Draft Online Safety Bill Report

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Let me start by commending the work of the Joint Committee. I do so in large part because it reflects the fact that, thankfully, there is precious little partisan politics in this area. There is huge agreement across the House.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister. He is the latest custodian of what I fear will become the largest Christmas tree Bill in Parliament. We run the risk of presenting this piece of legislation as something that will fix the entire internet. When I was the Minister with responsibility for this matter, I felt two possibly conflicting things. The first is that our guiding and most important principle is that what is illegal offline should be illegal online. There are huge parts of this Bill where that need not even be a conversation. The cyber-flashing example is an interesting one, because flashing is illegal in the real world. The idea that it might not be illegal online is absurd. We should not even be having that conversation. There are many pieces of this Bill where, in fact, what is required is simply a tidying up exercise, reflecting the fact that our legislation has not kept pace with the changing nature of the digital world.

The second feeling that I had was that, in many cases, we had existing laws that did not even need as much modification as perhaps we might think. There is an important issue of the existing resources that the police allocate to online criminality. That is not to denigrate the fantastic work that the police do—of course it is not—but, too often, we will have had constituents who have gone to their local police forces and found that online crime is treated fundamentally differently. The Home Office is on board with addressing that, but it does need to change.

I am, however, fundamentally optimistic about what this Bill can achieve. We are now all agreed that it is only right that elected people regulate the public square, and the public square now firmly includes Facebook and Twitter, so it cannot be right that Mark Zuckerberg has more power than my hon. Friend the Minister, or, indeed, the Prime Minister of many countries. That cannot be right, and this Bill goes a long way to fixing that.

I want to touch on a couple of specific points. The first is that it is plainly also right that we should be regulating advertising at the same time as we are regulating other content. There has never been a doubt in the Government’s mind that that should happen, but, importantly, I know that there is some ambition to align the timetables of both of those pieces of work.

Likewise, the place of journalism online is incredibly important. We can overthink who is a journalist in the modern world, but we should be able to make some sensible progress on whether the self-regulated journalism that we have in this country adopts a different status online, and Ofcom, in its work in this Bill, should reflect that.

My final point on those specific issues is that I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) and former Secretaries of State who spoke in the debate wanted the primacy of free speech of the individual to be protected in all the work that we have done in this Parliament. I know it is difficult to embed that in a Bill, but we must address the fact that, just as large numbers of people are—rightly or wrongly—genuinely hesitant about taking the vaccine, large numbers of people genuinely worry that the Bill will allow serious constriction of free speech online. For me, that potentially has a chilling effect, which we should all be concerned about.

I commend the Minister for how he has engaged with colleagues across the House. We need to communicate better about how the Bill will tidy up some aspects of the imperfections that I have mentioned and make a real change and difference to how people experience social media. Fundamentally, we need to be clear that the Government’s commitment to protecting free speech runs like a golden thread through the Bill and that the measure will not potentially undermine that. None the less, I think we all agree that the Bill will perform an essential function in an area that is essential to all aspects of modern life.