Oral Answers to Questions

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Feryal Clark]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for drawing attention to the work of the Mark Sommerville Foundation in this important area. Government funders are investing in MND research to accelerate progress. Let me give just one example. Through UK Research and Innovation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the Government are investing £6 million in the MND translational accelerator, led by Dementias Platform UK. The aim of the funded projects is to accelerate the development of treatment for MND.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

It is good to hear that there is continuing investment in the search for therapies and indeed cures to deal with this horrific disease, but even if therapies do emerge, one of the frustrations in getting them to patients may be the inability of scientists to obtain access to clinical trials. In “Life Sciences Vision”, published in 2021, a number of groups combined to look into access to clinical trials in the UK and the possibility of increasing the number of such trials, but acceleration has not been good. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for life sciences, and one of the comments I hear most frequently in the industry is about the need for a more focused effort in this regard. Would the Minister consider establishing a clinical trials taskforce in her Department to drive this important work forward?

Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), from the far and beautiful north-west, has made an extremely strong case for the original Bill that he envisaged bringing before this House. I am afraid that today I will speak not to celebrate progress, but to lament the gutting of what could have been a landmark Bill.

Sadly, this Government, like the last—notwithstanding the Online Safety Act 2023—have dithered, diluted and capitulated, and I am afraid that what remains is a hollowed-out gesture and an opportunity missed. As the hon. Gentleman said, the evidence is strong, the damage is profound and the public support is overwhelming. Documentary after documentary details the significant damage being done to our young people on a daily basis. Parent after parent in millions of homes across the land is screaming for help and assistance from the Government. As the hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out, we are allowing smoking for the brain in our youngest children, with the long-term impact that that will have. I am afraid to say that in the face of all that overwhelming evidence and momentum, the hon. Gentleman has been done over in bringing forward this Bill. When we look at what we are presented with, as I said, we have nothing more than a gesture.

The first point is that the CMO should bring forward guidance. As the hon. Gentleman surely knows, there is already plenty of guidance out there for parents—the NSPCC has online guidance, as does Internet Matters. Lots of organisations, including schools themselves, are issuing guidance for parents. In truth, the CMO producing guidance within 12 months will be no more effective than those organisations have been, and possibly less. As the hon. Gentleman himself pointed out, we are dealing with a collective action issue. An organisation can issue guidance, and a small percentage of parents may pick up that guidance and observe it, but if the percentage is below 20%, so strong is the peer pressure and so addictive is what we are dealing with that those parents end up in screaming matches with their teenage children on a daily basis.

[Dr Arthur]

By explaining that there are so many fragmented and—no doubt—contradictory sources of information, surely the right hon. Gentleman is making the argument for there to be a single source of advice to parents right across the United Kingdom? Surely this Bill will create an authoritative set of guidance for parents that they can share with their children.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am not convinced that the guidance created by this Bill will be any more authoritative than that created by the NSPCC or by Internet Matters. The point I was making was not necessarily that the guidance is going to be pivotal, but that we need to get to a critical mass of observance before guidance is likely to have any impact. The original Bill was likely to do that, not least through the ban in schools, which created a nucleus of clear space for children that could be translated into homes. Many Members may have heard on the BBC this morning a short piece on the Fulham boys school, which has an absolute ban on even bringing a smartphone to school. That ban during the school period has resulted in the periods before and after school also being phone-free, and therefore much more social and beneficial to those pupils.

[Chris Bryant]

I urge the right hon. Gentleman to be slightly less sceptical about the value of CMO advice. As he knows, I have campaigned for many years on acquired brain injury, particularly in relation to concussion or sub-concussive events in sport. It was a very significant change when, under the previous Administration, the British Government brought forward specific advice in relation to concussion in sport. That has changed practices in lots of sports around the country, and I am hopeful that authoritative advice of this kind could make a significant difference.

[Kit Malthouse]

I would be willing to accept the hon. Gentleman’s encouragement if this were advice to schools, but it is not; it is advice to parents and carers. If there were going to be authoritative advice for schools, as well as other organisations that have charge of children—scout troops, children’s clubs, and other publicly funded organisations that look after children—I would have said, “Possibly,” even though there is to be a 12-month delay before the CMO tells us stuff we already know, as the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington pointed out.

The second step is for the Government to publish a plan for research within 12 months. That is not the conclusion of research, and there is no time limit—just a plan, a vague aspiration that we should have a plan, with no commencement, no sense of budget and no idea of when it might come. I am sorry to say that the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington has been sold a cosmetic pup.

The third and final point is that the Government have to publish this “assessment”—whatever that may be—which, as far as I can see, is fundamentally to tell us something we already know, and which the hon. Gentleman has illustrated extremely vividly. We should all be furious about the delay and prevarication that is being injected into what could have been a huge step forward for parents and children.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I am one of the people who is very angry about this, and my right hon. Friend is a co-sponsor of this Bill, so his disappointment must be even greater. However, does he agree that one way forward would be for this Bill, with its present inadequate drafting, to get its Second Reading and go into Committee? The people’s representatives in Committee would then be able to restore the Bill into something closer to what they expected.

[Kit Malthouse]

I was going to come on to that later, but my hon. Friend is completely right.

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

I support very much what the right hon. Gentleman is saying about the need for urgent action. What conversations were had before 4 July last year about tightening up legislation around smartphones, because this problem did not start on the day of the general election, but was there when his party was in government?

[Kit Malthouse]

As I said at the start of my speech, I lament the dithering and delay by the previous Government, too. There were attempts by Back Benchers—and I was one for the last two years of the Government—to change the Online Safety Bill to take exactly these sort of measures. That was rebuffed by Ministers at that stage, and I regret that completely. To me, this is a national, if not international, emergency, about which we are being far too passive and complacent. I am not necessarily making a political point about this; it is about the weight of Government and, frankly, the weight and influence of big tech against the health and welfare of our children. That applies to Governments of all stripes in all countries across the world.

It is not just we in this Chamber who should be furious. There are plenty of people out there in the country who should be furious, because two key things were promised in the original Bill. The first was an absolute school ban. All Members will know that when they go to visit schools, one of the features coming through strongly when we talk to headteachers is the increase in parental aggression towards schools. The source of conflict at the school gate is around all sorts of issues, not least the use of phones in schools. By advocating a complete blanket ban on phones in schools, we would be removing at one stroke a source of conflict between parent and teacher, as well as at the same time creating completely clear space for those kids to concentrate on their education. In school upon school across the country, they are bringing in their own policies, often in the teeth of opposition, whether parental or from children. Their life is made immeasurably more difficult by not having an absolute ban.

The second thing that was promised and the second reason why we should be furious was the raising of the digital age of consent. By not including that in the Bill, we are consenting to those tech companies—as they have admitted in meetings in the run-up to this Bill—using children’s data to addict them to their services. We know that happens, and we see it happening. Anybody who has a teenage child and has tried desperately to move them off from cradling this precious phone at the dinner table or even from watching TV at the same time will see how they cannot get away from their phone and will realise the addictive nature. The fact that neither of those two steps is now in the Bill is, I am afraid, deeply lamentable.

It feels to me as though the Government have capitulated to big tech. I had a look online to see—I am not casting aspersions—but it would be helpful if the Minister could tell us in his remarks what meetings he had with big tech companies in the run-up to this Bill, and whether he has consulted or spoken to them. [Interruption.] The Minister is indicating zero, and that is useful to know, but I cannot then understand why the Government have pressured the new Member for Whitehaven and Workington to produce what is, frankly, a cosmetic pup, betraying our children and capitulating to big tech. I am afraid that this Bill is a shell of what it could have been, and as a result is yet another missed opportunity to improve the lives of our young people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes]

The Education Committee will certainly continue to take this issue extremely seriously and to monitor what happens, and I will say a little about that in a moment.

We know that screen time is quite literally rewiring young brains, resulting in lower cognitive abilities and affecting language acquisition, critical thinking, social skills and attention span.

When the Government have evidence of harm, they have a duty to act. The point of legislation in this case is its power to change societal norms in a way that will make a difference to parents and professionals who are currently struggling to limit the harms of screen time, but lack the back-up to do so. There are many comparable examples, with smoking and seatbelts being the most obvious, in which the evidence of harm became clear but the debate raged for many years, with counter-arguments against legislation.

[Kit Malthouse]

As the hon. Lady says, the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) has done an enormous amount of work, and it is obviously desirable for the Government to act in the face of evidence. Does she think that the Bill, as negotiated with the Government, constitutes action?

[Helen Hayes]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for helping me out at a difficult moment. I have now found the correct place in my speech, and I will tell him what I believe should happen next.

The debate about both smoking and seatbelts raged for years, with much controversy at the time. Some were demanding higher and higher levels of proof, while others argued that the matter could be dealt with simply through guidance and through individuals’ choosing to change their behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

I am pleased to speak in support of the Bill. I must start by declaring an interest: I am a mother of three children who enjoy nothing more than staring at their screens day in, day out—if they could, they would be on them 24/7. No longer are our children clamouring to go out and play or to see their friends; instead, they want to do everything through a screen. They want to watch endless YouTube videos. I never realised that the unpacking of a toy or slime making could hold such interest. It seems that they take their joy in watching others do things online—even, rather bizarrely, playing computer games—instead of actually doing them in the real world.

I would be a hypocrite if I did not call out my own behaviour on this front. I, too, am addicted to my phone. Yes, I need it for this job, so I can justify some of my use, but I often find myself endlessly doomscrolling, and I am too embarrassed to tell the House how many hours I spend staring at it every week. At least my addiction started when I was a fully developed adult, after a childhood of play and socialisation when I learned much-needed life skills. This generation of children is not so lucky.

The huge amount of time spent online is incredibly damaging in so many ways. It is no coincidence that we see a mental health crisis in our young people at the same time as mass adoption of smartphones and access to social media. Some may underplay the importance of social media and screens in the challenges we face as a society, and indeed it can be difficult to conclusively prove the role of one particular factor in the effects we are seeing, but I suggest that when it comes to our children, we should always err on the side of caution and protect them from potentially harmful influences. In a recent survey, social media and excessive screen time was ranked as the top issue affecting children’s mental wellbeing. To put that in context, it was ranked higher than alcohol and bullying.

Another significant risk to mental health is exposure to harmful online content. I am incredibly concerned about that, especially given the proliferation of extreme pornography, harmful content and unrealistic body images. If children spend all their time in this fantasy world that is completely disjointed from reality, of course it will change how they view people, relationships and the world in general. That is supported by Ofcom’s 2024 research, which showed that older teens are finding it harder to distinguish the real from the fake online. The more mundane things in life that do not trigger a dopamine hit seem an even less appealing way to spend time to a child jacked up on likes and shares. Children’s attention spans are getting shorter, and they have an ever-increasing need for higher levels of stimulation. Is it any wonder that our children seem less interested in reading a book or baking a cake nowadays?

The evidence from Health Professionals for Safer Screens shows that children who routinely spend extended periods on their smartphones have poorer eyesight, inhibited speech and language development, interrupted sleep, and rising rates of anxiety. We are allowing our children to become addicts. Social media is designed with exactly that in mind. It is meant to be addictive and compelling. It wants users to stay online for prolonged periods and to keep engaging with content. Those of us who use it ourselves know this all to be true, so how on earth do we expect our children to manage and moderate appropriately?

Ofcom’s 2024 research showed that the overall use of social media sites or apps among five to seven-year-olds had increased year on year. Online gaming among that group had also increased significantly, as had the watching of livestreamed content. Under current data protection law, the age at which children can access information society services—ISS—is 13. ISS includes most social media platforms and content streaming services. It is important to acknowledge that the Online Safety Act 2023 introduced protections for children by ensuring that online platforms will have to remove illegal content such as child sexual abuse material, prevent children from accessing harmful content—for example, that encouraging suicide, self-harm or bullying—and introduce age-checking measures to restrict access to pornographic material. Those are all very welcome improvements, but they need to be put in place at pace and be effectively enforced.

I commend the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for all his work on this important topic. I will do all I can to support him in making the online world safer for our children. The Bill is an important precursor to the myriad changes needed in this area, and I know that many parents will support him in calling for the digital age of consent to be looked at again. While the Bill does not call for the age limit to be raised to 16, it does call for the UK’s chief medical officer to look at this important issue in detail and, ultimately, issue a statement on whether it should be raised.

Some 75% of Brits now back raising the minimum age from 13 to 16, as per a recent survey by More in Common, for all the reasons that have been raised today, and 129,000 people signed an e-petition calling for social media companies to be banned from letting children under 16 create social media accounts. It is past time for tech companies—and Members of this House—to take responsibility for keeping our children and young people safe.

I am not normally in favour of blanket bans, and I often talk about the importance of parents and carers taking responsibility for their children. However, in this instance, I deviate a little. As a parent who is wrangling with this exact issue myself, I know how difficult it is to tell a child that they cannot do something that every single other child in their class is doing. If their group of friends interacts only online, what are the consequences for my child if I prohibit them from joining in? Isolation? Loneliness? Loss of self-esteem? There are very real costs that should not be underestimated, which is why the state needs to step in. Members will not often hear me say this, but the state needs to step in and remove the option for all, helping parents across the country who want the best for their children without the downsides.

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend vividly illustrates the problem with this kind of collective action and peer pressure. Has she reflected on the fact that it is not just the addictive nature of the application that is pulling in our kids, but the fact that they are free, and therefore everybody is encouraged to get them? We then get 100% coverage, and it is very hard to deny them to our child, if they will be the only child without.

[Rebecca Paul]

I concur with everything my right hon. Friend says. It is completely accessible to all our children, so it is very hard for one child to be kept separate from it. That is why it is important that we address it.

However, increasing the digital age of consent is just the first step—we have so much more to do. We also need to ban smartphones in schools for children under the age of 16. On a typical workday, 42% of older teenagers say their smartphone is distracting them from schoolwork, and half say that social media has distracted them enough to impact their grades. Notably, only 11% of schools are genuinely smartphone free, and children at these schools get GCSE results one to two grades higher, so there is clearly a big upside to banning smartphones in schools. I urge the Government to seriously consider implementing this much needed restriction, which would be a game changer, protecting children and improving educational outcomes in one fell swoop. Our schools need this ban in statute, not just in guidance, in order to be able to effectively police and enforce it. I pay tribute to Smartphone Free Childhood for all its work to raise awareness on this important issue.

In closing, I hope that Members will support the Bill today, which would move us forward in our mission to protect our children from an increasingly insidious online realm that they are simply not equipped to navigate. I also hope that this is just the beginning, and that in moving forward we will see the digital age of consent raised to 16 and a ban on smartphones in school. The value of those two changes alone would be huge for our society, and would safeguard the wellbeing of this and future generations of children. I cannot think of anything more important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Our children’s use of phones and social media give us many things to worry about, but broadly speaking they are grouped into three categories.

The first is about content, going from pornography and violence and the insidious effects of curated lives, influencers and celebs on our children and their sense of self-worth, their body image and so on through to dodgy news and views propagated across the internet not by worth, let alone veracity, but by engagement and likes. All of those things have vortexes that children can get sucked deeper and deeper into.

The second is about contact. Contact includes, in the worst cases, child abuse and the generation of child sexual abuse material, and goes through to, at a lower level, contact that can be from other children, such as what we call in this House cyber-bullying, although no child ever uses that phrase; they just talk about people being very mean to each other online.

The third is about the sheer amount of children’s time that gets sucked into these activities. It is the compounding factor, because it is the thing that makes the other two things, content and contact, worse and more risky. It also has an effect on children’s sleep, on their concentration and even on their physical development, and it crowds out the other things that we want children to be doing and that children themselves want to be doing, when they do actually do them. If we ever do get a child away from their phone for a full weekend, they talk about how wonderful the experience was with their friends.

The Online Safety Act 2023 did some good things on content and on contact. There was more to do, but it made some good progress. We have a lot more to do, in particular on the topic of time and the addictiveness of social media, and that is where I think the work of the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) has been incredibly valuable. I commend him on all his work in the lead up to this point and his use of convening power to bring together so many individuals and organisations. Those conversations, some of which I had the opportunity to attend, covered a huge range. Obviously the Bill we have in front of us today is, shall we say, somewhat thinner than the Bill envisaged.

[Kit Malthouse]

I also attended events that the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington pulled together. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the strong characteristic that came out of all of them was deep and profound anger among parents about what has been allowed to develop?

[Damian Hinds]

I think that is right. The other thing I was struck by in some of the sessions was the great unity of views. Whether it was trade unions, charities, parent groups, doctors or parents, there was a great commonality of view about what needed to be done.

I understand what happens sometimes with private Members’ Bills and the need to make progress and to have Government support, but I say to the Government that this is a huge missed opportunity. If the Minister looks behind him, he will see all his colleagues who have rearranged their Fridays and rearranged their surgeries and all their appointments because they believe in this subject. He should heed the list that his hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington read out of all the organisations that came together in support of action in this area. It is so worth doing, and we have made good progress with the Online Safety Act, but there is further to go.

There are things we can do with a private Member’s Bill that it is harder sometimes to do with Government legislation, because of the party political controversies that come in. This is a missed opportunity, because this may well be the only private Member’s Bill with a good chance of success in this area, being at the top of the ballot, in this entire Parliament.

The Bill as drafted is unlikely to require this House to divide, because there is not much in it that anyone could disagree on. I will, if I may, focus my comments on the things that the Bill envisages, such as the CMO’s advice for parents on the use of smartphones and social media, and the plan for research that the Secretary of State will prepare on the effect of the use of social media on children and the appropriateness and effectiveness of the so-called digital age of consent. I will say one very simple thing to the Minister about that research: the evidence is not perfect today; it will not be perfect in one year; it will never, ever be perfect. If we hang around waiting for perfect evidence, we will never act in the way that we should. Why is it not perfect? Because this is a phenomenon that has happened across the entire world at the same time. There is no control group.

Given that this is such a huge topic, the studies that there are, which try to narrow it down to something manageable, tend to end up looking at either Facebook or Twitter, neither of which is particularly relevant for teenagers. When we have proxy studies, they are generally inadequate. For phone use in schools, studies tend to look at a school that has a phone ban and a school that does not. That is a totally invalid scientific comparison, because there could be all sorts of other things going on, and the sort of school that is likely to do well in GCSEs is also likely to bring in a phone ban, so we cannot prove the direction of causality.

People will also tell us that there has not been enough time, because the technology is constantly developing. It may have been around for 20 years or so, but the current version of it has only been around for 18 months, so there has not been time to say conclusively what the effects are. None of that is about to change. The evidence will continue to be imperfect.

However, the evidence that we do have is pretty clear. We know, as the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who chairs the Education Committee, mentioned, that there can be some benefit from relatively small amounts of screen time. The 2019 programme for international student assessment—PISA —study covered this in some detail, looking at multiple countries. It talked about a “Goldilocks” effect, whereby about an hour of screen time a day seemed to be correlated with increased wellbeing. But the same study found that in almost every country studied, with the fascinating exception of the Dominican Republic, high levels of internet usage were associated with lower levels of life satisfaction. There are lots of other studies, which colleagues have referred to, that look at happiness, quality of relationships, eyesight, sleep, concentration and so on.

Then there is the rising prevalence of mental ill health in young people. Often, when people look at the numbers on mental ill health, particularly in teenagers, they reach immediately for their preferred explanation for why teenagers are having these difficulties, and sometimes it gets quite political. It is important to note that the rise in teenage mental ill health is not a uniquely British phenomenon. On the two main measures of mental wellbeing used in the 2021 UNICEF-Gallup “Changing Childhood” study—“How often do you experience feeling worried, nervous or anxious?” and “How often do you experience feeling depressed or having little interest in doing things?”—the UK was broadly in line with the average of 21 countries, including France, Germany and the US. Actually, it was slightly better on most of the measures.

There are ample other studies from around the world, including the World Health Organisation’s multi-country “Health Behaviour in School-aged Children” study, France’s EDC—I will not attempt the language—study, which is quite a long time series, and the shorter time series in the United States, “Trends in Mental Wellbeing”. The best study of all is the NHS’s “Mental Health of Children and Young People in England”. I say in passing to the Minister that I do not think we have yet had a commitment from the Department of Health and Social Care to carry on with that time series. It is incredibly valuable, and that is a relatively simple thing that the Government could do.

I have said that the rise in teenage mental ill health is not a uniquely British phenomenon. It is also not only about covid. A lot of the studies in recent years have set out to answer the question, “What happened to children’s mental health during covid?” That is a perfectly legitimate question, but if we look at the shape of the curve, it looks very unlikely that it started in covid, and in the NHS study, it carries on growing long after covid, up until the most recent wave.

The Minister said this in a debate in Westminster Hall the other day, and he is right that it is entirely invalid to infer causality from correlation, but the Bradford Hill criteria, which his hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington mentioned, are relevant, particularly the criteria of consistency, strength, plausibility, coherence and analogy, as well as temporality. In any event, it seems odd that we allow something to happen to our children because we cannot 100% prove that it causes harm, rather than because we can prove that it is safe. That is not the way in which we deal with children’s toys, food or medicine.

I turn the question around and say to people who query the direction of causality: with something like self-harm, are you honestly trying to tell me that incidents of self-harm in our country are nothing to do with the prevalence and normalisation of imagery around self-harm on social media? As I say, I worry that if we continue to seek perfect information, we simply will not act as we should. I have pages more to say, but I will not say them, because I know that many colleagues wish to speak.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Ashley Fox]

I agree with the Minister that often a Bill will contain something that is merely declaratory. Has he ever seen a Bill that is wholly declaratory and contains nothing that actually requires legislation?

[Kit Malthouse]

As I think we all know, the Government are likely to adjourn the debate on the Bill. Will my hon. Friend’s case be made if the case for adjournment is that the Minister commits that he will go and do these things anyway, and therefore the legislation is unnecessary?

[Sir Ashley Fox]

My right hon. Friend makes a very good point.

I maintain that this Bill is a waste of time. I will vote for it today, if we get the opportunity. Unfortunately, I understand that the debate is going to be adjourned, which suggests that the Government are not that serious about taking it forward. I will vote with a heavy heart, because I really think the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington could have achieved so much more if he had had the courage of his convictions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. The use of a mobile phone as another form of aggression is a very disturbing part of the trend we have seen. She is quite right that we need to consider action in that field.

The hon. Member for Esher and Walton referred to services that are “inherently addictive by design”. I think there is actually a contradiction in terms there. They are not inherently addictive; they are addictive by design. Those are two quite different things. We should strive to achieve no services provided for children being addictive by design, which is precisely one of the things that the Government are determined about.

I should say to the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) that I indicated earlier that I had had no meetings with tech by making a zero with my fingers, but that is not quite true. I had a meeting a few months ago with Baroness Jones and TikTok, although I expressed as strongly as many Members have in this debate the kind of views that they have in relation to the operation of TikTok. It is not that I have been convinced by TikTok—if anything, we were trying to put the argument to it about the need for responsible activity in this field.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to the Minister for that clarification. In his negotiations with the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), he will have consulted and taken direction from No. 10. One of the concerns, given that he has instituted an investigation into the impact of UK legislation on American tech firms, is that President Trump might be upset if we were to take these kinds of steps. How much of that has been a consideration in him effectively filleting this Bill?

[Chris Bryant]

The right hon. Gentleman is beginning to subscribe to conspiracy theories. I have had no role in any negotiations with my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington or with Downing Street on these matters, and I have not taken into consideration anything in relation to what Donald Trump might think about this field.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Dan Tomlinson) said that he is 32, which is obviously very difficult to believe. He referred to smartphones in 2007, but 3G was launched in 2001. I am slightly conscious that when I was at school, the only thing we were rowing about was whether we were allowed to take electronic calculators into O-level maths exams, so I sometimes feel a little out of my depth with all these young expressions of interest.

[Kit Malthouse]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Chris Bryant]

I bet this is not a point of order.

[Kit Malthouse]

It is a point of order. Madam Deputy Speaker, I wonder if you could give us guidance as to whether we actually have the right Minister responding to this Bill. If there were negotiations with the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) about the Bill, one would expect the Minister who had conducted those negotiations, and who was therefore able to speak to the decisions that have been made, to appear at the Dispatch Box. Have we got the right person?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order. However, that is not a matter for the Chair. It is entirely up to the Government to decide which Minister they put up to speak.

AstraZeneca

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Regional mayors have an important role to play in helping bring investment into key areas. I am happy to ensure that the meetings that my hon. Friend has asked for take place. This has to be a joint venture between everyone. I want to underline that it is not the case that AstraZeneca is leaving the United Kingdom, or that it does not have confidence in the United Kingdom, because it clearly does—it invests more than £2.5 billion every year into the UK economy. It is a key partner of the UK and will continue to be so.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

What a shame the Minister has chosen to substitute aggression for what should be regret for what is, whichever way he paints it, obviously a terrible failure of negotiation. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for life sciences, and I can tell the House that this is a terrible blow not just for Speke and Liverpool—the city of my birth—but for our vaccination development environment generally. The lack of this production facility means that there will be no pull for vaccination development in the UK and the various technologies that come with it. What will he do to replace that?

[Chris Bryant]

Of course we feel regretful. We would have preferred to get this over the line but that was not possible, in large measure because AstraZeneca decided that it did not add up in whatever particular way for it. The right hon. Gentleman makes one very good point: we want a manufacturing provision in the country, and my colleague Lord Vallance is working on that very closely with the sector.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Q7. During the election campaign, the now Prime Minister made a hell of a lot of promises, some of which I am sure he will remember. Of particular importance to my constituents in Andover and North West Hampshire was a promise made on 18 June during a campaign visit to Basingstoke, when he made an unequivocal, unconditional commitment to rebuild our local hospital. Is that a promise on which we can rely?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising that; it is obviously of huge importance to his constituents and he is right to do so. As he knows, we are reviewing the programme. The programme that the last Government put in place for 40 new hospitals had a number of flaws: they were not all hospitals, they were not new, and they were not funded, so we are reviewing it. He is right to raise this matter, and I will ensure that he has a meeting with the relevant Minister to discuss the development in his constituency. It will matter to his constituents who are listening to this, and it is important that they know where the failure lay.

Science, Innovation and Technology

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Ministerial Corrections

The following is an extract from Second Reading of the Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill on 17 April 2023.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

… May I take the Minister back to the subject of compliance costs? I understand that the projected simplification will result in a reduction in those costs, but does she acknowledge that a new regime, or changes to the current regime, will kick off an enormous retraining exercise for businesses, many of which have already been through that process recently and reached a settled state of understanding of how they should be managing data? Even a modest amount of tinkering instils a sense among British businesses, particularly small businesses, that they must put everyone back through the system, at enormous cost. Unless the Minister is very careful and very clear about the changes being made, she will create a whole new industry for the next two or three years, as every data controller in a small business—often doing this part time alongside their main job—has to be retrained.

[Julia Lopez]

We have been very cognisant of that risk in developing our proposals. As I said in my opening remarks, we do not wish to upset the apple cart and create a compliance headache for businesses, which would be entirely contrary to the aims of the Bill. A small business that is currently compliant with the GDPR will continue to be compliant under the new regime. However, we want to give businesses flexibility in regard to how they deliver that compliance, so that, for instance, they do not have to employ a data protection officer.

[Official Report, 17 April 2023, Vol. 731, c. 70.]

Letter of correction from the Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure:

An error has been identified in the speech I gave on Second Reading of the Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill.

The correct statement should have been:

Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Julia Lopez]

I am delighted, in turn, to hear my hon. Friend call me the Secretary of State—I am grateful for the promotion, even if it is not a reality. I know how passionate he feels about open data, which is a subject we have discussed before. As I said earlier, I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade is present, because this morning he announced that a new council will be driving forward this work. As my hon. Friend knows, this is not necessarily about legislation being in place—I think the Bill gives him what he wants—but about that sense of momentum, and about onboarding new sectors into this regime and not being slow in doing so. As he says, a great deal of economic benefit can be gained from this, and we do not want it to be delayed any further.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Let me first draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Let me also apologise for missing the Minister’s opening remarks—I was taken by surprise by the shortness of the preceding statement and had to rush to the Chamber.

May I take the Minister back to the subject of compliance costs? I understand that the projected simplification will result in a reduction in those costs, but does she acknowledge that a new regime, or changes to the current regime, will kick off an enormous retraining exercise for businesses, many of which have already been through that process recently and reached a settled state of understanding of how they should be managing data? Even a modest amount of tinkering instils a sense among British businesses, particularly small businesses, that they must put everyone back through the system, at enormous cost. Unless the Minister is very careful and very clear about the changes being made, she will create a whole new industry for the next two or three years, as every data controller in a small business—often doing this part time alongside their main job—has to be retrained.

[Julia Lopez]

We have been very cognisant of that risk in developing our proposals. As I said in my opening remarks, we do not wish to upset the apple cart and create a compliance headache for businesses, which would be entirely contrary to the aims of the Bill. A small business that is currently compliant with the GDPR will continue to be compliant under the new regime. However, we want to give businesses flexibility in regard to how they deliver that compliance, so that, for instance, they do not have to employ a data protection officer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I am delighted to speak in support of this long-awaited Bill. It is a necessary piece of legislation to learn the lessons from GDPR and look at how we can improve the system, both to make it easier for businesses to work with and to give users and citizens the certainty they need about how their data will be processed and used.

In bringing forward new measures, the Bill in no way suggests that we are looking to move away from our data adequacy agreements with the European Union. Around the world, in north America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere in the far east, we see Governments looking at developing trusted systems for sharing and using data and for allowing businesses to process data across international borders, knowing that those systems may not be exactly the same, but they work to the same standards and with similar levels of integrity. That is clearly the direction that the whole world wants to move in and we should play a leading role in that.

I want to talk briefly about an important area of the Bill: getting the balance between data rights and data safety and what the Bill refers to as the “legitimate interest” of a particular business. I should also note that this Bill, while important in its own right, sits alongside other legislation—some of it to be introduced in this Session and some of it already well on its way through the Parliamentary processes—dealing with other aspects of the digital world. The regulation of data is an aspect of digital regulation; it is in some ways the fuel that powers the digital experience and is relevant to other areas of digital life as well.

To take one example, we have already established and implemented the age-appropriate design code for children, which principally addresses the way data is gathered from children online and used to design services and products that they use. As this Bill goes through its parliamentary stages, it is important that we understand how the age-appropriate design code is applied as part of the new data regime, and that the safeguards set out in that code are guaranteed through the Bill as well.

There has been a lot of debate, as has already been mentioned, about companies such as TikTok. There is a concern that engineers who work for TikTok in China, some of whom may be members of the Chinese Communist party, have access to UK user data that may not be stored in China, but is accessed from China, and are using that data to develop products. There is legitimate concern about oversight of that process and what that data might be used for, particularly in a country such as China.

However, there is also a question about data, because one reason the TikTok app is being withdrawn from Government devices around the world is that it is incredibly data-acquisitive. It does not just analyse how people use TikTok and from that create data profiles of users to determine what content to recommend to them, although that is a fundamental part of the experience of using it; it is also gathering, as other big apps do, data from what people do on other apps on the same device. People may not realise that they have given consent, and it is certainly not informed consent, for companies such as TikTok to access data from what they do on other apps, not just when they are TikTok.

It is a question of having trusted systems for how data can be gathered, and giving users the right to opt out of such data systems more easily. Some users might say, “I’m quite happy for TikTok or Meta to have that data gathered about what I do across a range of services.” Others may say, “No, I only want them to see data about what I do when I am using their particular service, not other people’s.”

The Online Safety Bill is one of the principal ways in which we are seeking to regulate AI now. There is debate among people in the tech sectors; a letter was published recently, co-signed by a number of tech executives, including Elon Musk, to say that we should have a six-month pause in the development of AI systems, particularly for large language models. That suggests a problem in the near future of very sophisticated data systems that can make decisions faster than a human can analyse them.

People such as Eric Schmidt have raised concerns about AI in defence systems, where an aggressive system could make decisions faster than a human could respond to them, to which we would need an AI system to respond and where there is potentially no human oversight. That is a frightening scenario in which we might want to consider moratoriums and agreements, as we have in other areas of warfare such as the use of chemical weapons, that we will not allow such systems to be developed because they are so difficult to control.

If we look at the application of that sort of technology closer to home and some of the cases most referenced in the Online Safety Bill, for example the tragic death of the teenager Molly Russell, we see that what was driving the behaviour of concern was data gathered about a user to make recommendations to that person that were endangering their life. The Online Safety Bill seeks to regulate that practice by creating codes and responsibilities for businesses, but that behaviour is only possible because of the collection of data and decisions made by the company on how the data is processed.

This is where the Bill also links to the Government’s White Paper on AI, and this is particularly important: there must be an onus on companies to demonstrate that their systems are safe. The onus must not just be on the user to demonstrate that they have somehow suffered as a consequence of that system’s design. The company should have to demonstrate that they are designing systems with people’s safety and their rights in mind—be that their rights as a worker and a citizen, or their rights to have certain safeguards and protections over how their data is used.

Companies creating datasets should be able to demonstrate to the regulator what data they have gathered, how that data is being trained and what it is being used for. It should be easy for the regulator to see and, if the regulator has concerns up-front, it should be able to raise them with the company. We must try to create that shift, particularly on AI systems, in how systems are tested before they are deployed, with both safety and the principles set out in the legislation in mind.

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend makes a strong point about safety being designed, but a secondary area of concern for many people is discrimination—that is, the more data companies acquire, the greater their ability to discriminate. For example, in an insurance context, we allow companies to discriminate on the basis of experience or behaviour; if someone has had a lot of crashes or speeding fines, we allow discrimination. However, for companies that process large amounts of data and may be making automated decisions or otherwise, there is no openly advertised line of acceptability drawn. In the future it may be that datasets come together that allow extreme levels of discrimination. For example, if they linked data science, psychometrics and genetic data, there is the possibility for significant levels of discrimination in society. Does he think that, as well as safety, we should be emphasising that line in the sand?