Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill

Melanie Ward Excerpts

Friday 7th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lola McEvoy]

The online world has lots of moving parts, and it is really hard for legislators to keep up. We are already lagging way behind where we need to be. What we need—I will address this later in my speech—is a dynamic risk assessment, so that when new innovations come online and we see children using them, they will be risk assessed in real time and children will be prevented from coming to harm.

On marketing to children, obviously that needs to be kept in line with new societal trends to protect children from being targeted for sales. That is quite clear. I stand by the measures in the Bill, and I am confident that this is not the end of this campaign.

My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington and I first met when, as candidates for the Labour party, we were both shocked at how cross-cutting an issue children’s safety online was for our constituents. When he asked me to be a co-sponsor of the Bill, I said, “Of course,” but I asked him to engage with Bereaved Families for Online Safety, as I had heard about the group’s work and had huge respect for them. He agreed and we invited them to Parliament. The argument that there is a moral panic over children’s online safety is utterly offensive. I cannot overstate how upsetting it is for people in that group and around the country who have serious concerns about their children’s safety online. I want to put on the record in this Chamber my unequivocal support and respect for that group and for parents across the country who have lost their children. Their stories are all the evidence I need to know that we as a Government must go further.

Ellen Roome, Jools Sweeney’s mother, has been campaigning for the right of bereaved parents to have access to their children’s accounts in the event of their death, to search for answers. I strongly support a further amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill to make it automatic that, in the case of a sudden unexplained death of a child, Ofcom is notified immediately and a data notice is sent to regulated online platforms to freeze the child’s accounts from deletion. That would prevent any other parents from having to go through the awful process that Ellen has had to endure to try to find answers. I urge the platforms that have been contacted by Ellen and other bereaved families: please engage and adhere to their requests for the children’s data. These people have lost their children. Do the decent thing and help them find answers.

[Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I were both present at an event with bereaved parents that was organised by our hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), at which a number of social media companies were also present. The children who had taken their lives had been very active on the platforms provided by those companies. Does my hon. Friend share my dismay at the reaction of the social media companies in that room? They made it very clear that they did not understand the responsibility they held for the harm they were causing.

[Lola McEvoy]

It has been very interesting to be part of this campaign, and I think there is a lot more to do.

There are other areas that we must urgently take action on, from going forwards with the second iteration of the children’s code to ensure that functionalities are included, to upgrading the requirement for risk assessments to make them more dynamic and supporting bereaved families.

To conclude, I am incredibly grateful to all those who have supported the Bill—to my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington for his incredible work, to Ben Kingsley for his excellent expertise, and to my wonderful constituents in Darlington, who have put me here to represent them, improve their lives and help them to protect their children. This Christmas just gone, I was at a carol concert at the Crown Street library in Darlington, and a man tapped me on the shoulder, pointed at his beautiful child, who was looking up at me and beaming, and said, “Keep going on the online safety. You’re doing it for her.” I am, and I will continue to do so. I urge our Government to get on with it and to take as much action as we reasonably can within the timeframe that we have.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I think it was John Prescott who said something about ancient values in a modern setting. As we move forward, we need to secure the liberty of the individual at the same time as we protect the vulnerable.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Katie White) made the point that she has had twice as much correspondence on this subject as on any other this year. She made a really important point, which applies not only to this area, but to many other areas in which we work with young people: if we possibly can, it is very important to be able to extend the years of childhood that a child gets to enjoy. Many years ago, I wrote a report about teenage pregnancy in my constituency. That is another aspect of trying to ensure that where children delay their first sexual experience, it is almost certainly better for them and leads to better personal, social and other outcomes.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) made a point about children attending A&E with psychiatric conditions. I urge him to be slightly cautious about the statistics here, because the work that I have done on acquired brain injuries suggests that sometimes people are actually presenting with a brain injury, rather than a psychiatric condition. That is one of the areas where we need to be much more intelligent about how we get data that informs our research.

We heard from the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Monica Harding)—incidentally, I see “Esher and Walton” written down and think, “That must be a Conservative Member of Parliament,” so it is such a delight when I find that it is not.

[Melanie Ward]

In my constituency and across my area of Fife we have a real problem with violence and aggression in schools. Every week for the last month there has been a violent attack by children on children, and on almost every occasion it is filmed, shared on social media and amplified. Does the Minister agree that that is a real reason why we need action?

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. The use of a mobile phone as another form of aggression is a very disturbing part of the trend we have seen. She is quite right that we need to consider action in that field.

The hon. Member for Esher and Walton referred to services that are “inherently addictive by design”. I think there is actually a contradiction in terms there. They are not inherently addictive; they are addictive by design. Those are two quite different things. We should strive to achieve no services provided for children being addictive by design, which is precisely one of the things that the Government are determined about.

I should say to the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) that I indicated earlier that I had had no meetings with tech by making a zero with my fingers, but that is not quite true. I had a meeting a few months ago with Baroness Jones and TikTok, although I expressed as strongly as many Members have in this debate the kind of views that they have in relation to the operation of TikTok. It is not that I have been convinced by TikTok—if anything, we were trying to put the argument to it about the need for responsible activity in this field.