Online Safety Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like other contributors to the debate, I support the Bill, but that does not mean that I think that it is perfect; we must be aware of letting the best be the enemy of the good. I declare my interests as a trustee of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation.

I was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to the Broadcasting Act 1996, because, during its passage as a Bill, I was fulfilling the role that the Minister is performing today. I remember that, before coming to address your Lordships, I looked at the draft speech that had been prepared and which described the Bill at length. It was incredibly boring, and I said, “No, I am not going to do that; I want to describe to the House what the world that the Bill will bring into effect will look like”. I told your Lordships that I was taking them into a world of science fiction. In fact, I may have misled your Lordships on that occasion, because I underestimated the impact of the technology that was evolving. Also, I do not think that anybody realised quite to the extent that we do now that you cannot disinvent technology: things have happened which are here for ever from here on out.

While technology has changed, sadly one thing has not changed: human wickedness. Rather, human wickedness has been innovative. The Government tell us that they are great believers in innovation, but I do not think that they believe in innovation in this context. History suggests, and the contemporary world corroborates, that countering wickedness and vice is never easy, particularly when it is complicated by issues of jurisdiction, geography and technology.

My view is that this simply cannot be done by primary law or, indeed, secondary legislation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, touched on, we need all kinds of soft law and codes of conduct to complement that. She was right that we have to move on from the kind of legislative approach we have now, which I call “stop and start”. We have a period of intense debate in Parliament about a piece of legislation and then, as has been heard this evening, it is all forgotten for five years—and then you find that the piece of legislation you passed does not really meet the problems of the day. We must find a way of passing what I like to describe as “living legislation”, so that it is possible, in an ongoing way, to allow those things to evolve in response to the problems that the world is presenting. It is not simply a matter of a cosy relationship between the Government, the regulator, media companies, pressure groups, charities and so on; Parliament must be involved in doing what is, after all, its real job: law-making. I think that the public, too, need to know what is going on.

If I am right in saying so, and I think I am, this kind of static approach to law-making cannot really be what is needed in circumstances of the kinds we are talking about now. Parliament, this House and the other place together, should somehow take the metaphorical bull by the horns and evolve ongoing procedures to complement the technological evolution of the internet, which changes every day—indeed, things will have changed during the duration of the very debate we are having. I dare say that the same is true elsewhere, including in other sectors about which I know very little. If we, as parliamentarians, do not grasp this particular nettle, the consequence will be that the citizens of this country will materially lose control over quite a lot of what surrounds their daily lives.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I very much agree. The core of what I want to say in supporting this amendment is that in Committee we will do what we are here to do. There are a lot of amendments to what is a very long and complicated Bill: we will test the Minister and his team on what the Government are trying to achieve and whether they have things exactly right in order to give Ofcom the best possible chance to make it work. But when push comes to shove at the end of the process, at its heart we need to build trust in Ofcom and give it the flexibility to be able to respond to the changing online world and the changing threats to children and adults in that online world. To do that, we need to ensure that we have the right amount of transparency.

I was particularly pleased to see proposed new paragraph (g) in the amendment, on transparency, as referenced by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. It is important that we have independence for Ofcom; we will come to that later in Committee. It is important that Parliament has a better role in terms of accountability so that we can hold Ofcom to account, having given it trust and flexibility. I see this amendment as fundamental to that, because it sets the framework for the flexibility that we then might want to be able to give Ofcom over time. I argue that this is about transparency of purpose, and it is a fundamental addition to the Bill to make it the success that we want.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, made possibly one of the truest statements that has ever been uttered in this House when she told us that this is a very complicated Bill. It is complicated to the extent that I have no confidence that I fully understand it and all its ramifications, and a number of other speakers have said the same. For that reason—because I am aware of my own limitations, and I am pretty sure they are shared by others—it is important to have a statement of purpose at the outset to provide the co-ordinates for the discussion we are going to have; I concur with the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Allan. Because there is then a framework within which we can be sure, we hope, that we will manage to achieve an outcome that is both comprehensive and coherent. As a number of noble Lords have said, there are a number of completely different, or nearly different, aspects to what we are discussing, yet the whole lot have to link together. In the words of EM Forster, we have to

“connect the prose and the passion”.

The Minister may say, “We can’t do that at the outset”. I am not so sure. If necessary, we should actually draft this opening section, or any successor to it, as the last amendment to the Bill, because then we would be able to provide an overview. That overview will be important because, just as I am prepared to concede that I do not think I understand it all now, there is a very real chance that I will not understand it all then either. If we have this at the head of the Bill, I think that will be a great help not only to us but to all those who are subsequently going to have to make use of it.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to say something simple in support of what has already been said. If it is true that the Bill’s purposes are already scattered in the course of the Bill and throughout its substance, I cannot see what possible objection there can be to having them extracted and put at the beginning. They are not contentious—they are there already—so let us have them at the beginning to set a direction of travel. It seems so obvious to me.

It is an important Bill. I thank the Minister and his colleagues because they have put an enormous amount of work into this, and of course the Joint Committee has done its work. We have all been sent I cannot say how many briefing papers from interested bodies and so on. It is vital that, as we try to hold as much of this together as we possibly can in taking this very important Bill forward, we should have a sense of purpose and criteria against which we can measure what we eventually go on to discuss, make decisions about and introduce into the body of the Bill. I cannot see that the logic of all that can possibly be faulted.

Of course, there will be words that are slippery, as has been said. I cannot think of a single word, and I have been a lexicographer in my life, that does not lend itself to slipperiness. I could use words that everybody thinks we have in common in a way that would befuddle noble Lords in two minutes. It seems to me self-evident that these purposes, as stated here at the outset of our consideration in Committee, are logical and sensible. I will be hoping, as the Bill proceeds, to contribute to and build on the astounding work that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has laid before us, with prodigious energy, in alerting all kinds of people, not just in your Lordships’ House but across the country, to the issues at stake here. I hope that she will sense that the Committee is rallying behind her in the astute way that she is bringing this matter before us. But again, I will judge outcomes against the provisions in this opening statement, a criterion for judging even the things that I feel passionate about.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and I have been in our own discussions about different parts of the Bill, about things such as suicide and self-harm. That is content. There are amendments. We will discuss them. Again, we can hold our own decisions about those matters against what we are seeking to achieve as stated so clearly at the outset of the Bill.

I remember working with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. It is so fabulous to have him back; the place feels right when he is here. When I was a bit of a greenhorn—he was the organ grinder and I was the monkey—I remember him pleading at the beginning of what was at that time the Data Protection Bill to have a statement like this at the beginning of that Bill. We were told, “Oh, but it is all in the Bill; all the words are there”. Then why not put them at the beginning, so that we can see them clearly and have something against which to measure our progress?

With all these things said, I hope we will not spend too much time on this. I hope we will nod it through, and then I hope we will remind ourselves of what it seeks to achieve as we go on in the interminable days that lie ahead of us. I have one last word as an old, old preacher remembering what I was told when I started preaching: “First, you tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; then you tell ‘em; and then you tell ‘em what you’ve told ‘em”. Let us take at least the first of those steps now.