Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for initiating this debate and putting the Bill before the House. I pay tribute to 5Rights and the fantastic work it is doing. I should put on record that I am a governor of Coram, which was founded in 1739 and is the oldest children’s charity in the UK—we have been fighting for children’s rights for rather a long time, and, thankfully, for rather a long time before the internet was dreamed up.

Yesterday, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and I had the pleasure of going to Wandsworth and spending three hours at a very large girls’ school there, called Burntwood School. It has about 1,800 pupils. It is incredibly diverse. Believe it or not, no fewer than 70 languages are spoken by the 1,800 pupils. Part of the visit was a question and answer session with around 100 of the girls. One of the questions they asked us was about internet safety and what we felt about it, so we were able to talk a bit about the online safety Bill and I was able to say that I would have the privilege of speaking in today’s debate.

Later on, we were talking with the teachers, who said that, during the pandemic, when everybody was in bubbles and the children were perhaps relying on social media more than usual, they decided that they needed to do a bit of homework. Somewhat to their surprise, they found that the legal age below which you are not meant to use WhatsApp is 13. It turns out that that is an unexpected negative Brexit dividend; if we were still in the EU or the European Economic Area, the minimum age would be 16, but one of the freedoms we have won in leaving the European Union is that the age has dropped to 13.

I thought I would use WhatsApp as an example because, although I know it is against the rules to ask noble Lords to put their hand up if they are on WhatsApp, I anticipate that it is probably the social media or communication app that most of us use—I am sure that most of us are in one or two groups.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Not me.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I understand that, in Lincolnshire, the reception is particularly bad. I am sure if the noble Lord asks the Government to do something about it they would improve it.

As we are all using WhatsApp, I thought it might be instructive to talk about what it does and, more to the point, the onus it puts on, in this case, the parents of children—first, to find out whether their children are using it, and, secondly, to find out whether they should be using it. If they decide that they should not be using it, the onus is entirely on the parents to contact WhatsApp with a variety of information, such as passports, to demonstrate that their child is underage. It may possibly respond, but it may not.

WhatsApp makes its money primarily through trying to get into the business world, and it makes money by selling emoticon stickers and online games. But it also plans to monetise the app by setting up a WhatsApp payment, rather like Apple Pay. You will see lots of people going on to the London Underground pointing their mobile phone as they enter, which is how they pay. So that is coming down the track.

WhatsApp has also announced a new privacy policy whereby, if users do not accept it, they will have to stop using the app. WhatsApp cannot do that in the EU, because it violates the GDPR, but in the rest of the world, it can. That is about to be rolled out this year, but I suspect very few of us know that.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, has just changed its name to Meta. In the law of unexpected consequences, in Hebrew, “meta” means “dead”; in Urdu, it means “delete”; and in certain dialects in my wife’s native Italy, it stands for a “pyramid of dung”. I am sure Mr Zuckerberg was aware of that when he changed the name.

What a lot of people do not realise with WhatsApp is that user groups can go up to 250 users; in Burntwood School, virtually all the children are in quite large groups. People say that WhatsApp is safe because it is end-to-end encrypted. However, any of the 250 in a group could share the details of the group with an outside person, who would immediately have access to every person. A lot of videos and photographs are put on WhatsApp groups, and although, in theory, they cannot be shared outside the group, as I am sure all noble Lords who are very au fait with how mobile phones work will know, you can easily take a screenshot to capture what is on a phone and send that on elsewhere. So WhatsApp is not terribly secure.

The school is particularly worried about its use for cyberbullying. It is worried about the fact that, quite regularly, spyware is used, there are requests for money and its students receive fraudulent job opportunities, even though they are still in school. This is not good, and the fact that the internet companies are, frankly, avoiding the responsibility they have to all of us—most particularly to our children and grandchildren—is simply unacceptable. The Government must do something. They really have no alternative.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in the gap because of what I have heard during this past hour or more. It has been a moving and powerful debate, so much so that I have asked my taxi to wait and I will risk the train. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for the way in which she introduced the Bill, and I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford and the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, who provoked me into getting to my feet.

I do not do “online” and have no intention of doing so, but I know it cannot be uninvented and is here as a permanent fixture of society. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford talked about the 19th century and referred to those who went down the mines and up the chimneys. Their bodies were broken but often their minds were still intact. What we are talking about here is distorting the brain, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, and destroying the mind.

The biggest crime that any society can commit is the destruction of childhood innocence. We have gone some way towards that, and I have mentioned it before in your Lordships’ House, but we have a chance here to move forward one definite step. There is still much to do, but I say to my noble friend the Minister that we demand action this day.