Online Safety Legislation: Abuse on Social Media

Lord Watts Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend will know that, in addition to the implementation of the Online Safety Act, we already have plans to bring forward a new data Bill where some of these issues can be debated. We also have ambitions to bring forward a further piece of AI legislation, on which we will have the opportunity to talk about those issues in more detail. He is absolutely right: these are serious issues. They were debated at length during the passage of the previous data protection Bill, and we hope to return to them again.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not the case that Ofcom is letting down the public? What we need is to review the role of Ofcom and other regulators and, if they are failing to do their duties for the public, they should be removed from office.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, Ofcom has a very wide-ranging and serious set of responsibilities. There is no suggestion that it is not carrying out its responsibilities in the run-up to the implementation of the Online Safety Act. We are working very closely with Ofcom and believe that it will carry out those additional functions that we have given it with proper scrutiny and to high standards. Yes, there is a case for looking at all regulators; we have a debate on this on Monday in the House, and I am looking forward to that, but that is a wider issue. For the moment, we have to give Ofcom all the support that we can in implementing a very difficult set of regulations.