Online Safety

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips

Tuesday 8th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

I thank the hon. Lady for her support for these measures. She asks me a number of questions. Will the legislation be developed regardless of the action taken by companies? Yes, it will—my officials have begun drawing up that legislation today. Both she and the hon. Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) raised specific issues. We will want to discuss those issues with Opposition parties and colleagues on the Government Benches to ensure that our response is right, and privacy is one of those issues. It is not our intention to ignore or sideline the privacy concerns, and we believe that it is perfectly possible to do this without encroaching on privacy in any way.

There is a particular challenge around end-to-end encrypted services, which the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) will be aware of. I would welcome cross-party discussion about that; we have a number of potential solutions that we are currently exploring, so it would be good to discuss the matter further with her.

Finally, the hon. Lady heard what I said about acting quickly and more decisively. Many colleagues will know that before I came to this place, I worked with children and young people. Keeping children safe is the first and most basic responsibility of any Government, and I am very pleased to hear such broad consensus on that across the House.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham Yardley) (Lab)]

This statement and the previous one are about the two things that I have previously resigned over, so I feel that my moral compass is back. [Laughter.]

First and foremost, I want to help out my right hon. Friend. To those who are concerned about the timeliness of this statement, let me say that the original statement may have had a timeframe in it, and I found in my negotiations with her that that was not quick enough. Actually, “as soon as possible” is quicker than what was going to be suggested, so I have every faith that she will do this quickly.

I want to stress the importance of the “take” element; there is no privacy issue if we just stop children taking images in the first place—the image will not exist to be able to go anywhere. But the take is the thing that the tech companies, for some reason, are faltering on. It is the most important thing to stop children being abused and groomed. Addressing that element will move the market away from our children here in the UK; they will not be able to use their phones for that terrible market of sexual abuse any more than they will be able to use them to make toast, because that will not be what they are for. When we remove the UK market, though, we will send the market somewhere else in the world. I therefore ask the Secretary of State to work with partners across the world to ensure that while we lead the world, we are not standing alone for too long.

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend makes a typically well informed and well thought-out point. I thank her not just for her support, but for all the work she has done to ensure that we have got here. I know that she is appreciated not just by me, but by many of the incredible, brave families who I have had the privilege to get to know over the last few weeks and who have wanted to see action in this space for a very long time. I pay tribute to those families as well as to her. She has made an important point about working with Governments and other partners across the world to keep children safe. That is the promise of the UN convention on the rights of the child. A child harmed anywhere means that children can be harmed everywhere, and we have to take that really seriously.

My hon. Friend should be encouraged—and I suspect that she is—by the fact that many Governments are now acting more decisively. They are stepping up and recognising that the development and regulation of new forms of technology cannot be left to the private sector alone. There is a clear role for active, empowering Governments working in this space, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) and I have not hesitated to reach out to like-minded Governments across the world to see what more we can do together.