Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Report stage
Monday 17th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, as others have said, this has been a very interesting tour d’horizon of some of the points in the Bill that we still need to resolve. I will not go over too much of the detail that has been raised because those points need a response from the Minister when he responds.

I will start with the use of “chairman” in several places throughout the Bill. We do not understand what is going on here. My noble friend Lady Merron wanted to deal with this but she unfortunately is not here, so I have been left holding the issue, and I wish to pursue it vigorously.

It is probably not well known but, in 2007, the Government decided that there ought to be changes in the drafting of our laws to make them gender-neutral as much as possible. Since 2007, it has been customary practice to replace words that could be gender-specific with those which are not. The Drafting Guidance, which is issued and should be followed by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, says that gender-neutral drafting requires

“avoiding gender-specific pronouns (such as ‘he’) for a person who is not necessarily of that gender”,

and avoiding gender-specific nouns

“that might appear to assume that a person of a particular gender will do a particular job or perform a particular role (eg ‘chairman’)”.

The guidance provides another bit of extra information:

“The gender-specific noun most likely to be encountered is ‘chairman’. ‘Chair’ is now widely used in primary legislation as a substitute”,


and we should expect to see it. Why do we not see it in this Bill?

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My wife, who is chairman of a number of things, objects to “chair” as “furniturism”. She likes to be referred to as a person and not a thing.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

I respect the noble Lord’s point. I did not make a specific proposal; I simply asked why the Bill was framed in circumstances that are not those required by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel.

Moving on, Amendment 288A, which addresses the issue of multiple characteristics, is welcome. I am grateful to the Minister for it. However, it is a rather odd solution to what should be a very straightforward question. We have the amendment—which, as I said, we welcome—because it was pointed out that the new overarching objective for this Bill that has been brought forward by government amendment refers to issues affecting those who have a characteristic. It uses the word “characteristic” without qualification, although I think most of us who have been involved in these debates and discussions realise that this is an oblique reference to the Equality Act 2010 and that, although they are not set out in the Bill, the characteristics concerned are probably those that are protected under the Equality Act. I think the Minister has some problem with the Equality Act, because we have crossed swords on it before, but we will not go back into that.

In referencing “a characteristic”, which is perfectly proper, we did not realise—but it has been pointed out—that under the Interpretation Act it is necessary to recall that in government legislation when the singular is mentioned it includes the plural unless it is specifically excluded. So we can assume that when references are made to “a characteristic”, they do in fact mean “characteristics”. Therefore, by logic, moving forward to the way to which it is referred in the Bill, when a person is referred to as having “a characteristic” it can also be assumed that the reference in the Bill applies to them having more than one characteristic.

However, grateful as I am to the Minister for bringing forward these amendments, which we accept, this is not quite the point that we were trying to get across. I invite the Minister, when he comes to respond, to explain a little more about the logic behind what I will propose. We are fairly convinced—as I think are most people who have been involved in these discussions—that social media companies’ form of operation, providing the materials and service that we want, is gendered. I do not think there is any doubt about that; everybody who has spoken in this debate has at some stage pointed out that, in many cases, those with protected characteristics, and women and girls in particular, are often picked on and singled out. A pile-on—the phrase used to mean the amplification that comes with working on the internet—is a very serious concern. That may change; it may just be a feature of today’s world and one day be something that does not happen. However, at the moment, it is clearly the case that if one is in some way characterised by a protected characteristic, and you have more than one of them, you tend to get more attention, aggravation and difficulty in your social media engagement. The evidence is so clear that we do not need to go into it.

The question we asked in Committee, and which we hoped we would get a response to, was whether we should always try to highlight the fact that where we are talking about people with more than one characteristic, it is the fact that there is a combination, not that it is a plural, that is the matter. Being female and Jewish, which has been discussed several times from the Dispatch Box by my noble friend Lady Merron and others, seems to be the sort of combination of characteristics which causes real difficulties on the internet for the people who have them. I use that only as one example; there are others.

If that is the case then it would have been nice to have seen that specifically picked up, and my original drafting of the amendment did that. However, we have accepted the Government’s amendment to create the new overarching objective, and I do not want to change it at this stage—we are past that debate. But I wonder whether the Minister, when he comes to respond, could perhaps as a grace note explain that he accepts the point that it is the doubling or tripling of the characteristics, not the plurality, that matters.

Moving back to the clauses that have been raised by others speaking in this debate, and who have made points that need to be responded to, I want to pick up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, about the need for some form of engagement between domestic regulators if we are going to get the best possible solution to how the internet is regulated as we go forward. We have never said that there had to be a new super-regulator and we never intended that there should be powers taken to change the way in which we do this. However, some form of co-operation, other than informal co-operation, is almost certainly going to be necessary. We do not want to subtract from where we are in relation to how our current regulators operate—they seem to be working well—but we worry that the legal powers and support that might be required in order to do that are not yet in place or, if they are in place, are based on somewhat archaic and certainly not modern-day regulatory practice.

Is this something that the committees of the Houses might consider? Perhaps when we come to other amendments around this, that is something we might pick up, because I think it probably needs further consideration away from the Bill in order to get the best possible solution. That is particularly true given, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, says, so many of these regulators will now have experience of working together and might be prepared to share that in evidence or in appearances before such a committee.