Online Safety Bill [HL]

Earl of Courtown Excerpts

Friday 17th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to introduce my latest Online Safety Bill, which is my fourth over four Sessions. I am particularly pleased that the Government have taken some important steps over that period to engage with this issue. The voluntary filtering agreement, announced by the Prime Minister in his seminal July 2013 NSPCC speech, between the big four internet service providers—which I shall refer to as ISPs for the rest of my speech—was of course very welcome. I am also particularly encouraged by the key developments this year, namely the headline “Conservative manifesto commitment to introduce age verification for all sites showing pornographic material”. The Prime Minister must be congratulated on his strong personal leadership on this issue.

However, despite this very welcome progress, the problems remain. In March 2014 the ATVOD report For Adults Only? Underage Access to Online Porn showed that at least 44,000 primary school children had access to adult websites in December 2013, as well as 200,000 under-16 year-olds. A European-wide piece of research into violence and abuse in teenage relationships published in February 2015 found that 39% of boys in England aged 14 to 17 regularly viewed pornography. An IPPR report published in August 2014 revealed that eight out of 10 18 year-olds thought that it was too easy for young people to accidentally see pornography online, and a March 2015 poll commissioned by the NSPCC of 2,000 11 to 17 year-olds found that one in 10 children aged 12 to 13 was worried that they might have become addicted to pornography.

For all the progress over the last few years, very significant problems remain which require equally significant changes in our online child protection arrangements. The purpose of my Bill is to rise to this critical challenge. My speech today is divided into three central components, which reflect the three central components of the Bill. I begin with adult content filters.

While the Government’s self-regulatory solution regarding adult content filters is a welcome step forward, it suffers from two critical limitations. First, the agreement only pertains to the big four ISPs and leaves a good 10% of the internet market, and therein many thousands of children, beyond its reach. I do not suggest that none of the remaining smaller ISPs offers good filtering options. However, according to my research, of the 14 smaller ISPs that service homes rather than businesses, only four were found to offer something comparable to default-on. One of them even boasted of the fact that it deliberately did not filter. Unless we are prepared to say that the rights of some children who have the opportunity of protection through adult content filters are less than those of others, that arrangement cannot be regarded as satisfactory.

Secondly, and more importantly, the voluntary agreement does not provide age verification to establish that someone seeking to lift adult content filters that were put in place at the set-up is indeed an adult. The ISPs could unwittingly be allowing children to access adult content. When pressed on this matter, the industry suggested that they would send an email to the account holder to let them know that the settings had been changed. However, even if the account holder was exceptionally diligent, checking their emails every hour and opening and reading every new email as it came through, that arrangement would still allow children to have access to adult content for a good hour or more.

In the real world, however, we know that that would not work. ComRes, polling for the charity CARE, demonstrated that a total of 34% of British adults—16.3 million people—said that they would not read an email from their ISP immediately, 11% said that they would probably leave the email unread for up to a week, 9% would be likely to leave it for more than a week, and a staggering 14% said that they were unlikely to read any email from their ISP at all. The common- sense understanding of age verification is that it is conducted before an age-restricted activity is permitted. The idea that this very half-hearted excuse for child protection can be regarded as age verification is simply not credible. My Bill addresses both these shortcomings.

Clause 1 requires that all ISPs ensure that households, schools and businesses with public wi-fi must face an unavoidable choice about adult content filters. Clauses 1 and 2 introduce proper age verification, requiring that anyone electing not to have adult content filters should confirm that they are 18 years old or over before being permitted to access adult content. Despite the voluntary code of practice adopted by some, I have included mobile phone operators—MPOs—in my Bill because, as well as the ISPs, the code does not cover all mobile providers. Moreover, it has not been as effective as a statutory approach. In 2010 it became apparent that BlackBerry had been ignoring the code, and in 2013 precisely the same happened in relation to Tesco Mobile. Both companies subsequently put their houses in order, but it is inconceivable that there would have been such widespread flouting of the code had it been statutory.

Since 2013, the British Board of Film Classification has acted as an independent regulator of content delivered via the mobile networks of EE, O₂, Three and Vodafone. Clause 2(7) is included in the Bill so that the BBFC can—and, indeed, I hope that it will be able to—continue in this very important role. The provision for this statutory approach to filtering with robust age verification for all ISPs and MPOs is entirely possible and, I stress, vital if we are to make the internet as safe as possible for our children.

I now move to wider issues of age verification in relation to adult content websites. Page 35 of the 2015 Conservative manifesto states that,

“we will stop children’s exposure to harmful sexualised content online, by requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material”.

That commitment is very welcome. However, it was noticeably absent from the Queen’s Speech. When I asked the Government why that was and whether they would set out their plan during the Queen’s Speech debate, no answer was forthcoming. I have since been informed by the Minister, who very kindly met me on Wednesday, that the Government are actively thinking about this. I was greatly encouraged by her very real enthusiasm for the commitment, as well as by her very wide knowledge of the whole communications industry.

As the Government consider their options, I suggest that they need look no further than Clauses 6 to 11 of the Bill, which introduce a robust system of age verification. The current law, the Communications Act 2003, recently amended by the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 to include Section 368E, requires sites based in the UK that provide R18 on-demand programme services—that is, the opportunity to watch restricted films that can be bought only from sex shops if purchased as physical media—to make their services available in such a way that they cannot be accessed by children. The Authority for Television On Demand, ATVOD, is given the job of policing this.

The provision of that legislation is very welcome but there is a major problem, highlighted by ATVOD’s 2014 report For Adults Only?. The vast majority of such material accessed in the UK is streamed into this country from websites based outside the UK that are untouched by the legislation. In December 2013, 23 of the 25 top adult websites visited by UK internet users provided instant free and unrestricted access to hardcore pornographic videos and to still images with no barriers to underage viewing. Given the increasing number of court cases during which it has become apparent that young boys committing sexual crimes against girls have been acting out R18 material that they have viewed online on computers in their bedrooms, it is clearly vital to protect children from material that comes from abroad, as well as from that streamed from within the UK.

Regulating online service provision from beyond the UK presents challenges but these are not insurmountable. The Government have just introduced a framework through the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 for regulating online gambling providers based outside the UK. The Act requires all online gambling sites based outside the UK to get a UK Gambling Commission licence to access the UK market. If they do not do so and seek to sell their services to people in the UK, the commission will direct financial transaction providers not to process transactions between people in the UK and the sites in question. They must either cease trading with people in the UK or get a Gambling Commission licence.

Clauses 1 to 7 are based on the principle of the Gambling Act. They require those seeking to stream pornography into the UK from sites based in other countries to have a UK licence to do so legally. One of the conditions of the licence is that there must be robust age verification checks. If a site is directed to the UK market without a licence, Clause 10 gives the UK licensing authority the power to direct financial transaction providers not to process transactions between such websites and people in the UK.

The truth is that, while some sites provide free material to draw people in, at some point they start charging to make money. If they cannot sell to people in the UK, they must either leave the UK market or introduce appropriate age verification so that they can get a licence. Given that the Communications Act already requires R18 on-demand programme services based in the UK to be made available in such a way that children cannot access them, and given that the vast majority of porn accessed online in this country comes from sites based outside the UK, the central challenge facing the Government is honouring their commitment to stop children’s exposure to harmful sexualised content online by requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material. That means that the central challenge will be the foreign sites, but Clauses 7 to 11 provide a mechanism for rising to that challenge. This priority, I may add, is strongly backed by public opinion. A ComRes poll of 2,058 adults conducted last weekend for the charity CARE in preparation for today’s debate revealed—these figures were released only this morning—that 74% of people believe that the Government’s age verification commitment must apply to sites based both in the UK and outside the UK, and only 13% of people disagree with that.

The second difficulty with the current legal framework in relation to protecting children from watching adult on-demand programming relates to the fact that it seeks to protect them only from watching R18 material. If we as a society have determined that it is not appropriate for children to watch 18-rated material and we have the technology to introduce age verification, how can it be right to seek to protect children only from watching R18-rated material? Frankly, this approach does not make much sense. If we say that children should be protected from watching, say, “Fifty Shades of Grey” in the offline world, why not in the online world? Do children change as they move from the offline world to the online? Do they therefore become less vulnerable? I think not. This point is again backed up by ComRes polling from the weekend, which demonstrates that 73% of people think that 18-rated on-demand programme services should be subject to age verification. Just a small proportion, 13%, disagrees. Again, my Bill addresses this shortfall. Clause 6 makes it clear that a robust age-verification policy should apply to 18-rated as well as R18-rated material.

The final component of my Bill relates to education, which is key because some online challenges relate to accidentally coming across unwanted adult content. Here, filtering and age verification are helpful. Some online behavioural challenges, such as cyberbullying, sexting and grooming, can be addressed only by better education. Clause 3 places a duty on ISPs and MPOs to make available information about online safety to account holders in a prominent and easily accessible format throughout the duration of their contract. Clause 4 places a duty on the Secretary of State to empower parents with information about online safety so that they can better help to prepare their children to deal with cyberbullying, sexting and grooming.

Working together, the three components of my Bill—filters, age verification and better education—will help make the internet a safer place for children. In bringing my comments to a close, I should like to highlight the key question that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, put to the previous Minister the last time this matter was debated. Sadly, the noble and learned Lord cannot be with us today but he has encouraged me to ask the question once again. How can it be right that in the offline world we say that statutory protection is important, and yet in the online world, with the exception of R18-rated material that is live-streamed from the UK, self-regulation will do?

In a context in which we seem to have laws for everything, it makes no sense to suggest that child protection is all-important but then say that we can uphold it through self-regulation. If that is sufficient, why do we not abolish statutory child protection for the offline world and have a consistent self-regulatory approach across the board? The truth is that if child protection is sufficiently important to merit statutory protection offline, the same must of course be true online.

I very much hope that the Government will take up the Bill. It provides a means whereby they can fulfil their manifesto commitment on age verification and ensure that adult content filters apply to the whole marketplace and cannot be lifted without age verification. It provides a means whereby we can hold our heads up high and say, “Yes, child protection is just as important online as it is offline and we will accord it the same level of statutory protection”. Finally, in providing a statutory basis for the voluntary filtering arrangements currently in place, the Bill does what I understand the recent telecoms directive says the Government must do anyway—namely, set out our filtering provisions in law.

Mindful of these considerations, I believe that it is a Bill whose time has come and I commend it to both the Government and the House. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, for the convenience of the House, I remind noble Lords of the advice of my noble friend the Chief Whip at the beginning of business today that there is an advisory speaking time of six minutes for Back-Bench speakers.