Online Safety Bill

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

This has been an interesting debate on a Bill I have followed closely. I have been particularly struck by some of the arguments that claim the Bill is an attack on freedom of speech. I always listen intently to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and to the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), but I think they are wrong in the conclusions they have reached about legal but harmful content. Indeed, many of the criticisms that the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West made of the various platforms were criticisms of the present situation, and that is exactly why I think this legislation will improve the position. However, those Members raised important points that I am sure will be responded to. I have also been a strong advocate of the inclusion of small but high-harm platforms, as the Minister and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), both know—we have all had those discussions.

In the time I have, I want to focus principally on the issue of search and on new clauses 9 and 10, which stand in my name. As the shadow Minister has highlighted, last week we were—like many people in this place, perhaps—sent the most remarkable online prompt, which was to simply search Google for the words “desk ornament”. The top images displayed in response to that very mundane and boring search were of swastikas, SS bolts and other Nazi memorabilia presented as desk ornaments. Despite there having been awareness of that fact since, I believe, the previous weekend, and even though Google is making millions of pounds in seconds from advertising, images promoting Nazism were still available for all to see as a result of those searches.

When he gave evidence to the Bill Committee recently, Danny Stone, the Antisemitism Policy Trust’s very capable chief executive, pointed out that Amazon’s Alexa had used just one comment posted by one individual on Amazon’s website to inform potentially millions of users who cared to ask that George Soros was responsible for all of the world’s evils, and that Alexa had used a comment from another website to inform those who searched for it that the humanitarian group the White Helmets was an illicit operation founded by a British spy.

As we have seen throughout the covid pandemic, similar results come up in response to other searches, such as those around vaccines and covid. The Antisemitism Policy Trust has previously demonstrated that Microsoft Bing, the platform that lies behind Alexa, was directing users to hateful searches such as “Jews are bastards” through autocompletes, as well as pointing people to homophobic stories. We even had the sickening situation of Google’s image carousel highlighting Jewish baby strollers in response to people searching for portable barbecues.

Our own Alexa searches highlighted the issue some time ago. Users who asked Alexa “Do Jews control the media?” were responded to with a quote from a website called Jew Watch—that should tell Members all they need to know about the nature of the platform—saying that Jews control not only the media, but the financial system too. The same problem manifests itself across search platforms in other languages, as we highlighted not so long ago with Siri in Spanish. When asked, “Do the Jews control the media?” she responds with an article that states that Jews do indeed control international media. This goes on and on, irrespective of whether the search is voice or text-based.

The largest search companies in the world are falling at the first hurdle when it comes to risk assessing for harms on their platform. That is the key point when we ask for lawful but harmful content to be responded to. It is about risk assessment—requiring companies that do not respect borders, operate globally and are in many ways more powerful than Governments to risk assess and warn about lawful but deeply harmful content that all of us in the House would be disgusted by.

At present, large traditional search services including Google and Microsoft Bing, and voice search assistants including Alexa and Siri, will be exempted from having to risk assess their systems and address harm to adults, despite the fact that other large user-to-user services will have to do so. How can it be possible that Google does not have to act, when Meta—Facebook—and Twitter do? That does not seem consistent with the aims of the Bill.

There is a lot more that I would like to have said on the Bill. I welcome the written ministerial statement last week in relation to small but high-harm platforms. I hope that as the Bill progresses to the other place, we can look again at search. Some of the content generated is truly appalling, even though it may very well be considered lawful.

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

I join everyone else in the House in welcoming the Minister to his place.

I rise to speak in support of amendments 15 and 16. At the core of this issue is the first duty of any Government: to keep people safe. Too often in debates, which can become highly technical, we lose sight of that fact. We are not just talking about technology and regulation; we are talking about real lives and real people. It is therefore incumbent on all of us in this place to have that at the forefront of our minds when discussing such legislation.

Labelling social media as the wild west of today is hardly controversial—that is plain and obvious for all to see. There has been a total failure on the part of social media companies to make their platforms safe for everyone to use, and that needs to change. Regulation is not a dirty word, but a crucial part of ensuring that as the internet plays a bigger role in every generation’s lives, it meets the key duty of keeping people safe. It has been a decade since we first heard of this Bill, and almost four years since the Government committed to it, so I am afraid that there is nothing even slightly groundbreaking about the Bill as it is today. We have seen progress being made in this area around the world, and the UK is falling further and further behind.

Of particular concern to me is the impact on children and young people. As a mother, I worry for the world that my young daughter will grow up in, and I will do all I can in this place to ensure that children’s welfare is at the absolute forefront. I can see no other system or institution that children are allowed to engage with that has such a wanting lack of safeguards and regulation. If there was a faulty slide in a playground, it would be closed off and fixed. If a sports field was covered with glass or litter, that would be reported and dealt with. Whether we like it or not, social media has become the streets our children hang out in, the world they grow up in and the playground they use. It is about time we started treating it with the same care and attention.

There are far too many holes in the Bill that allow for the continued exploitation of children. Labour’s amendments 15 and 16 tackle the deeply troubling issue of “breadcrumbing”. That is where child abusers use social networks to lay trails to illegal content elsewhere online and share videos of abuse edited to fall within content moderation guidelines. The amendments would give the regulators powers to tackle that disgusting practice and ensure that there is a proactive response to it. They would bring into regulatory scope the millions of interactions with accounts that actively enable child abuse. Perhaps most importantly, they would ensure that social media companies tackled child abuse at the earliest possible stage.

In its current form, even with Government amendment 14, the Bill merely reinforces companies’ current focus only on material that explicitly reaches the criminal threshold. That is simply not good enough. Rather than acknowledging that issue, Government amendments 71 and 72 let social media companies off the hook. They remove the requirement for companies to apply their terms and conditions “consistently”. That was addressed very eloquently by the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) and the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who highlighted that Government amendment 14 simply does not go far enough.

[Damian Collins]

On the amendments that the former Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), spoke to, the word “consistently” has not been removed from the text. There is new language that follows the use of “consistently”, but the use of that word will still apply in the context of the companies’ duties to act against illegal content.

[Feryal Clark]

I welcome the Minister’s clarification and look forward to the amendments being made to the Bill. Other than tying one of our hands behind our back in relation to trying to keep children safe, however, the proposals as they stand do not achieve very much. This will undermine the entire regulatory system, practically rendering it completely ineffective.

Although I welcome the Bill and some of the Government amendments, it still lacks a focus on ensuring that tech companies have the proper systems in place to fulfil their duty of care and keep our children safe. The children of this country deserve better. That is why I wholeheartedly welcome the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) and urge Government Members to support them.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

Since 2016, the Serious Fraud Office has convicted just five fraudulent companies, but it has negotiated deferred prosecution settlements with another 11. Does the Solicitor General share my concern that when the SFO detects corporate fraud, its instinct is to negotiate instead of prosecuting and convicting those responsible?

[The Solicitor General]

The hon. Lady is right that it is always important to be vigilant about the point she raises, but I would make two points. First, in looking at the deferred prosecution agreements, we should just consider what has been achieved over the past five years: £1.3 billion has been taken off companies that have acted in a fraudulent way, in agreements sanctioned by the courts. As I have indicated, this year there will be seven trials in respect of 20 defendants on 80 counts, in respect of fraud worth more than £500 million. It is good news that just this week, Glencore has indicated that it will plead guilty to serious fraud, and it will be sentenced accordingly.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Monday 8th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab) [V]]

Last week’s Budget was the Government’s golden opportunity to step up and fix the endemic inequality that they have created throughout the country and in my own constituency of Enfield North. They failed in that task on every conceivable level. They failed nurses, who deserve better than the pitiful 1% pay increase they have been offered. They failed teachers, who have been given little support to plan a safe return to school for their students. They failed businesses and the self-employed, including White Photographic Ltd in my constituency, which is one of the 3 million businesses that have been excluded from the Government’s support over the past 12 months.

There are currently more than 19,000 people registered unemployed in Enfield and 28,000 on furlough who still do not know what the future holds for them. There are nearly 14,000 people who were punished by the Chancellor with a £500 cut to universal credit, which will see nearly £7 million taken out of our local economy this year. The Budget was bad for families, for small business, for frontline workers and for our communities.

Who was the Budget for? It turns out that it was a Budget to support the Government’s local campaigns for re-election, with more than £1 billon funnelled into their constituencies. This Government believe that they can help to level up the UK—[Inaudible.] London has some of the most deprived communities in the country—even more so after this pandemic. Analysis by the London Mayor shows that 14 boroughs should have been given the highest priority for funding, yet only two have. The politics are so obvious that I nearly took a drive to Barnard Castle to check whether my eyes were deceiving me.

Last week, the Mayor of London announced his vision for a 1945-style recovery for London, with “Jobs, jobs, jobs” as his mantra. The Chancellor must work with the Mayor to deliver this ambitious plan, instead of standing in his way, and to deliver a post-furlough jobs guarantee. Instead of a Budget to get our country working after covid, we saw the spectre of austerity return to the Dispatch Box. The Chancellor is more interested in his social media than in social justice. He found money for well-lit videos but nothing for NHS nurses. Tin-eared and cold-hearted, this Budget was a litany of opportunities missed and chances squandered. The Chancellor failed to meet the moment and his Budget failed to meet the needs of the most vulnerable.

Oral Answers to Questions

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Solicitor General]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to speak up for his constituents in Dudley on this matter. Public confidence in sentencing is crucial, and I am delighted to say that the general public do have and should have confidence in sentencing. The reality is that a very tiny fraction—far less than 1%—has to be referred to the Court of Appeal for a review of sentence for undue leniency. In his area, he might be interested to know of a case where a sentence of two and a half years for possession of a sawn-off shotgun and other material was increased to five years when it was referred by me for a review.

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

What discussions she has had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the effectiveness of Government support for law firms during the covid-19 outbreak.

[The Solicitor General (Michael Ellis)]

The CPS has made changes to its system for paying fees to advocates to help support them during this difficult time, adjusted to ensure payment for work performed, even where a normal invoice trigger point has not been reached. The Ministry of Justice is also working closely with legal practitioners to understand the impact of covid-19 on them. The Legal Aid Agency has streamlined the process for interim payments and hardship payments, including lowering the threshold for when such claims can be made.

[Feryal Clark]

Before the pandemic, many law firms were already struggling because of a decade of cuts to legal aid. What is the Solicitor General doing to ensure we have a functioning and fair criminal justice system when the crisis is over?

[The Solicitor General]

Prosecuting advocates play an essential role in our criminal justice system, and the Government support them, as can be seen with the recent influx of money from the Treasury to the Crown Prosecution Service. On 30 March, the CPS announced measures enabling interim invoices to be raised. That is just one mechanism by which we are supporting criminal practitioners working on Crown Court cases. They are now able to claim hardship payments, for example, which have been expedited. Millions of pounds in extra funding is being provided for not-for-profit providers. We are supporting the legal community across the board in what I accept are very difficult times.

Arts, Culture and Heritage: Support Package

Feryal Clark Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

Yes, as far as I understand it, the 200th anniversary of the railways is still going ahead. I know that Locomotion No. 1 is the property of the Science Museum and Dame Mary Archer, the chair of the Science Museum, has agreed to meet my hon. Friend.

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

All Safe and Sound and Handheld Audio Ltd are just two of the companies in my constituency working in the arts and creative sector that have lost 98% of their incomes since the March lockdown and will fall off the cliff when the furlough has ended. Will the Minister tell me what support is available from this rescue package for the ecosystem of such companies and businesses that support our creative and arts sector?

[Caroline Dinenage]

There is an unprecedented package of business support. The furloughing scheme, the business loan scheme and the bounce back loan scheme have poured millions and millions of pounds into supporting businesses up and down the country.