Digital Economy Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 20th March 2017 Lords Chamber

I urge noble Lords to join me in calling for the retention of equivalent protections on the internet as are in place for the distribution of pornography offline by rejecting these amendments. I shall be pleased to vote for the excellent “review and rethink” amendment, Amendment 25YD, in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I offer my strongest support to my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss in her Amendment 25YD. She is of course a former president of the family courts and a chair of the adoption Select Committee which recommended additional support for adoptive families, a recommendation which has now been implemented. She has a long record in protecting vulnerable children.

I apologise for rising for the first time at this late stage in proceedings on the Bill. I felt bound to do so because I am vice-chair of the parliamentary group for young people in local authority care. On my noble and learned friend’s concern that the relaxing of the regime might to some degree encourage an increase in the level of domestic violence, many young people coming into care come from backgrounds where there is domestic violence. I agree with her entirely that we need a review to make sure that such a change does not contribute towards violence towards women.

I thank the Minister for the additional protections in the Bill for children accessing pornography; they are very welcome indeed. I extend my thanks to his colleagues in the other place for introducing a statutory requirement for personal, social, health and economic education, which will ensure that all children receive high-quality sex and relationship education. I heard from Professor Sue Berelowitz last night, an academic who has produced a number of reports on child sexual exploitation. She highlighted to me the correlation between violent pornography and domestic violence. It is only a correlation, but because there is such a correlation, we should give it careful attention. I support my noble and learned friend’s amendment and I hope that your Lordships will choose to do so.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 25YD in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I fully support powers to block the supply of damaging pornography both to support the requirement for age verification and to prevent the distribution of material that is harmful even for adult viewing. I support the Government’s intention announced last month for a,

“major new drive on internet safety”.

I support the Prime Minister’s launch of a plan to,

“transform the way we tackle domestic violence and abuse”.

But the principle of joined-up government seems to be lacking as we review the Government’s amendments to Clauses 16 and 22 and the new clause defining extreme pornographic material.

The Government have recognised that the internet with its many amazing facets can also be extremely detrimental to the well-being of our young people if they are accessing pornography. That fact no longer seems to be in dispute. We recognise its impact on young people’s self-perceptions and relationships. I hope your Lordships will bear with me as I quote from the 2013 report prepared for the Children’s Commissioner for England. It concluded:

“Access and exposure to pornography affect children and young people’s sexual beliefs … maladaptive attitudes about relationships; more sexually permissive attitudes; greater acceptance of casual sex; beliefs that women are sex objects; more frequent thoughts about sex … Pornography has been linked to sexually coercive behaviour among young people, and, for young women, viewing pornography is linked with higher rates of sexual harassment and forced sex”.


This is why we want to protect children and I fully support the Government’s intentions.

I find myself perplexed as to why we think this material has no impact on a person when they turn 18. I accept that being an adult brings certain freedoms, but they are not infinite. I accept that we have laws that make it an offence to possess certain types of material and that that position remains, as set out in government Amendment 25YV, but at the same time government Amendment 25H is saying, “It is okay for a person running a website to supply that very same material into the UK as long as it is behind age verification”, with an exception for a very small number of very realistic images. I hope that the Government will reassure us that there are, indeed, a significant number of prosecutions for those offences, but I have my doubts. Even if there are cases that come to court in the coming years, are we going to be hearing, “This material was behind age verification systems, which the Government have said are what is needed. Therefore I thought material X and Y was within the law”? We are sending very mixed messages to the public about violent pornography.

I am particularly concerned about animated images of child sexual abuse, which would be against the law to possess in the UK and would be considered “prohibited material” under the present definition but will not be caught by the definition of “extreme pornography” the Minister intends to replace it with.

I greatly value the work of the Internet Watch Foundation in taking down online child abuse images, but it does not have the remit to cover animated or drawn images if the websites on which they are found are hosted outside the UK. This limitation is compounded when we understand that 99% of criminal content is hosted outside the UK. It disturbs me greatly that we are being asked to purposefully amend the Bill to remove from the regulator the power to prevent those images being made available in the UK via the internet when there is no other body able to fulfil that role. I cannot agree to changing a definition to one that will class such images as acceptable behind age verification. Therefore I will not be supporting the government amendments in this group.

I am not alone in my concerns about the kind of pornography these amendments would make permissible. Polling undertaken by ComRes over the weekend and published today—my colleague has made reference to it already—asked more than 2,000 adults what sorts of violent acts should be allowed in pornography online. In responding to different forms of content against which the age verification regulator would not have the power to act if the government amendments pass today, public opposition to allowing access to that material varied from 74% to 81%. Not surprisingly, these figures were bigger among women, who clearly feel particularly worried about these changes. Whatever pressure the Government may have been under to make the changes proposed today, the great majority of the general public do not want the material described as “prohibited” to be accessible.

I have consulted John Larkin QC, the Northern Ireland Attorney-General, about how the Bill will impact Northern Ireland and he advises me that he can “see no good reason for a change from the prohibited material category to the extreme pornography category.” Noble Lords will understand that I am inclined to agree with him. I am not convinced by the Government’s arguments that such a wholesale change of approach is needed and do not support the government amendments. As someone who took Northern Ireland’s equivalent of the Modern Slavery Bill through the Northern Ireland Assembly, I am particularly alive to the reality of violence against women. I find it very surprising that a Government led by a female Prime Minister who took the Modern Slavery Bill through Westminster should countenance the amendments before us today. I wonder whether she has been properly briefed on their consequence.

If there is a Division on the government amendments, I will vote against. In the unfortunate event that the amendments pass, I will vote for Amendment 25YD in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and other members of your Lordships’ House. It proposes that there should be a review of the effect of this change and a sunset clause that would revert the effect of the Bill back to that in Committee, because it is time we looked at the evidence for how this material is impacting adults as well as young people. We are a digitally connected people—for good and ill. I am not suggesting that every violent sex crime is fuelled by pornography but it is time we had an open discussion about the impact of this material on violence against women and children, so that there can be reasoned policy responses.

The Relate counselling service has indicated that counsellors are increasingly seeing problems with “relationships and sexual functioning” as a result of internet pornography. In The Way We Are Now: The State of the UK’s Relationships 2015, Relate reported that 23% of 16 to 34 year-olds in a relationship reported an “overall negative impact” on their relationship from use of online pornography. The report said that pornography use is,

“an increasingly common topic in the counselling room”.

Last year, a journal article reported, based on interviews with 55 women in rural Ohio, all of whom were trying to leave their male partner, that,

“pornography is a major component of the problem of rural woman abuse”.

I hope Amendment 25YD will get overwhelming support from your Lordships that there needs to be a careful review of this change and the brakes put on, if necessary.