Online Safety Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Friday 9th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for bringing this Bill forward. As the father of a 10 year-old girl, I am getting to that point in my life when I am having to pay close attention to this area of the internet and to what I should do to best look after the interests of my daughter. However, in a country where 1 million mothers have a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, I think that we ought to keep things in proportion. The internet is not the only way that children get access to these things, and I well remember in my youth not being put off by the fact that images had been generated for medical purposes, shall we say.

This is not the easiest area to be effective in, but we should do something to make it easy for parents to install, and make use of, internet-blocking or filtering software, which gives them at least some level of security and control over what happens to their children.

I do not, however, feel comfortable with the particular technical solution proposed in the Bill. If you give ISPs the responsibility for deciding what is pornographic and what is not, you are recreating the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. You are making it terribly difficult for these organisations, which are not set up for this purpose, to decide whether a particular website should be accessible. You are placing on them the burden of ruling and of having appeal procedures on this. I do not think that that is practical. You leave them with a liability that will be difficult for them to insure against and control. I cannot see that as being the right way forward.

I should much prefer to see the ideas incorporated in the noble Baroness’s Bill in terms of compulsion on ISPs and on equipment manufacturers used to make sure that at the point of purchase of a device the option of turning on a variety of parental controls is offered. Parents could be offered the opportunity to turn on a form of controls on the point of signing up with an ISP. The noble Baroness made a point about dealing with contracts with continuing ISPs. Perhaps there could be a point after Royal Assent for the Bill by which all existing contracts had to comply.

This is important, too, because these controls are about much more than pornographic websites. They are about supplying parents with the information that they need to deal with sexting, which is the abuse of text messages for sexual bullying, and other forms of harassment that take place over the internet for ills other than pornography. They will allow parents to know what is going on and deal with it. That is not effectively dealt with by just blocking systems. Fundamentally, in a free country, these things should be dealt with by parental choice and not by imposition through an ISP.