Kit Malthouse
Main Page: Kit Malthouse (Conservative - North West Hampshire)
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
I have met my fair share of bullies in my time. As you may have noticed, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am, as they used to say in my home town of Liverpool, a chap who is built like a brick outhouse—I think that is the parliamentary version of the term—so bullies have not really bothered me much over the years. However, I am aware, not least as a father, that the internet and social media have brought about two big changes that have meant that I probably would not have avoided bullying were I a teenager now.
First, bullying is now 24/7. As other Members have said, it is inescapable. There is no refuge from bullying these days—no chance to get home, shut the back door and sit down to your fish fingers safe in the knowledge that it will not occur again, at least for a few hours. Secondly, social media has unfortunately decreased our children’s resilience, creating a whole host of exploitable vulnerabilities, including eating disorders, self-harm, harmful sexual behaviour, depression and anxiety. For teenagers, many of whom are hard-wired to take the judgments of others to heart, the amplification of bullying that the online world allows will obviously lead to more permanent damage.
As many Members have said, it is pretty shocking that we have allowed things to get to this stage. We seem to have sleepwalked into an epidemic of terrible mental health, particularly among children, whose self-confidence has been wrecked by social media with its unrealistic expectations and the kind of digital solipsism that it seems to encourage. Perhaps it is because we have been too wrapped up in our own smartphones to notice their obsession—too wrapped up to remember that there are two distinct types of people in society: adults and children. It is the job of adults to make decisions about the boundaries that protect children from harm even when they do not always like it. Instead, I fear that we have become carried away by technology, which has led us to become too indulgent to be seen to be backtracking.
The current generation of teenagers are glued, perhaps irreversibly, to a social media world filled with images of continuously perfect, happy people—so obviously fictional—paired with the unavoidable realisation that they can never attain that ideal. The result is both an insatiable sense of entitlement combined with a crushing hopelessness, which can only lead to self-loathing and anger. They are too often made to feel like failures. Throw into that mix the pressure of exams and the signal sent to children that their entire future and value as a person rests on their academic performance and social standing at school, and it is no wonder that cyber-bullying is the trigger for a whole host of problems. Such pressures contribute to deep unhappiness and many feel the need to put on a brave face and not burden their families, which compounds the isolation. As the president of ChildLine, Esther Rantzen, wrote recently, unhappiness and low self-esteem are the main new phenomena that the organisation is seeing. It only appeared in the top five of children’s worries a couple of years ago but accounted for 35,244 of their counselling sessions last year alone. Make no mistake, we have done little to halt the trend and it is only going to get worse. We must not consign the next generation of teenagers to the same fate.
Turning to the main subject of the debate, the resilience-sapping effect of social media and the addiction to smartphones are far more fundamental and intractable than the cyber-bullying issue, which is a product of them. There is much to be said about how we tackle cyber-bullying. Many people need to be involved in that conversation and consultation, which will have to include the mega-corporations, such as Facebook, that are the common platforms on which the problem occurs. We have let the resilience issue get out of control as a result of complacency in Parliament and an inertia in law, and we need to address them with more urgency than the bullying.
Like many Members, I hope that the response to the bullying issue will take the shape of a new online offences Act, which would replace the 30-plus pieces of legislation currently covering online abuse. It would include, among other things, a specific online abuse offence as well as an extensive definition of the duties of internet service providers in relation to young people. On resilience, we also need to get on with a children and young persons Act that is fit for this age, in which we can clearly define the duties of parents, in law, to help them cope with the impact of social media on their children. It is plainly not right that under-16s spend an average of three hours a day online, making them, according to experts, much more likely to suffer mental health problems, or that two in three 12 to l5-year-olds have their own smartphone given that parents have no idea what they are doing on them.
Spending too much time on social media has been shown to inhibit personal development by many different researchers, including in research carried out by the Government. We must be less complacent about the evidence. The change has been allowed to happen partly owing to parliamentary complacency, but also parental naivety and short-sightedness, and we need to put things right. No one is particularly to blame. That this House has failed to consider the issue properly is down to the same reason that parents across the country and around the world get caught out so badly by the change. Nothing comparable was around when we were growing up, and we are not equipped with the knowledge or understanding to guide children in their use of social media, especially as children themselves seem to be driving the evolution of the platforms on a daily basis.
The pace of change also explains how the main pieces of legislation on children are so out of date. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and the Children Act 1989 constructed the framework under which we still operate today, but obviously they do not have anything to say about parents’ duties to children in the social media age or about cyber-bullying. Making it harder still, it appears that getting the guidance and supervision right requires a level of intrusiveness that was not commonplace among parents of previous generations, one that children today will certainly resent and resist. Understandably, given where we are now, any group of teenagers would react with horror at the idea of handing their smartphones in at the beginning of the school day and picking them up at home time.
Seema Kennedy
My hon. Friend says that teenagers might resist that, but he began by saying that there are two groups of people in this world—adults and children—and surely it is incumbent on us adults to make them give these things up.
Kit Malthouse
Exactly, as I was about to say. Let me continue: but I will be firm here and say that the reason we have not done something in a systematic way, when teachers and experts on children have been telling us for some time that there was trouble brewing, is down to an increased weakness of parents and some teachers who act as though it was the children who should set the rules. Once again, adults seem to be unwilling to act as adults, meaning action has been weak or tentative. However, given the gravity of the situation in children’s mental health, in particular, we obviously cannot afford for that to continue. We need a new direction from which to approach this important area, but it is right to deal with the causes as well as the fallout.
I fear that this situation is again down to an indulgence that leads people to the conclusion that we can never declare that what someone is doing is harmful or bad for them, even when that person is not yet an adult and cannot be expected to understand properly what is good for them. Increased funding for talking therapies for distressed young people, which everybody has been pushing for over the past few months, is right, but no amount of therapy will stem the tide of the children’s mental health crisis if the root cause of why we need this resilience is not addressed.
I agree with many hon. Members who have spoken today about the need for legislation to clarify and consolidate the law relating to offences committed online. More fundamentally, however, we need to look more seriously at the resilience of children, at availability and at the time they spend online, and decide for ourselves, as parents and as a country, whether we should set firmer boundaries about what they can and cannot do in their own time.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
My apologies, Mr Deputy Speaker, for stepping out of the Chamber, but I was involved in a school visit. I thank the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) for securing this very important debate. I also thank all those Members who have spoken before me and whom I have been able to hear.
Technology is a central part of our lives today; it is a tool. Sadly, used maliciously, it can be turned into a weapon that can have, and indeed has had, damaging and sometimes devastating consequences for victims. As others have mentioned, Members of this House have been victims of such abuse, and some have been sufficiently frightened by the abuse that they have been afraid to go home at the weekend. Most victims do not have the benefit of the police and parliamentary support that we have here. Like all bullying, bullies tend to target people who already feel vulnerable. Members have rightly acknowledged the gaps and the need for action, legislation, police and prosecutors, and, most importantly, awareness.
I want to focus my contribution on online abuse and harassment in schools and the importance of effective and consistent school management and curriculum policies to complement the effective legislation that we also need. I am honoured to be on the Women and Equalities Committee under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Basingstoke. We have been addressing the issue of sexual harassment and violence in schools. Our report is not quite ready, but I am sure that my Chair will not mind if I give a little flavour of what we have experienced. We were shocked by the extent that sexual imagery, abusive sexual relationships and objectification of women have been normalised by young people. We had two sessions—one with young men and the other with young women—in which we were told about the experiences of young people of the use and misuse of technology in and around the school environment. If we do not understand and address that misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and all the other kinds of abuse, we risk turning victims into criminals, which means that they will not get the support that they so badly need.
I wish to focus my remarks on the experience brought to me by one of my constituents, a headteacher at a successful and thriving secondary school. Recent safeguarding investigations introduced him to the shocking mobile and cyber-world in which virtually every child in his school and, he presumes, in other local schools and therefore nationally seem to be engaged for unfeasibly large proportions of their days and nights. What happened in his school started with the exchange of photos between two students who were in a consensual relationship, but it escalated. The images got out. There was blackmail and violence, and the police were involved. Criminal charges were considered. What started as a consensual relationship ended up as truly violent abuse, and it could have been prevented.
The situation raised some really important aspects of child online and mobile safety and the equalities agenda, which appear to be being ignored. The headteacher is seeking a body of work in some key areas that has cross-party and organisational support that can help schools and parents to safeguard children much more effectively.
It is right to focus on strengthening the law, but we need to look at a parallel solution if we are not to put thousands of teenagers at risk of criminal charges when education and child protection are more in order. Although tackling offenders and strengthening the law are very important, they are only a small part of what needs to be done and are not on their own a real solution. If we do not want young people to be needlessly and unfairly criminalised, elements of the law and the context of the online abuse must be thoroughly analysed before changes are made. We must focus not so much on reaction, but on prevention. The law is not always the correct tool, and it must not be used when young people are engaging in unwise activities—as so many do—which relate to the expectation and culture of a mobile and cyber environment in which appropriate adults have virtually no presence and where, too often, we leave them abandoned and to fend for themselves.
My constituent contends that a strong positive culture must dominate any community, including the online and mobile community, because when it is absent, there will never be a vacuum—a “street culture” will fill the void. Alas, he fears and he sees that this is the case with the mobile and cyber-worlds that our children spend so much of their day and night lives inhabiting. We need to take care not to end up targeting and criminalising young people who are, in fact, victims. This will require significant training and support for the police, as other Members have mentioned, and for others whose response to such crime already appears to be under-confident and very variable.
My constituent subscribes to a restorative justice approach in his school, and that might be appropriate in cases where mitigating factors are considered. He asserts that the ignored fact is that the vast majority of young people are already mobile and online victims in a largely unsupervised cyber-world. Although the internet gets considerable attention from safeguarding organisations and in training, mobile activity and mobile-based abuse are, in fact, even more rife but more neglected by us adults. Parents, teachers and other adults normally responsible for the routine safety of children are best placed to supervise and guide young people, yet they are largely absent from the potentially dangerous environment and too little is being done to address that omission.
There is an over-focus on the internet and the wrong applications, such as Facebook, because they are what we older people use and are familiar with. The mobile world and the dark web get less attention, yet they are part of most children’s experiences—perhaps the dark web to a lesser degree. There are lots of apps. I know Snapchat, but I do not use it. Hon. Members have probably never even heard of other apps unless we have asked our kids to tell us, and that does not always happen. The mobile and online culture in which our children live and grow up—the ground is established in the primary years for some of them but in early secondary for many more—is their normality.
This normalisation, with no appropriate adult presence to challenge it, is what leads to the lack of reporting of sexual and other mobile, online and cyber-abuse. We must deal with the issue that young people do not want to go to court, or they do not want perpetrators to be punished. The idea that abuse is not worth reporting is not necessarily an indictment of the criminal justice system, but it may not be considered worth reporting when it is seen as normalised.
Data from police forces and court proceedings are only a small subset of the true or possible dataset. The reality is that the relative lack of adult presence in the mobile and cyber-worlds of children, including the practitioners responsible for keeping children safe, means that conclusions drawn on available quantitative data must be received cautiously. We need to establish a different online, mobile and cyber-culture and skill-up children, parents and other adults.
Police, children’s services, health and education staff need consistent training on child exploitation and on how to support victims. In short, parents and other responsible adults just do not know how to be part of the mobile and cyber-world. Schools have a responsibility in this debate and in the remedies. Some suggestions that come from the work that our headteachers have done include every school having an equalities and safeguarding committee and updating the behaviour policy to have a strong safeguarding structure and training for parents, staff and, of course, students. Students should be engaged in this work and in policy development and roll out in an equal ratio to adults.
Heads suggest using up-to-date information and communications technology and security in the school ICT environment; ensuring staff, students and parents are clear on the law and people’s rights; and encouraging a transparent culture where children welcome parents and school staff interrogating their mobile devices as a matter of course. That is a challenge for parents, but we need to think about that in the context of an overall policy.
Heads also suggest developing clear, consistent procedures and guidance for investigating safeguarding, social media, sexual exploitation and mobile and online incidents, including the protection of staff investigating such incidents, while taking account of pupil privacy and so on; working with relevant organisations such as the police, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and others; and using pupil ICT champions to keep schools up to date with developments in social media and portable apps and to help inform e-safety curriculum developments.
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Lady refers to the difficulty with teenagers. Does she agree that we should perhaps look as a House at whether parents should have a legal duty to be aware of what their children are doing online, in the same way as we have legal duties to ensure that our children are not exposed to other dangers?
Ruth Cadbury
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting issue. As a parent of two young adults, I have always wondered why all sorts of people are required to do all sorts of things in respect of the children in their care, yet there seems to be no legal duty that a woman signs when she pops out a baby. I am sure that people far more legally qualified than I am can respond in detail to the hon. Gentleman’s interesting and pertinent question.
I have concluded my core points. We need to address online bullying and abuse with a whole raft of mixed approaches that include not only enforcement, criminal charges and policing but public policy and education policy solutions, so that victims are not criminalised.
John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I congratulate the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) on securing this debate and outlining at the beginning the homophobic and racist abuse and the horrors of child abuse that we often see on the internet. The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) described the many ways in which abuse can take place.
The hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) issued a stark warning that children were losing their ability to empathise which we all found striking and interesting. I was particularly happy to hear her description of her doorstep visits to trolls. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for the pathetic creatures when I imagined her turning up and remonstrating with them.
Members have made a variety of speeches describing their personal experiences. I was struck by the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) describing a victim’s terrifying experience online. Particularly moving, I thought, was my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) talking about her experiences of being at the receiving end of abuse from online cowards.
Today, we are all connected. We use the internet to conduct business, for entertainment and to connect with our friends through social media. Our mobile phones in our pockets ensure that we are available anytime, anywhere and that we can instantly share photos with family, friends and complete strangers. For the vast majority of people, that connectivity has enhanced our lives, but as the historian Melvin Kranzberg wrote in the first of his six laws of technology,
“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
As we have heard, online abuse is one of the negative consequences of advances in online technology.
While social media can be a platform to share a happy family photograph, it can also be a platform to share content intended to humiliate with as large an audience as possible. While an iPhone can be a helpful tool in keeping in touch with friends, it can also be an instrument through which an individual is harassed and intimidated. While Twitter can provide an opportunity for witty banter, as Members of this House well know, it can also be used by cowardly bullies hiding behind anonymity to send abuse. As the debate has shown, all political parties have sent out strong and clear messages that this behaviour must be strenuously tackled, and we must consider every possible method of dealing with it, including strengthening existing legislation.
Children and young people are often the first to embrace and adapt to changes in technology. However, that also means that they are more likely to be victims of online abuse. Much of that abuse can come from their peers, and it has been exacerbated by the use of social media and the widespread availability of smartphones with cameras. In late 2004, happy slapping became a youth craze throughout the United Kingdom—many people have forgotten about it, but it was covered widely in the tabloids at the time. It involved filming minor acts of violence, such as hitting or slapping a victim, and then circulating the videos via Bluetooth on mobile phones. However, it escalated into more serious assaults, sexual assaults and, in some instances, manslaughter. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have provided further platforms for cowards. The intention of such videos is clearly to humiliate and intimidate the victim, to make them feel small and worthless, and to share their misery with the world, increasing the feeling that the whole world is against them. Rightly, these videos are roundly condemned. They are removed—sometimes—by site administrators. They are sometimes, but not often enough, investigated by the police.
Other types of abuse are more subtle and more difficult to act against. Embarrassing pictures or videos, altered photos, or photos and videos taken without an individual’s permission can be widely shared without consent. Classic bullying behaviour can manifest itself much more easily online. Victims can be ridiculed and singled out in group messages, rumours can be spread quickly and widely, and victims can be excluded from online activity. The ability to go online does not create bullying, but it helps it to go unnoticed away from the classroom and the playground.
Similarly, those who are most often targeted by conventional bullying are also targeted by online abuse. In February 2016 the UK Safer Internet Centre published a study that found that 24% of those 13 to 18-year-olds surveyed had been targeted due to their gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or disability, or due to the fact that they were transgendered.
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful contribution. One key aspect of this abuse, which he has illustrated so well, is the ability for people on the internet to be anonymous. Is it time for the House to come to a view about whether we should allow internet anonymity to persist in this country?
John Nicolson
It is an interesting issue: do we have an entitlement to anonymity? Perhaps we do, and perhaps we should preserve that. However, I would have to think about that. My answer is I am not sure. I was interested in the suggestion by a Labour Member that Facebook and Twitter should use technology to identify certain troll words and that using them should result automatically in the suspension of the accounts concerned. Perhaps the Minister will address those issues, among others, in his speech, and perhaps he can go away and look at them later.
One in 25 of the young people who spoke about this issue in a variety of surveys said they were singled out for abuse all or most of the time. That is a horrendous thing for young people to have to deal with. Teenagers with disabilities, and especially teenagers from African-Caribbean, Asian, middle eastern and other minority groups, were much more likely to encounter cyber-bullying.
To target cyber-bullying north of the border, the Scottish Government have funded Respectme—an anti-bullying service that acts as a source of information for young people. It has created and made available publications to raise awareness of cyber-bullying. The service works particularly well with adults involved in the lives of children and young people, giving them the practical skills and confidence to deal with children who are bullied and those who bully others. Respectme is keen to stress that, no matter where bullying takes place, it needs to be challenged, and that is a message worth repeating: anyone suffering from bullying, whether online or not, must report it and stand up to it.
Online, children and young people are also in danger of sexual abuse. A recent study by UNICEF, which was published in June 2016, suggested that eight out of 10 18-year-olds worldwide believe they or their friends are in danger of being sexually abused or taken advantage of as a result of online activity. The ability to remain anonymous online, or to take on another identity, is a contributory factor; it leads to an increased likelihood of people receiving unwanted sexual comments, unsolicited explicit material or pressure to participate in sexual activity. As we have heard from many speakers today, that problem is also experienced by adult women, with applications such as Snapchat and Tinder often providing an easy way for men to harass them.
Another increasing phenomenon is revenge porn, which involves sharing private sexual images and recordings without consent and with the intention of causing harm. The revenge porn helpline has received almost 4,000 calls in the last year alone, with cases reported involving children as young as 11 years old. Furthermore, attempts to stigmatise women are extremely common. The think-tank Demos found that 10,000 tweets were sent from UK accounts in a single three-week period aggressively attacking individuals as a “slut” or a “whore”.
Women in public life are often prime targets for online abuse. In Scotland, the three largest political parties are led by women, two of them gay. All three women have to deal routinely with sexist, misogynistic and homophobic tweets. The Scottish Conservative party leader, Ruth Davidson, has suffered horrendous homophobic abuse, and has handled it with humour, honesty and courage.
Kit Malthouse
One revelation that has come out of the awful murder of Jo Cox is the amount of online abuse directed at Members of Parliament, but particularly female Members of Parliament—or, indeed, anybody who is not a heterosexual white male. Would it be appropriate for the parliamentary authorities to publish an annual report on the levels, content and types of abuse Members of Parliament receive? It comes as a surprise to most right-thinking members of the public to know that their Member of Parliament receives that kind of material.
John Nicolson
That is an absolutely excellent idea. One of the great things about this debate is that people have been able to share their experiences. I suspect that many Members—especially some of the men—are quite surprised to discover just how widespread the problem is, so that would be an excellent thing for the House to do.
In many ways, the online world has enhanced our democracy by allowing people to interact with politicians in a way they could not before. Robust political debate is part of our public life, and we must cherish it, even when it uses language we might not personally use. What cannot be tolerated, however, is people debasing political debate with threats of violence, insults and abuse based on misogyny, homophobia, sexism and racism.
Opposition to online abuse is something that unites all our political parties. However, it is not just politicians who suffer such online abuse when they are famous. High-profile television personalities, journalists, academics, actors and sports people are all subject to abuse, whether it is petty and crude or threatening and vicious.
Online, many people seem to lose a sense of themselves and say things that they would never dream of saying in person. Quite often when I get abuse, I make a point of writing to people to ask whether they can imagine saying such things to me in real life. Of course they cannot imagine it, so why on earth do they feel free to say it simply because it is online? However, hiding behind a pseudonym and a cartoon profile picture does not make the abuse any less real. We have a duty of care as politicians, and it is vital that we send out a strong message that online abuse is wrong always.
One clear message from this debate is that, as we have heard repeatedly, Twitter and Facebook are hopelessly inadequate when it comes to their response to online, and sometimes very violent, bullying. It seems that the House, across both sides and all parties, wants the Minister to tackle Facebook and Twitter on our behalf and, much more importantly, on behalf of all our constituents. I look forward to hearing what he has to say on the matter.
Mr Vaizey
Let us go for the 10-minute special, then.
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for calling this important debate. I was lucky enough to work with her when she was Secretary of State. She took on two important issues at that time: Leveson and the issue of press regulation, and equal marriage. She handled both with aplomb, and she has since shown the House how one transitions from such a position to a new role. She has taken a huge and leading role in the House on women and equalities issues. She has certainly pushed forward the important agenda of online abuse, so it is no surprise at all to find her leading this debate and setting out for the Government some very clear approaches and suggestions, which it behoves us to take seriously.
It is worth recalling that when the matter has been raised in the House—for example, when my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) first raised the question of children’s access to adult content online—it has resulted in action. Debates in this House may sometimes appear to be simply an exchange of views between Government and Members of the House, but, because this agenda is so fast moving, the House has a great deal of influence on the direction of Government policy. Without wishing to single out individuals too much, I have to say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke has pushed the matter forward, not least the change in legislation on revenge pornography last year.
It would be remiss of me to go through every speech that has been made. Some 18 or 19 hon. Members have made contributions, all of which have been serious and worth while. Because this was a lengthy and detailed debate, I appreciated the odd moment of light-heartedness, not least when my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) told us that she responds to online abuse with a picture of a kitten. That particularly appealed to me, because I have a picture, which is now well known, of a kitten sitting on my shoulder when I visited Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. I will use that in future to respond to my online trolls.
I was also amused when my right hon. Friend the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) complained that teenagers now live in a world in which they are surrounded by perfect people who are wonderful to look at. I wondered why he thought that that was a problem when we all exist in the perfect world of the Palace of Westminster, where people are charming and lovely, as we have particularly found during the last week or so.
Four clear issues emerged from the debate. Let me briefly pause to put them in context. The Government are, quite rightly, committed to an open internet. When I attend international forums, I find that it is very important that the UK, along with our allies, is committed to what we call the multi-stakeholder approach for internet governance. That involves civic society, business and Governments working together to keep the internet open and free. Authoritarian-inclined regimes would like to regulate the internet, restrict freedom of speech and clamp down on innovation. The Government of this country do, however, regard things that are illegal and wrong offline to be illegal and wrong online. Hon. Members have made the point that some people seem to believe that the rules of behaviour and the legal rules that we all live by in the physical world somehow do not apply on the internet. That is absolutely not the case.
The UK has led the way in approaching the issue from a perspective of self-regulation rather than legislation. Self-regulation works because it brings about partnerships and helps us to move forward more quickly. A good example is the creation of the Internet Watch Foundation, which was the first charity to focus on dealing with images of child sexual abuse. It is a model that has been copied around the world, and it became incredibly important in driving forward the recent work with search engines, such as Google, to make searching for and discovering images of child abuse online much, much more difficult. We have worked with the Internet Watch Foundation to ensure that internet service providers had the funding to increase their capacity, and we have worked with technology providers on the use of technology that enables images to be matched and traced, and that makes it easier to catch and trace perpetrators.
Similarly, by working with industry we were able to secure family-friendly filters; the default-on option means that people who log on must actively disable the filters that prevent harmful content from reaching, for example, young people. We have also worked with industry on an important and generously funded campaign, “Internet Matters”. The previous Labour Government set up the UK Council for Child Internet safety, which brings together 200 stakeholders who work on these issues. It has an important effect on driving forward policy. We continue to make progress on matters such as increasing police capability, the creation of the first Minister for Internet Safety and Security—my colleague Baroness Joanna Shields—and, with the Digital Economy Bill, the introduction of legislation to secure age verification for adult content.
As I have said, four clear issues that the Government should take forward emerged from the debate. First, although there was welcome praise for the Essex and Durham constabularies, there was an absolute recognition of the need to skill up the police force. We have the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and different arrangements in the national police service, but for cybercrime in general—it is often financial crime—and this kind of crime in particular, it should be possible to create specialist units with national capability.
The police should also think very hard about the people they recruit. There is no need for them to recruit only for conventional police training—people who can walk the beat or perform the traditional roles of policing; there is every opportunity to recruit people with specialist skills that may not be transferable to the rest of the police service but who could be recruited relatively quickly to do this work.
There was a clear call from the House for legislative clarity, both clarity in defining online abuse and clarity about the myriad different Acts and statutes that come to bear in this area. The new Government under the new Prime Minister will want to make clarifying and consolidating that legislation a priority. That was a clear call from the House that must be taken forward.
The issue of anonymity was raised, with the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (John Nicolson) debating whether it should come under our consideration. I would not want to legislate to remove anonymity. Whether to allow anonymous users should be a matter for individual platforms, just as I would not require the Royal Mail to refuse to handle any letter that had been sent anonymously. That kind of interference would be unjustified,
That point leads me on to the role of platforms. It is interesting to consider that in the online world we now suddenly have companies that in many respects are bigger and more influential than many nation states—Facebook has a population of 1.2 billion, and Twitter has a population of 300 million—yet to a certain extent are left to their own devices to create their own rules, society and regulation, without the role of Government or of civic society as a whole being taken into account. Platforms must work with Governments and civic society to create rules. I support my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke in her call for something I have been keen to make progress on, namely a clear code of conduct within the UK that clarifies what constitutes online abuse, and, even more importantly for users, gives clarity on the rapid remedies available to people who are abused in this way. We have heard some really horrific examples, but of course we all know of those examples because we see them day in, day out, either on the news or because we ourselves or our friends are being attacked.
Kit Malthouse
Will the Minister address the specific point raised by a number of Members about whether there should be legislation to place specific duties—in particular, a duty on child protection—on some of the very large companies that he mentioned? There was a general theme in contributions from across the House that we would either like existing legislation to be consolidated in one Bill that we could then look at in the round or we would like measures on this issue to be brought forward in the Digital Economy Bill. Is any of that likely to happen?
Mr Vaizey
I should have said earlier that the views of my hon. Friend need to be taken very seriously. He has very serious experience from his time as deputy mayor for policing in London. I listen to him very seriously indeed. How can I put this? I want to get the Digital Economy Bill through the House. It has a specific focus, so I would be cautious about inviting him or any other Member to load additional responsibilities on to it, particularly on issues that need careful thought and planning. But I would certainly welcome discussions with him and would never rule out appropriate regulation to push the responsibility for some of the appalling abuse that we see day in, day out on to social media. It is not enough—this also applies to issues such as intellectual property and the online theft of music and film—to view platforms as passive vehicles. They are extremely wealthy companies that rely on a large number of users to generate the advertising that creates their shareholders’ wealth. There needs to be partnership, and I do not rule out regulation.
Having said that, given a post-Brexit situation in which we are keen to encourage inward investment, I do not want to frighten the horses of companies that provide a great deal of direct and indirect employment in the UK. We need to work with the companies, and we need clear guidelines on, and definitions of, online abuse. Even more importantly, we need very quick reactions, so that all of us as constituency MPs do not have to sit in surgeries with people who are clearly utterly distressed because of online material—their lives are sometimes in absolute pieces—and cannot get any adequate response from the platform hosting it.
This has been an extremely helpful and useful debate, and I look forward to moving seamlessly into the next debate, which I am also responding to.