Crime Centre, which is leading a multi-agency response to tackle serious and organised fraud during the pandemic. The CPS continues to play a key role in this effort, providing early investigative support in serious fraud cases.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I, too, would like to join the Chairman of the Select Committee in wishing the Attorney General the very best for the birth of her child and maternity leave afterwards.

At a time when we are hearing about more disturbing cases of fraud, not just against private citizens but against the state and the public purse, will the Attorney General continue to give us information through the House of Commons Library, publicising the success stories of the CPS in following, tackling and prosecuting those fraudsters?

[The Attorney General]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind wishes. He is right to highlight the successes that the CPS has had in tackling serious fraud. In recent months, the serious fraud division has brought three high-value investment scammers to justice. These include Joseph Lewis, who ran a £20 million Ponzi scheme fraud for a decade and was sentenced to five years and four months’ imprisonment, and Freddy David, an authorised financial consultant who was operating a parallel Ponzi fraud which resulted in a loss of £10.4 million to his victims. He was sentenced to a total of six years in prison and was issued with a confiscation order for just over £1 million.

Birmingham Commonwealth Games Bill [Lords]

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Thursday 11th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Shaun Bailey]

I am indeed, and I am very aware of the campaign that my right hon. Friend has been running to keep the police station open in the royal town.

Security will be key and we need to make sure that people feel safe. I have every confidence that our west midlands police officers will do that. They are, in my view, the best police force in the world, and I am proud of the work that they have done across our community to support cohesion and diversity and to keep our communities safe. I put on record my thanks to them.

I turn to my main point, which is about long-term opportunity, and that comes in the form of long-term investment. Many Members have made points about the crisis we find ourselves in and the economic crisis that we will go into. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) said that we need about £3.2 billion of investment to deal with the jobs crisis. These Commonwealth games go some way towards doing that, but they are not a fix-all. However, their timing could not be better. We need to ensure that we have those long-term opportunities to battle the threat of long-term and increased unemployment, which will happen. My area and the communities that I represent —Wednesbury, Oldbury and Tipton—were absolutely decimated by unemployment last time. I do not want to see that happen again and I will be fighting to make sure that it does not.

The point about community is absolutely crucial. I am very proud to represent Tipton. Many Government and Opposition Members have heard me go on and on about the town. I love Tipton, mainly because it is an underdog. Many people often call Tipton the forgotten city and that makes me angry, because nowhere in this country should be forgotten, and why should Tipton? Why should the people of Tipton feel that they do not matter? People might think that it is a joke or that it is funny, but it is not, because those communities are crying out. When I stood in a school in Tipton and spoke to those students, I took a straw poll and said, “How many of you will come back here once you have done whatever qualification it is you decide to do?”, and 80% of those kids said that they will not come back. That is the reason why we need these games and the long-term investment and opportunities that come out of them. It is for those kids in that school, because they should feel proud of the town and community they come from, and they should feel that they will come back there and live their lives in that community.

The fact is that if we are going to enhance these opportunities, we need to ensure that we respect the fact that the urban west midlands in particular is a patchwork of individual socioeconomic areas. Yes, the games will be in Birmingham, but as many right hon. and hon. Members have said, we need to ensure that the benefits transfer across the urban west midlands, and I am proud of the fact that that will happen. As hon. Members have pointed out, we will have the aquatics centre in Smethwick, in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), but if we think back to the long-term legacy, we need to look as well at encouraging innovation.

I have been really impressed by the engagement from the Commonwealth games team and the fact that it wants to secure local procurement and local jobs, but we need to tie that into ensuring that we get whatever residual investment comes out of that into Black Country innovation, because that is what makes the Black Country —things such as the Wood Green Academy in Wednesbury making personal protective equipment, and Q3 Academy in Tipton currently completely diversifying the way it teaches its students. It is about latching on to the core principle of ingenuity in the Black Country and that residual investment as it comes through over the years—not just in 2022, but in 2032 and 2042—and absolutely maximising it, so that Tipton is never forgotten again.

I will draw my remarks to a close, because I appreciate that I have been talking for some time and, as one of my predecessors said, sometimes it is better to be a bit quicker and leave them wanting more. We need to join this up; we need to ensure that the opportunity and investment that comes out of these games benefits the whole of west midlands, from Tipton to Tettenhall, from Perry Barr to Princes End, from Wolverhampton to Wednesbury and from Clitheroe to Burnt Tree—

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

And Shropshire.

[Shaun Bailey]

And Shropshire, of course, as my hon. Friend says. These games present a fantastic opportunity. It is not a sticking plaster to the problems we are going to face, and I do not think any right hon. or hon. Members would suggest that it is, but it is a start. If we seize these opportunities, we will succeed, in the way the west midlands does. I commend this Bill to the House.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mims Davies]

I welcome the hon. Lady to her post. I know that she is very passionate about this area and was part of our knife crime summit in April. I met UK Youth and the NCS yesterday as part of our youth charter work. Work is going on with the Treasury to ensure that all our youth sector is supported, including through the underspend of the NCS.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

2. What recent progress his Department has made on increasing access to superfast broadband in rural areas.

[The Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries (Margot James)]

The Government’s superfast broadband programme has met its target and is now providing superfast coverage to 97% of premises, including 94.8% of premises in my hon. Friend’s constituency. In addition, we have just launched the rural gigabit connectivity programme, with £200 million of funding, to begin to deliver even faster, gigabit speeds to the most remote and rural parts of the UK.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. Clearly, improved access to superfast broadband in places such as Shropshire will reduce the number of car journeys needing to be made. What assessment has her Department made of that improvement in helping us to reach the net zero carbon contribution target we have set?

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Although we have not conducted a specific study on the environmental impact of faster broadband speeds, we have considered it as part of a wider evaluation. We have found that the use of cloud computing has an effect in reducing commuting time, and we will be exploring this more specifically in our superfast broadband programme evaluation next year.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney General]

As my right hon. Friend knows, I have the greatest respect for all those who have served in our armed forces. My own family were an armed forces family, and I am acutely anxious to resolve this question to the satisfaction of this House. The measures that we have in mind would not be peculiar to one area of the United Kingdom, would be comprehensive and, I hope, would give dignity, peace of mind and assurance to all those who have served in our armed forces. We are anxious to make announcements as soon as possible.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

3. What recent discussions he has had with the CPS on improving prosecution rates for domestic abuse.

[The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)]

Dealing with domestic abuse is a top priority for the Government, and I regularly engage with the CPS on this subject. The CPS wants to ensure that every victim of domestic abuse has full confidence in the justice system. Only last month it unveiled a best practice model developed in partnership with the police and the Courts Service to help victims through the criminal justice process.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I thank the Minister for that answer. What success has the Crown Prosecution Service had in prosecuting controlling and coercive behaviour as a feature of domestic abuse?

[The Solicitor General]

My hon. Friend raises a very important point. Since we introduced the law on coercive control several years ago the number of charges continues to increase. In 2016-17, 309 charges were brought, but last year that trebled to 960.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

8. What steps he is taking to improve broadband and mobile phone coverage in rural areas.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

17. What steps he is taking to improve broadband and mobile phone coverage in rural areas.

[The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Jeremy Wright)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall) knows, our superfast broadband programme has achieved 95% national coverage, but I appreciate that that is of little comfort for people in the remaining 5%. For that reason, the programme is continuing to roll out to further rural areas. We are also clearing the 700 MHz spectrum to improve mobile coverage, and our full fibre roll-out plans include a strategy to ensure that rural areas are not left behind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Wright]

Yes is the short answer but, as you would expect, Mr Speaker, I will not leave it as a short answer. All I will say in addition is that there are a number of ways in which we can help. We want to work with local areas, and there may well be very specific local solutions in areas such as North Devon so that we can expand coverage more successfully.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The Government’s aspiration of full fibre by 2033 is laudable. However, this goal raises concerns about existing public intervention. Some contracts for copper and wireless broadband will subsequently need to be over-built. How will the Government ensure that rural areas like mine in Shropshire are treated equitably for full fibre deployment?

[Jeremy Wright]

I offer my hon. Friend the reassurance that, in relation to the process that is under way, I expect that a considerable amount of the infrastructure will be reused in the full fibre roll-out process, so there will not be as much over-building as he fears. On the full fibre roll-out, he may have noted that at the end of July we set out plans for what we describe as an outside-in strategy—in other words, making sure that rural areas such as the one he represents in Shropshire will be covered alongside the market roll-out in those areas that the market will cover.