Protection of Children Codes of Practice

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2025 Lords Chamber

I have one question for the Minister: what will the Government do to protect our youngest children—those whom even the social media platforms recognise should not be on these platforms—and ensure that they are not on them? Sadly, that will not happen through these codes.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for introducing this regret Motion. I am very familiar with it because, as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, I was part of the team scrutinising it when it came in front of us. I welcome the Minister to her post. This is one of her early baptisms in the world of online safety and it will be the precursor, I suspect, to many more. I suspect that she will be on a fairly steep learning curve, and I wish her well.

Many people have spoken about the perception that many of us have that we thought we were being very explicit about our hopes and ambitions for the Online Safety Bill as it went through Parliament—with, in particular, a huge amount of time in this House. If she has not yet been able to, I suggest that the Minister could benefit from sitting down over a suitable libation with the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson and Lord Clement-Jones, the noble Viscounts, Lord Camrose and Lord Colville, the noble Baronesses, Lady Harding and Lady Kidron, and others to understand what we thought we were being very clear about in terms of Parliament’s expectations when this Act passed and what we are now experiencing in terms of its enactment. That would be really helpful in understanding where we are coming from when we repeatedly raise some of these issues. That really comes under the heading of an insufficiency of ambition and of clarity of understanding about what it was that we thought we were being very clear about.

There is a failure of process in certain areas. I will not go into great detail, but the fact that smaller, high-risk sites are, to a large extent, excluded is madness. It is exactly on some of those smaller, high-risk sites where you have incidents of people being encouraged to self-harm, of people being encouraged to end their lives and of radicalisation. That is going on in plain sight. At the moment, Ofcom does not appear to feel that it has enough resources to do anything about it. I am also not sure that it feels it is entirely clear, under the auspices of the Act, whether this should indeed be a priority for it.

There are also structural flaws: the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, mentioned the safe harbour. There are three key questions that I will pose to the Minister— I do not expect her to be able to give a magic answer at the Dispatch Box—to really focus on trying to get an understanding of what is going on and some answers. I am sure she will be asked some of these questions in the future.

The first is: does Ofcom have sufficient resources and knowledge at its disposal to do what we very clearly intended it to do in the Act? Given the evidence at the moment of what it is able to do, I am not sure the resources are adequate. If the resources are adequate, they are not being tactically and strategically deployed in the best way to achieve what we were trying to do.

The second point was referred to briefly. We tried very hard, during the passage of the Act, to try to find a place for parents to go. If, under the terms of the Act, they are meant to go to the platform with which they have a problem—perhaps their child was harmed or, God forbid, even died—and the platform is unable to satisfy them and give them an adequate response, they have nowhere to go. We talked about that at length during the passage of the Act, and it is still the case. I do not think, in all conscience, that is adequate or appropriate. I encourage the Government to look carefully at that and how it might be mitigated. Talking to people such as Ian Russell and the Molly Rose Foundation would be a very good way of understanding what those families, who are not getting an adequate response, are going through and will continue to go through.

The third area is the level of scrutiny that the Act is undergoing. We fought in vain to encourage the then Government to agree to set up a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament to scrutinise the Online Safety Act on a continuing basis; to establish a dialogue with Ofcom in a direct and relatively open way, but also for it to be possible to do it, if needs be, more discreetly, away from the limelight and publicity; to try to understand some of the issues and problems that Ofcom may be having; and to see how we can help, rather than being slightly outside it, as it is currently constructed. I do not feel comfortable being critical of Ofcom without necessarily being in full receipt of the facts and understanding what is really going on inside. I think all those of us involved in the passage of the Act would like to help Ofcom do its job, not castigate it for not doing what we think it should have done. Trying to see whether there is a way in which we can have a more regular dialogue between Parliament and Ofcom, for each to understand where the other is coming from and to be better informed, would be a good step forward.

The day before yesterday, in our Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, we had yet another statutory instrument on online safety, in this case from the Home Office. Again, I am afraid it was slightly disappointing news. This statutory instrument has a particularly catchy title. It is called the Online Safety (CSEA Content Reporting by Regulated User-to-User Service Providers) (Revocation) Regulations. For those at the Dispatch Box, it is Statutory Instrument 2025 No. 1066, like the Battle of Hastings. In this case, an online portal to enable all reports of child sexual exploitation and abuse to be aggregated in one place was meant to go live, I think, next month. For reasons probably to do with poor design and project planning, it will not go live. It is effectively having to be rebuilt and will hopefully go online, if it works, at some point in the spring. We will publish our report and noble Lords will be able to read it and see that the committee was not exactly happy. In this case, the Home Office provided an inadequate Explanatory Memorandum and has agreed to go back and do a better job. I can see the chair of our committee sitting behind the Minister; he will be well aware of that.

In conclusion, I think the status quo is untenable. Until and unless the group of us who were particularly closely involved in the passage of the Act are more confident that the victims who are suffering in the online world, particularly children, are better protected—until we feel that their concerns and experiences are being responded to more robustly, succinctly and accurately—we will continue to keep on raising this issue again and again.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise: I came to listen to this debate from the steps of the throne, but the more I listened, the more I thought I would make a very short contribution. I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for his Motion. The noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Watson, and others in the House, will know that, as part of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and I and others have introduced a number of amendments that are relevant to our debate today. One would raise the age of access to social media for children from 13 to 15. Another would prohibit the use of VPNs by children. A third would ban the use of smartphones in schools during the school day.

The Department for Education and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, in their rejection of our proposed amendments in Committee, cited as reasons for waiting the lack of convincing evidence and the fact that these codes were going to be implemented, and said it was premature to act. I hope there is some way of making sure that the noble Baroness is briefed on today’s debate, because I think she might feel, if she listened to some of the comments around the House, somewhat less reassured. She would also have been less reassured if she had been present earlier this week at the round table we hosted, across parties and with Cross-Bench support, which took evidence from medical experts including the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, academic experts and safeguarding experts. What we heard was deeply troubling.

The Minister may be aware that there are a number of ongoing campaigns about aspects of this and the way in which social media has led to tragic deaths of children. The noble Lord, Lord Russell, referred to Ian Russell and his daughter Molly, but Esther Ghey, mother of Brianna Ghey, and Ellen Roome, mother of Jools, also lost their children tragically as a result of their involvement with social media. This is an opportunity for the Government to be on the right side of history. All the evidence seems to be going in one direction and one direction only in terms of harm to children. If there is ever a time to adopt the precautionary principle, surely this is it.