Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Linsey Farnsworth Excerpts

Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Conlon (Beckenham and Penge) (Lab)]

I begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), who I have now started calling the patron saint of the smartphone-free childhood campaign. He often comes up on the doorsteps in Beckenham and Penge when I speak to parents.

This topic has prompted a huge response both in my own constituency and across the country. I welcome Elizabeth, Sarah and other constituents who are here to watch this debate. I also pay tribute to Crispin, Raj and all the brilliant local parents and campaigners I have been working with on this. I will spend some time exploring the wealth of feedback I have had from my constituents before talking about the type of change we need to see across the country. That change needs to be cultural, to put children and parents first and to place the onus on social media companies and manufacturers to prove that their products are safe while ensuring that we do not miss out on the many benefits of technology.

Ahead of this debate, I engaged extensively with three key groups in Beckenham and Penge: young people, parents and school leaders. Despite being the reason we are here today, young people are the group that we most risk excluding from the conversation, which is why I held a focus group at a local secondary school, Harris academy Beckenham, and spoke to students from a range of year groups about their views on how smartphones are changing childhood. In that focus group, half of the students said that smartphones and social media overall have a negative impact on their mental health. The majority of students told me that they would feel panicked without their mobile phone, and some spoke to me with quiet self-awareness about how they knew their mobile phone had acted as a barrier to interaction with their family. This is time that they are not spending building meaningful relationships through face-to-face conversation and developing the social and communication skills that they will need in life.

The second group, teachers, offered another perspective. On Monday, I was delighted to bring together a group of 12 primary and secondary school headteachers from right across my constituency. We discussed the impact of their students’ smartphone use in and out of schools. What stood out the most from that conversation was the sheer amount of time that they as school leaders have to spend week after week dealing with issues that have taken place on their students’ phones—cyber-bulling, sexting, the sharing of graphic videos or explicit photos, often of the students themselves. All those and more are crossing our teachers’ desks and demanding hours of their time every day, pulling them away from their core and crucial job of educating.

Finally, there are the parents. In Beckenham and Penge, concerns about smartphone and social media use easily fall into the top five issues that constituents have contacted me about since my election to this House last July. Last Friday, I put out a survey asking parents in my constituency for their views; within a week, I have received well over 500 responses. Some 89% of respondents agree that smartphones and social media have a negative impact on their children’s mental health, but what makes that figure more shocking is that 70% of those who agreed with that statement are parents of primary-aged children—that is children under the age of 12.

More than three-quarters of parents agreed that the negatives of their child having a smartphone outweighed the positives. Digging into that, I asked parents if they would have any concerns were their child not to have a smartphone. Understandably, the ability for a child to call home in an emergency, or for parents to track them on their journey to and from school came up a fair amount, but we know that other phones and options on the market have those features.

The damage is undeniable and is reflected in statistics across the country. Since smartphones became prominent in 2012, we have seen a 27% increase in speech and language challenges, a 65% rise in mental health admissions to hospital, and a 640% increase in eating disorders. The average teenager today gets 337 notifications in a day, which averages out at one every six minutes. Once they receive a notification, it takes 23 minutes for them to refocus on what they are doing. Finally—I had not heard this until this week—one in three parents admit to crying over their child’s smartphone use.

Those figures chime with what parents have fed back to me across the constituency. One constituent, Gemma, who has worked in the smartphone industry for 15 years, says:

“My child is seven, so is not yet exposed to smartphones in a significant way. But when he plays games on his phone his behaviour is noticeably different—he’s hyperactive, gets emotional quickly and easily, and is devastated when we say that time to play is up.”

Another constituent, Megan, is a therapist by profession. She said:

“I regularly hear adult clients sharing how smartphones negatively impact their mental health, from raised anxiety to hours lost doom-scrolling, to more serious harms. If we as adults sometimes struggle to manage our own smartphone use, how are we expecting our children and teenagers to be able to moderate theirs?”

[Linsey Farnsworth (Amber Valley) (Lab)]

I am pleased that the Government are committed to tackling the mental health epidemic among adults and children in this country, especially with the specialist mental health professionals that will be installed in every school—parents in my constituency of Amber Valley will welcome that. Does my hon. Friend agree that the provisions in the Bill are a useful tool in preventing mental health issues in the first place, and in helping parents to safeguard their children’s mental health?

[Liam Conlon]

Absolutely. A key provision of the Bill will provide the evidence base on which to take the best action moving forward.

Another parent, Georgia, simply said to me:

“My children are two and four, and smartphones are my greatest fear in raising them.”

Many other constituents have written in, and I thank everyone across the constituency who responded to my survey and shared their thoughts.

The case for change is undeniable and, to sum up, we need collective action and cultural change. Many contributions have been made across the House to that effect. We must put children and parents first by moving the onus from them on to social media companies and manufacturers to prove that their products are safe, as well as recognising the potential benefits of technology. Before I came to this place, I worked in tech for nearly a decade, including at Discovery Education UK, and I saw the many benefits of technology in unlocking the potential of our young people. I believe that balance is possible and must be found, and again I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington for bringing forward this Bill.