Online Safety Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord. I hope that the amendments I support will be supported by CEASE, Refuge and Barnardo’s—I declare an interest here. Let us not let the chance of creating a robust Online Safety Bill slip through our fingers. It is now time to act with boldness, vision, morality and determination. I trust that we will continue to focus on the purpose of the Bill: to make the online world safer, especially for our children. They are relying on us to do the right thing, so let us do so.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I strongly support my noble friend in his amendment. I clarify that, in doing so, I am occupying a guest slot on the Front Bench: I do so as a member of his team but also as a member of the former Joint Committee. As my noble friend set out, this reflects where we got to in our thinking as a Joint Committee all that time ago. My noble friend said “at last”, and I echo that and what others said. I am grateful for the many briefings and conversations that we have had in the run-up to Committee, but it is good to finally be able to get on with it and start to clear some of these things out of my head, if nothing else.

In the end, as everyone has said, this is a highly complex Bill. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, in preparation for this I had another go at trying to read the blooming thing, and it is pretty much unreadable —it is very challenging. That is right at the heart of why I think this amendment is so important. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I worry that this will be a bonanza for the legal profession, because it is almost impenetrable when you work your way through the wiring of the Bill. I am sure that, in trying to amend it, some of us will have made errors. We have been helped by the Public Bill Office, but we will have missed things and got things the wrong way around.

It is important to have something purposive, as the Joint Committee wanted, and to have clarity of intent for Ofcom, including that this is so much more about systems than about content. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—clearly, we all respect her work chairing the communications committee and the insights she brings to the House—I think that a very simple statement, restricting it just to proposed new paragraph (g), is not enough. It would almost be the same as the description at the beginning of the Bill, before Clause 1. We need to go beyond that to get the most from having a clear statement of how we want Ofcom to do its job and the Secretary of State to support Ofcom.

I like what the noble Lord, Lord Allan, said about the risk of overcommitment and underdevelopment. When the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford talked about being the safest place in the world to go online, which is the claim that has been made about the Bill from the beginning, I was reminded again of the difficulty of overcommitting and underdelivering. The Bill is not perfect, and I do not believe that it will be when this Committee and this House have finished their work; we will need to keep coming back and legislating and regulating in this area, as we pursue the goal of being the safest place in the world to go online —but it will not be any time soon.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who I respect, that I understand what she is saying about some of her concerns about a risk-free child safety regime and the unintended consequences that may come in this legislation. But at its heart, what motivate us and make us believe that getting the Bill right is one of the most important things we will do in all of our times in this Parliament are the unintended consequences of the algorithms that these tech companies have created in pushing content at children that they do not want to hear. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, wanting to comment.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I just want to say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that we are not looking to mollycoddle children or put them in cotton wool; we are asking for a system where they are not systematically exploited by major companies.

[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.