Digital Safety: Children

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Baroness Lloyd of Effra) (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Lord that there is unanimity on the importance of tackling child sexual abuse online and taking measures to further restrict that and make it harder. As my noble friend Lord Hanson made clear during the passage of the Act, device-level nudity detection can play an important role in preventing children taking, sharing or viewing nude imagery.

This measure really looks at how to prevent those images getting online. That is a very important part of the strategy; it stops harm before it happens, in addition to the law enforcement activity that must happen in parallel. It applies to both old and new smartphones and tablets, and we expect tech companies to set up controls so that, if a parent hands down a phone, for example, all they have to do is reset it to enact this operating-level facility.

In respect of making sure that legislation is ready, as the Minister for Online Safety said in the other place yesterday, he is working carefully and closely in parallel with the Home Office to draw up legislation should that be needed, should the protections not be put in place at scale as expected.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my honourable friend Munira Wilson on trying to extract some clarity from the Government after the Prime Minister’s speech yesterday before almost any of us arrived at London Tech Week. Sadly, it did not contain all of what was in the weekend media briefings. On these Benches, the Liberal Democrats have long called for a film-style harms-based age-rating system, with addictiveness as a central criterion, rather than a blanket ban on user-to-user services. Minister Narayan in the Commons subsequently indicated yesterday that addictiveness is

“very much on our minds”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/6/26; col. 31.]

Can the Minister confirm that the forthcoming consultation response will explicitly adopt addictive design, including infinite scroll, autoplay and recommender algorithms as a harm category, triggering age-based platform restrictions, rather than relying solely on content type or constituting a blanket ban? Can she confirm that this will be enshrined in legislation, rather than a voluntary expectation of tech platforms?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The consultation to which the noble Lord refers includes looking at features and functionalities; it looks at addictive algorithms, screen time and the impact on children’s health. The consultation has closed. There were many responses, and we are taking time to make sure that we have looked carefully at them—and, in addition to those responses, at the conversations that have gone on. I cannot pre-empt the Government’s response, which will come soon, but all the matters I have just mentioned were within the consultation for discussion.