Online Safety Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I also have a pair of amendments in this group. I am patron of a charity called JobsAware, which specialises in dealing with fraudulent job advertisements. It is an excellent example of collaboration between government and industry in dealing with a problem such as this. Going forward, though, they will be much more effective if there is a decent flow of information and if this Bill provides the mechanism for that. I would be very grateful if my noble friend would agree to a meeting, between Committee and Report, to discuss how that might best be achieved within the construct of this Bill.

It is not just the authorities who are able to deter these sort of things from happening. If there is knowledge spread through reputable networks about who is doing these things, it becomes much easier for other people to stop them happening. At the moment, the experience in using the internet must bear some similarity to walking down a Victorian street in London with your purse open. It really is all our responsibility to try to do something about this, since we now live so much of our life online. I very much look forward to my noble friend’s response.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I had the great privilege of serving as a member of this House’s Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee under the excellent chairing of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. She has already told us of the ghastly effects that fraud has on individuals and indeed its adverse effects on businesses. We heard really dramatic statistics, such as when Action Fraud told us that 80% of fraud is cyber enabled.

Many of us here will have been victims of fraud—I have been a victim—or know people who have been victims of fraud. I was therefore very pleased when the Government introduced the fraudulent advertising provisions into the Bill, which will go some way to reducing the prevalence of online fraud. It seems to me that it requires special attention, which is what these amendments should do.

We heard in our inquiry about the problems that category 1 companies had in taking down fraudulent advertisements quickly. Philip Milton, the public policy manager at Meta, told us that it takes between 24 and 48 hours to review possibly harmful content after it has been flagged to the company. He recognised that, due to the deceptive nature of fraudulent advertising, Meta’s systems do not always recognise that advertising is fraudulent and, therefore, take-down rates would be variable. That is one of the most sophisticated tech platforms—if it has difficulties, just imagine the difficulty that other companies have in both recognising and taking down fraudulent advertising.

Again and again, the Bill recognises the difficulties that platforms have in systematising the protections provided in the Bill. Fraud has an ever-changing nature and is massively increasing—particularly so for fraudulent advertising. It is absolutely essential that the highest possible levels of transparency are placed upon the tech companies to report their response to fraudulent advertising. Both Ofcom and users need to be assured that not only do the companies have the most effective reporting systems but, just as importantly, they have the most effective transparency to check how well they are performing.

To do this, the obligations on platforms must go beyond the transparency reporting requirements in the Bill. These amendments would ensure that they include obligations to provide information on incidence of fraud advertising, in line with other types of priority illegal content. These increased obligations are part of checking the effectiveness of the Bill when it comes to being implemented.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, told us on the fifth day of Committee, when taking about the risk-assessment amendments she had tabled:

“They are about ensuring transparency to give all users confidence”.—[Official Report, 9/5/23; col. 1755.]


Across the Bill, noble Lords have repeatedly stated that there needs to be a range of ways to judge how effectively the protections provided are working. I suggest to noble Lords that these amendments are important attempts to help make the Bill more accountable and provide the data to future-proof the harms it is trying to deal with. As we said in the committee report:

“Without sufficient futureproofing, technology will most likely continue to create new opportunities for fraudsters to target victims”.


I ask the Minister to at least look at some of these amendments favourably.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for replying to my amendments and for his offer of a meeting, which I will certainly accept when issued.

The Government are missing some opportunities here. I do not know whether he has tried reporting something to Action Fraud, but if you have not lost money you cannot do it; you need to have been gulled and lost money for any of the government systems to take you seriously. While you can report something to the other ones, they do not tell you what they have done. There is no feedback or mechanism for encouraging and rewarding you for reporting—it is a deficient system.

When it comes to job adverts, by and large they go through job boards. There is a collection of people out there who are not direct internet providers who have leverage, and a flow of data to them can make a huge difference; there may also be other areas. It is that flow of data that enables job scams to be piled down on, and that is what the Bill needs to improve. Although the industry as a whole is willing, there just is not the impetus at the moment to make prevention nearly as good as it should be.

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister very much indeed for his response. Although this has been a short debate, it is a good example of us all just trying to get the Bill to work as well as possible—in this case to protect consumers, but there will be other examples as well.

My noble friend said that the larger services in particular are the ones that are going to have to deal with fraudulent advertisements, so I think the issue about the burdens of user reporting do not apply. I remind him of the paragraph I read out from the Fraud Strategy, where the Government themselves say that they want to make the reporting of fraud online as easy as possible. I will read the record of what he said very carefully, but it might be helpful after that to have a further conversation or perhaps for him to write to reassure those outside this Committee who are looking for confirmation about how transparency reporting, user reporting and complaints will actually apply in relation to fraudulent advertisements, so that this can work as well as possible.

On that basis, I will withdraw my amendment for today, but I think we would all be grateful for further discussion and clarification so that this part of the Bill works as well as possible to protect people from any kind of fraudulent advertisement.