Online Safety Bill

Lord Browne of Belmont Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

These amendments, in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, will ensure that all pornographic content is regulated in the same way, at the same time, and that Part 5 can be brought into force more quickly to ensure all content is treated in the same way. I believe that was certainly the will of your Lordships at Second Reading. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s views on how this will be achieved. I beg to move.

[Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)]

My Lords, first, I tender an apology from my noble friend Lord Morrow, whose name is attached to the amendments. Unfortunately, he is unable to participate in tonight’s debate, as he had to return home at very short notice. I will speak to the amendments in this group. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and my noble friend Lord Morrow for tabling the amendments, allowing for a debate on how the duties of Part 5 should apply to Part 3 services and to probe what sites Part 5 will cover once it is implemented.

The Government have devised a Bill which attempts carefully to navigate regulation of several different types of service. I am sure that it will eventually become an exemplar emulated around the world, so I understand why there may be a general resistance on the part of the Government to tamper with the Bill’s architecture. However, these amendments are designed to treat pornographic content as a clear exception wherever it is found online. This can be achieved, because we already know the harm caused by pornography and Part 5 already creates a duty to ensure that rigorous age verification is in place to stop children accessing it.

The Government recognised that the original drafting of the Bill would not address the unfinished business of Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act. In 2017, as many will recall, this House and the other place expressed the clear demand that online pornography should not be accessible to children. Part 5 of the Bill is the evolution of that 2017 debate, but, regrettably, it was bolted on belatedly after pre-legislative scrutiny. That bolt-on approach has had the unfortunate consequence of creating two separate regimes to deal with pornography. Part 5 applies only to “provider pornographic content”, which is content

“published or displayed on the service by the provider … or by a person acting on behalf of the provider”.

Clause 70 makes it clear:

“Pornographic content that is user-generated content … is not to be regarded as provider pornographic content”;


in other words, if pornography is on social media or the large tube sites, it falls under Part 3, not Part 5. That means that not all content will be regulated in the same way or at the same time.

Amendment 125A addresses an issue raised by this two-tier approach to regulation. Clause 49 defines “user-generated content” as content

“generated directly on the service by a user of the service, or … uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service, and … that may be encountered by another user”.

Encounter is defined broadly, meaning to

“read, view, hear or otherwise experience content”,

including adding “comments and reviews”. By including reviews, that seems to be a broad definition. Does it include a like, an up vote or an emoji? That is an important question that Amendment 125A probes. On this basis, it seems that almost all the most popular pornographic websites are user-to-user services, and therefore will fall into Part 3.