Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Baroness Howe of Idlicote

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 5th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, this is a group of technical amendments to ensure that the legislation is as clear and consistent as possible.

Amendment 2 removes Clause 10, which creates a new power for the Secretary of State to set a statement of strategic priorities relating to the management of radio spectrum. On Report, Clause 104 was introduced, expanding this power to cover telecommunications and postal services, in addition to the management of radio spectrum. The introduction of this new provision means that Clause 10 is no longer necessary. I promised on Report to introduce this amendment at Third Reading.

Amendments 3 to 8 relate to the measures for age verification for online pornography. Amendments 3 and 6 remove clarificatory wording on,

“a means of accessing the internet”,

from Clause 16 and put it in Clause 23. Due to an earlier amendment, that phrase is no longer used in Clause 16 but it is still used in Clause 23, so the definition is moved to Clause 23.

Amendment 4 is one for aficionados of parliamentary drafting. It ensures that the Bill is consistent by aligning the wording of Clause 19(7)(a), which refers to,

“the House of Commons and the House of Lords”,

with the wording of Clause 27(13)(a), which refers to “each House of Parliament”. I think we will all sleep easier at night if that is consistent.

Amendment 5 clarifies that the regulator’s power to require information can be from internet service providers and any other person that the age-verification regulator believes to be involved, or to have been involved, in making pornographic material available on the internet on a commercial basis to persons in the United Kingdom.

Amendments 7 and 8 amend the definition of “video works authority” for the purposes of Clause 24, so that this includes the authority designated in respect of video games. This follows the approach to the extreme pornographic material provisions of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

Amendment 9 removes the provision for transitional, transitory and saving provisions in relation to the repeal of Section 73 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This is a technical drafting amendment to ensure consistency between this clause and Clause 122 on commencement. I can confirm again to the House that Section 73 will be repealed without a transition period and that the Government will commence repeal without delay.

Turning to Amendment 12, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, for drawing my attention on Report to the need for complete clarity as to whom the Government are referring in the undertaking to be transferred from BT plc to a future Openreach Ltd. I accepted that a clear definition of the term “undertaking” was necessary and offered to come back with a government amendment at Third Reading to address this issue. Government Amendment 12 does this, making it clear that we define the term “undertaking” to include anything that may be the subject of a transfer or service provision change, whether or not the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations —TUPE—apply. The intention is that all employees currently benefiting from the Crown guarantee will continue to do so if they transfer to Openreach Ltd. The Government consulted on the wording in advance of laying this technical amendment. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for assisting us, and to both BT plc and the trustee for confirming that this definition was satisfactory.

Amendments 13 to 17 relate to the Electronic Communications Code. Under the new code, an owner or occupier whose access to their land is obstructed by electronic communications apparatus without their agreement has the right to require the removal of that apparatus. Amendments 13 and 14 make it clear that this right arises only where the apparatus itself interferes with access, as opposed, for example, to a temporary obstruction by a vehicle.

Amendments 15, 16 and 17 merely correct minor omissions and referencing errors. I beg to move.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome these tidying-up amendments. I want to take the opportunity provided by this Third Reading debate to congratulate the Government once again on taking action to protect children from pornography on the internet through age verification. I shall be watching the implementation of Part 3 of the Bill closely. I would like also to put on record my thanks to the Minister for meeting with me to discuss adult content filters. I am very grateful also to noble Lords who supported my amendment at an earlier stage, highlighting the need to get a better understanding of the adult-content filtering approaches adopted by smaller ISPs that service homes with children: the noble Lords, Lord Collins of Highbury and Lord McColl of Dulwich, and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin.

Turning to the future, I am very much looking forward to the discussions on the Government’s Green Paper on internet safety and to their response to the Communications Committee’s report, Growing up with the Internet. Part 3 of this Bill is not the end of the story on children and internet safety.

Despite many positives, in comparing and contrasting the Bill that entered your Lordships’ House with the Bill as it now leaves, my response is one of sadness. The underlying principle of parity of content has been removed and the Bill is, in this respect, unquestionably weaker as a result.

In the first instance, the Bill entered your Lordships’ House properly applying the same adult content standard online as applied offline. It leaves your Lordships’ House saying that most material that the law does not accommodate for adults offline will be accommodated online behind age verification. Only the most violent pornography—that which is life-threatening or likely to result in severe injury to breast, anus and genitals—will be caught. Injury or severe injury to other parts of the body appear to be fine as long as they are not life-threatening. As the Bill leaves us, the message goes out loud and clear that violence against women—unless it is “grotesque”, to quote what the Minister said on Report—is, in some senses, acceptable.

In the second instance, the Bill entered your Lordships’ House properly applying the standard of zero tolerance to child sex abuse images, including non-photographic and animated child sex abuse images. Today it leaves your Lordship’s House with the relevant powers of the regulator deleted so that it can no longer take enforcement action against animated child sex abuse images that fall under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. As such, the Bill goes out from us today proclaiming that non-photographic images of child sex abuse, including animated images, are worthy of accommodation as long as they are behind age verification.

As agreed, Third Reading is a time for tidying up. However, Part 3 of the Bill clearly requires further amendment so that the message can go out once again—as it did in the other place—that there is no place for normalising violence against women and no place for accommodating any form of child sex abuse. I hope that the other place will now rise to that challenge.

Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Baroness Howe of Idlicote

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 29th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. I will start by saying that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has been a consistently strong voice in this House in favour of protecting children online and we pay tribute to that. As noble Lords know, we introduced Clause 91 in Committee on the provision of family-friendly filters, clarifying that internet service providers may restrict access to information, content, applications or services where that is in accordance with the terms of service agreed by the end user. That clause gives a reassurance to providers that such filters are compliant with EU net neutrality regulations, so the debate on that has been had in this Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Collins, my noble friend Lord McColl and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, referred to the report of the House of Lords Communications Committee, Growing up with the internet, which was published on 21 March. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, hopes that we will take careful note of it. She knows that we listen to her—she had an amendment accepted. Among the many recommendations in the report, there is a call for a mandatory default on filters set to a minimum standard to be a requirement made of all ISPs and mobile network operators. Of course I can confirm that we will consider the recommendations in the report carefully as part of our developing work on the new internet safety strategy, and we will respond to it formally in due course.

However, we believe that the current voluntary approach on filters works well and that a mandatory approach would run the risk of replacing the current user-friendly parental control tools with a more inflexible top-down system. As has been noted by several noble Lords, the Internet Service Providers’ Association, the trade body for the industry, is taking further action to encourage smaller ISPs to consider online safety issues and parental control filters for their customers where appropriate. But having said that, I can make the commitment that we will listen to what the committee has said on this subject and, as I say, we will respond in due course. This amendment would require Ofcom to report to the Secretary of State every two years on the number of internet access providers which do or do not offer filters and to describe the actions being undertaken by them in relation to child protection.

As noble Lords will know, in 2013 the previous Prime Minister announced our agreement with the big four ISPs—Sky, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk—that they would offer network-level family filters to all customers by the end of December 2014. Ofcom was asked to produce reports on this rollout and did so in four reports issued between January 2014 and December 2015 covering the detail on the provision of filters and child protection measures by the big four ISPs, covering 88% of the fixed broadband market. The vast majority of consumer-focused broadband is therefore a matter of public record. The Ofcom reports also cover data on take-up and usage by parents of these filters. The data are now updated annually in Ofcom’s Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes reports, which provide statistics on parental usage and awareness of filters and experience of online safety. In respect of ISPs other than the big four, which run into hundreds, the vast majority of these are SMEs and micro-businesses, as noble Lords may be aware, offering niche, specialist and business-to-business services to small subscriber bases.

With that in mind, it is not clear from the amendment how Ofcom would gather the information it would need to prepare the statutory reports. It is likely that Ofcom would need to identify and ask providers for this information. This would be a very big task for Ofcom as ISPs enter and leave the market constantly and there is no requirement for them to register with Ofcom. It would also be disproportionate for the majority of ISPs, most of which are not focused on the mainstream consumer market, to be asked to provide this information.

The information covered by the existing Ofcom reporting ensures that the most relevant data are sourced on the actual usage of filters by parents, without disproportionate costs or impact on SMEs and micro-businesses. A statutory approach could also unnecessarily limit the scope and focus of reporting moving forward, as technology and the market changes.

On that basis, we consider it more appropriate for Ofcom’s reporting to be on a non-statutory basis to allow greater flexibility. Therefore, I hope that in light of that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and raised all these extremely important issues, and to the Minister for setting out his views on what has been achieved and some of what he considers the danger of asking Ofcom to do rather more than at present, therefore perhaps limiting some of the other work. I would certainly like to see rather more progress being achieved, but on the other hand I understand the extent to which steps have been taken. In the circumstances I will not press the amendment further, but I hope that the Minister will keep the whole issue under review and let us know as and when he becomes even more satisfied with what has been achieved, remembering that at the back of all this it is the small users, such as the parents and children, who we are really concerned about protecting. Having said that, I will withdraw my amendment.