Lord Best
Main Page: Lord Best (Crossbench - Life peer)Growing up with the Internet (Communications Committee Report)
Lord Best Excerpts
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, as the chairman of your Lordships’ Communications Committee when this report was published, it is a great pleasure to introduce today’s debate. I take the opportunity to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg, who has now been appointed as the committee’s new chairman. The committee published Growing Up With the Internet in March and the Government responded in October, making this debate very timely—all the more so as the Government are now consulting on their Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper, with a deadline for responses next month, and timely, too, because the related Data Protection Bill is currently in your Lordships’ House.
I am exceedingly grateful to my fellow committee members for their support and contributions to this unanimous and, I am glad to say, well-received report. My thanks, too, go to all noble Lords participating this afternoon. I particularly look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. I give special thanks to our clerk, Theo Pembroke, and our committee assistant, Rita Logan, as well as to our policy analyst, Helena Peacock, who, sadly for this House, is leaving parliamentary service to take up a senior position at the BBC. I wish her every success. I give sincere thanks, too, to our specialist advisers, Professors Marina Jirotka and Sonia Livingstone, and I commend Professor Livingstone’s LSE blogs on all these issues.
Our report sets out how the internet today pervades the lives of children. By the age of 13, three-quarters of children already have a social media profile. The internet provides endless opportunities for connecting and sharing with friends, alongside access to the search engines and apps that bring endless entertainment, wonderfully presented education and, indeed, developmental support. For example, half of girls aged 16 to 21 turn to the internet for information on sex and relationships. But for all its positive attributes, the phenomenon that is the internet can also bring hazards, harassment and harm.
Rereading our report, I listed some 10 areas of risk and danger that confront a child who goes online. You can face horrible cyberbullying, the subject of an important Royal Foundation Taskforce led by the Duke of Cambridge. Bullying and name-calling online does not stop when you go home from school, or even when you go to bed. You can be exposed to confusing and frightening images of pornography and violence, which can stay in the mind for years. These may pop up on social media, or they may be pressed on you by others—or you may access them deliberately, but regret doing so. One-fifth of 12 to 15 year-olds say that they have encountered something online that they have found “worrying or nasty”.
You can be pressurised on social media by your peers, developing worries about your body image and about how many people like you, and you can become obsessed with selfies. You can face privacy issues, not least linked to sexting, when highly personal images can appear on social media. Every aspect of your life, every move you make, is likely, unbeknown to you, to be recorded and held by the social media company for its own purposes.
You can be misled by fake news and by vloggers selling products surreptitiously, by unsolicited advertising appearing on your Facebook pages, like it or not. You can be captivated by websites that distort, not support, websites featuring self-harm, suicide and anorexia. You can find your critical faculties blunted and your attention span diminished. You can be ensnared by addictive online games, captured by sophisticated but sinister algorithms that hold the player online. It is not so uncommon for a child to stay up all night playing games and be unable to go to school in the morning. You are also at risk from predators online using false identities to groom and exploit children.
It is clear that those with serious concerns about the internet are fully justified, even while we all agree that it provides incredible opportunities to explore, experiment, learn, be creative and get important support from websites and friends. Our report contains 38 recommendations and conclusions, to which the Government have responded helpfully, alongside their publication of the excellent draft Internet Safety Strategy, which I know that the committee greatly welcomes. Let me summarise the committee’s views and the Government’s response.
First, we recognise that parents and carers are in the front line, and they need the tools to guide their children through this minefield. It is no good parents saying that their children know more than they do; that taking away the mobile phone from a compulsive user causes too much trouble; or that their children can find ways around any filters controlling online content. No—for better or worse, good parenting today requires an understanding of what can be done to help one’s child to build resilience and avoid pitfalls. Agreeing and setting ground rules and maintaining lines of communication between parent and child about their internet use is a serious matter.
Fortunately, there is help at hand, not least online. We heard from Vicki Shotbolt about Parent Zone’s guidance; from the NSPCC with its Net Aware website and guide for parents; from Barnardo’s, and from others doing wonderful work. So advice and support is available to assist parents. The Government, in their internet safety strategy, pledge to work with civil organisations and the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, or UKCCIS, which will be remodelled to align with the new strategy.
Secondly, the committee underlined the central role played by schools. We saw an urgent need to enhance the digital literacy of children to equip them to navigate safely through the online world. We called digital literacy the “fourth pillar” of a child’s education, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. This is quite different from the important education in computer literacy required in the modern world, and we emphasised the need for teacher training to cover the skills which teaching digital literacy demands. We advocated making this a core ingredient in personal, social and health education, or PSHE, which, we said, should be a statutory subject, inspected by Ofsted, and should cover compulsive use, privacy of data, obsession with body image and the rest, not just the e-safety agenda of risks.
The Government’s draft strategy fully accepts this crucial role for education and notes the new compulsory relationships education at the primary school level and the relationships and sex education at the secondary school level, as well as through PSHE, if that is made compulsory, too.
Thirdly, after parents and schools, there is the role of industry—online platforms such as Google, Twitter and YouTube, internet service providers and mobile network operators, such as Virgin, BT and Sky, as well as those that make the tablets and smartphones such as Apple and Microsoft. These are huge and immensely powerful organisations with responsibilities that should match their pervasive power.
We had little time for the excuses that we heard from those who produce and deliver the internet’s content: that the internet is too big to police with its operations all over the world, although most of its traffic passes through the hands of a very small number of huge tech companies, which can indeed be held to account, and regulation has to start in one country before it can spread to others; that it amounts to censorship if people are constrained in what they can access on their screens, although few believe that children should be treated in the same way as adults, any more than they should be treated in the same way if they want to buy cigarettes or drive a car; that technology is insufficiently advanced to filter contents and protect the innocent, although personalised technology already exists and, among others, the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, a leading expert in this field, encouraged the committee to recognise that technology can do almost everything we can imagine, and more.
The committee was glad to see coming through the pipeline measures that should improve the behaviour of tech companies, such as the Digital Economy Act 2017, which, after April 2018, should see that harmful pornographic content is blocked, and the EU’s general data protection regulation, which, from next May, should introduce such measures as the “right to be forgotten”. But now the Government are proposing in their internet safety strategy a much fuller code of practice, greater transparency in companies’ reporting and a social media levy. This is going absolutely in the direction advocated by the Communications Committee. We would include in the code of practice the obligation to make terms and conditions understandable to children, rather than expecting them to have to read extensive small print before ticking an “I accept” box. Our committee also wanted to see proper dispute resolution, such as an ombudsman service, when the customer or user of an internet service is dissatisfied—for example, when the internet service provider fails to take down personal data when requested to do so.
That leaves our recommendations aimed directly at the Government. We recognise that government, as well as supporting parents and schools, has the key role in influencing industry’s behaviour. We found that government responsibility here was fragmented, divided between the Department of Health, the Department for Education and the DCMS. We wanted leadership from the Prime Minister and the appointment of a children’s digital champion within the Cabinet Office to take a holistic overview of all aspects of this issue. Karen Bradley, the DCMS Secretary of State, told us last month that the Prime Minister is indeed giving these issues her personal attention, and there is recognition that a more co-ordinated approach across government departments must be part of the new strategy. The Minister for Digital will perform this role.
The Prime Minister’s interest is more than welcome and I hope that she will convene the industry summit that we recommended. Having a Minister for Digital is helpful but it is not quite the same as having a children’s digital champion as a permanent appointment at the centre of government, helping to establish and oversee those minimum standards of design and practice, working with the different government departments, commissioning research and ensuring that policies are progressed.
As things stand, government’s approach is positive but depends on this mighty industry putting its own house in order, implementing minimum standards of child-friendly design and making the filtering of content as easy as possible—for example, with the default for filters to be “on” so that parents are not required to turn them on themselves, which is how Sky operates, with far better results than its competitors in this regard—with proper protection of privacy and speedy action in taking down unwanted personal content, and so on. We added that the best interests of the child should be built into the design process, making compulsive behaviour more difficult rather than actively promoting it. And there is more.
I finish by congratulating the Government on the steps they are now taking and on the increased priority they are giving to keeping children safe online. However, without going as far as Simon Jenkins, who in the Guardian described the Government’s stance as “beyond pathetic”, I sense a pervasive uneasiness that the internet providers and the huge tech companies—the Googles, Facebooks and the rest—may never do as much as they should without more strenuous government intervention, perhaps along the lines so plausibly argued by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron, Lady Harding of Winscombe and Lady Lane-Fox, and others in the debate on the Data Protection Bill in this House only yesterday. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that, if encouragement of voluntary action, with the industry adopting and following a rigorous code of practice, does not produce results, the Government are ready to act to make sure that our children really are safe as they grow up with the internet. I beg to move.
Lord Best
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions and for the near-unanimous support for all the recommendations in our report. I kept thinking after yet another excellent speech, “What a cracking speech” and then there was another one. I really think we were treated to some remarkably good speeches this afternoon; many thanks to all concerned. It was a special privilege to listen to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. To have an ex-Lord Chief Justice with us is going to be tremendously helpful, not least in this particular field. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg, as well, as the new chair. I can see that the committee is in very safe hands, and with the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, as the champion there, this is obviously a Welsh takeover of the whole enterprise.
Six members of my committee spoke, and I am going to be very unfair and single out my noble friend Lady Kidron because she was so helpful during the preparation of this report and is now championing changes in the Data Protection Bill that are gaining a great deal of support across the House.
I am grateful to the Minister. I was very pleased that the internet safety strategy is taking on board many of our recommendations. I even heard this evening that the idea of an ombudsman, which I am very keen on, is getting serious consideration. The big question is whether we can regard self-regulation, voluntary action, by industry as sufficient when the moment comes that the Government are willing to act—and it is clear from the Minister’s remarks that the Government are willing—as act they will need to do.
It is slightly strange and counterintuitive that the House of Lords is leading the charge not just about children but about the internet. Not everyone would have guessed that that is where we would be, but we are in the forefront on this and are very proud to be so. I hope that tonight is not the end but the beginning of an ongoing debate. I thank all noble Lords for taking part.