Online Safety Bill [HL]

Lord Browne of Belmont Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for introducing a comprehensive piece of legislation that is designed to help our nation’s families. Parenting today is a challenge, particularly in the area of technology, in which our children are growing up with gadgets and devices that had not hit the high street even a few years ago. So often, children are more tech savvy than parents. Indeed, in the latest Ofcom report on children and media, around half of parents of children aged five to 15 said that they feel their child knows more about the internet than they do, and 14% of parents with children aged three to four agreed.

We need to give parents all the tools we can to help them keep their child safe regardless of their age. Now, I recognise that Clause 1 is an excellent start and would allow parents to choose not to have adult content on their child’s mobile phone, or coming into their house via their internet service provider. However, there is still the dilemma of how to ensure each child has access to what is appropriate to their age. It is no longer enough to turn the TV off when certain programmes are being shown. The plethora of electronic devices in the home today means that any content can be easily accessed at any time by the youngest members of the family.

Ofcom’s 2013 report on children’s use of media includes, for the first time, information about access to, and use of, media among children aged three to four. That shows us how things are changing. Some 28% of children aged three to four use a tablet computer at home, while 26% of 12 to 15 year-olds and 18% of eight to 11 year-olds own their own tablet computer. Ofcom says that tablets are,

“becoming the must-have device for children”,

because they can access such a diverse range of content from games, films, music and the internet.

Not only have the devices used in the home changed substantially, but the places where they are used have also changed. Whereas TVs were sometimes put in bedrooms, computers were initially more likely to be in a communal space. Now, however, children aged eight to 11 access the internet mainly in their bedrooms, which is an increasing trend. The modern home is full of electronic devices, so I fully support the need for more precise filtering than simply relying on whether someone is 18 or not. Clause 3 would require manufacturers of electronic devices that can connect to the internet to have a means of filtering content at an age-appropriate level. Those last words, “age appropriate level”, make this clause different from Clause 1.

Clause 3 would allow parents to set filters for the content that is accessed by the 12% of three and four year-olds who go online using a tablet, at the same time as managing the content that their older children download. Ofcom reports that 43% of parents of five to 15 year-olds have parental controls in place on their PC, laptop or netbook. However, there is a much lower incident of parental controls on game consoles to help parents restrict their child’s access to certain age-rated games or to prevent their child going online. Of course, parental controls are available to help parents, but 13% of parents said that they did not know that they could install them on a PC or how to install them, and around 25% said the same for games consoles.

I hope that noble Lords will agree that, with such a wide age range of children accessing the wonders and dangers of the internet, we need to ensure that we are doing as much as we can to help parents have the tools in their hands that they need to ensure that their child remains safe. I hope noble Lords will join me in supporting Clause 3 and the rest of the Bill.