Online Harm: Child Protection

Layla Moran Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson]

I am going to try to move on now—[Interruption.] I am going to make some progress, because I think we have now tested the procedural approach to death.

It is important that we reach consensus on our approach and reject the unworkable blanket bans that have been proposed elsewhere that put enormous powers in the hands of an individual politician. I do not think any Reform Members are here in the Chamber, but given that Reform wants to scrap the Online Safety Act altogether, I shudder to think what future Ministers might deem acceptable if they were allowed to choose what our children and young people could access, which the amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill coming from the other place would allow the Secretary of State to do.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

In among the discussions around procedure, which are important in this place, I fear that we are missing the nub of what my hon. Friend is trying to get to, which is that this is a nuanced space. This is not a blanket “we say no to everything”. Some people are arguing that we should do nothing, and that it should just be down to parents to deal with it. Does she agree that the thoughtful way that she is putting this across, trying to get us all to come together around this issue with the public, is how we will create something that is future-proof? So much of legislation in this area involves chasing our tails, but this is an opportunity for us to get ahead of it, for once.

[Munira Wilson]

That is indeed what we are trying to do. Putting forward a blanket ban on a particular list of social media sites determined by any Secretary of State at any given point in time is necessarily acting after the fact. That is not future-proof or particularly effective, and it is subject to politicisation. That is why our harms-based approach, which I want to negotiate to get into legislation soon, would be future-proof and work to act on things such as chatbots and games. I know from the discussions we have at home how addictive games such as Roblox can be, for instance.

We Liberal Democrats have long been pressing for a suite of measures that would make the online world safer and healthier for all. One measure that could be implemented overnight would be to ban tech companies from profiting from our children’s attention by raising the age of digital data consent from 13 to 16. This would end the hold that addictive algorithms have on children.