Online Harms Legislation

Julian Knight Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport if he will make a statement on the Government’s plans for online harms legislation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Matt Warman)]

I thank my hon. Friend for their question on this important issue.

The Government are taking significant action to tackle the issue of online harm and make this country the safest place in the world to go online. There is widespread consensus that online platforms must do more to make sure that their services are safe for all users, particularly children, while also promoting freedom of expression online. Strikingly, far fewer parents now believe that the benefits of their child being online outweigh the risks, with the proportion falling from 65% of parents in 2015 to 55% last year. That is a worrying trend that we must address. We can keep the benefits of the digital economy only if we can improve trust and confidence in technology and tackle what erodes it.

The “Online Harms” White Paper proposed a statutory duty of care, enforced by an independent regulator. Since its publication, we have consulted on our proposals and announced our intention to legislate in the Queen’s Speech. The evidence given during the consultation will help us to get the balance right between an open and vibrant internet and one where users are protected from harm.

Yesterday, as set out in a written ministerial statement, the Government published our initial consultation response. The response set out our proposed direction of travel following the consultation, and we will publish a full response in the spring, before bringing forward legislation in this Session. I wish to bring to the attention of the House four specific points raised during the consultation.

First, we must ensure that in aiming to make the internet safer we do not inadvertently stifle legitimate debate. We will place safeguards in legislation, giving companies and the regulator the responsibility to protect users’ rights, including freedom of expression, online. We will introduce greater transparency about content removals so that users can appeal if their content is taken down.

Secondly, we know that greater protections are needed to keep young people safe online. The new regulatory framework will require companies to take steps to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content and protect them from other harms.

Thirdly, some consultation responses raised concerns that the regulation would place undue burdens on sites where opportunities for harm to occur are limited. Our legislation will be proportionate and risk-based, affecting only those companies in respect of which there is a risk of harm. The duty of care will apply only to businesses facilitating the sharing of user-generated content, for example, through comments or video sharing, and only around 5% of UK businesses provide these functions.

Finally, the regulator will ensure that in-scope companies have appropriate systems and processes in place to protect users from harm, especially children and the most vulnerable. We are minded to appoint Ofcom to regulate online harms, building on its experience and expertise to make further progress on this important issue. We also yesterday appointed Ofcom to regulate video-sharing platforms under the audiovisual media services directive, which aims to reduce harmful content on these sites. That will provide quicker protection for some harms and activities and will act as a stepping stone to the full online harms regulatory framework.

We will publish our full consultation response in the spring, setting out further details of our plans ahead of legislation and, alongside this, the Home Office will publish voluntary interim codes of practice to set out what companies should do to prevent terrorist use of the internet, or child sex exploitation and abuse on their platforms.

We are confident that this publication and the other plans that we are driving forward will help to make Britain the safest place to be online and the best digital economy in the world. No other country in the world is working faster to foster tackling this vital issue.

[Julian Knight]

I thank the Minister for his initial response. A regulator is nothing without the ability genuinely to disrupt the business practices of a firm that it is regulating. What assurances can he give the House that the proposed Ofcom plus regulator can genuinely bring social media companies to account with simply a bit of public shaming and fines? Does he agree that there needs to be a tech levy set at 2% of UK revenues in order properly to fund this super-regulator?

Will the Minister confirm that there will be a legal duty on companies to inform users of their personal privacy rights? Would not the new regulatory framework benefit from pre-legislative scrutiny by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, as well as from allowing the Committee a veto over the appointment or dismissal of the head of the regulator, in exactly the same way that the Treasury Committee has over the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility? Will the Minister assure the House that legislation will be forthcoming this calendar year, as we have been waiting a very long time for this?

[Matt Warman]

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right that regulation without teeth is not a valuable form of regulation. We will be talking to Ofcom about what it believes the most effective form of regulation will be, and we will obviously be feeding in our own thoughts as well. The decision that we made yesterday allows us to start having those formal conversations, and Ofcom to start talking to the industry as well. In the same vein, I agree with my hon. Friend that a levy has been much discussed. He mentions one figure. We will obviously have to discuss with Ofcom what it considers to be the level of resources that it needs, and I do not use that as a way of trying to weasel out of what he suggests by any means. It is a very interesting suggestion.

There will be, of course, a legal duty on companies to be more transparent with their customers. We are talking about transparency already in some working groups that I have been chairing. My hon. Friend mentions pre-legislative scrutiny. It is, of course, a tradition, although not a necessity, that full pre-legislative scrutiny in one Session would require the Bill to be introduced in the following Session, and this Government are not content to introduce that kind of delay. However, he did in fact mention pre-legislative scrutiny by his Committee, rather than in the formal way, and it is an interesting suggestion. I look forward to working closely with him on what the best form of scrutiny looks like.

Similarly, another interesting suggestion is what role my hon. Friend’s Committee might play when it comes to the regulator of this. We have compared regulation of financial services when we have been thinking about this, and he is right to make a comparison. It is another interesting suggestion. I look forward to working with him and his Committee—I hope. [Interruption.] I will put my phone on speaker on the Dispatch Box. I look forward to working with him, to be serious, because this is an area where I hope we can form genuine cross-party consensus on what is the right way forward without introducing a moment’s delay.