Digital Economy

Mike Wood Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

Thank you for your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker, which I will take on board, but I will just deal with the point raised by my hon. Friend. The measures that will be acceptable to the BBFC will be of greater rigour than the examples he gave. I hope that I will be able to satisfy his concerns, but I may write to him, rather than dwell at length on the important issue he raises.

I now turn to the guidance on ancillary service providers. Paragraph 3 of section 3 provides a non-exhaustive list of classes of providers that the age-verification regulator may consider as within scope. However, to ensure that this policy remains flexible for the benefit of future developments, it is necessary that this is a non-exhaustive list. Where new classes of ancillary services appear in the future, the BBFC’s guidance explains the process by which these services will be informed.

The guidance includes additional material, as this is a new policy and the regulator considered that it was important for its stakeholders that the guidance set out the wider context in which the age-verification regulator will carry out regulation. This includes valuable guidance on matters such as the BBFC’s approach, powers and material on data protection.

We are aware of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s special interest report. The Committee raised similar concerns to the JCSI—for example, on the content threshold—and the responses to the SLSC’s concerns on these points are the same as the responses we have given to the JCSI reports. However, the SLSC also suggested that the House may want to ask what action the Government will take to tackle pornographic material available on a non-commercial basis. We have already debated these issues during my remarks.

I appreciate that pornography is of course made available by means not covered by the regulations. We have already covered those issues, but they were also the subject of extensive discussion during the passage of the Digital Economy Bill. In particular, concern has been expressed about social media platforms. As I have said in response to hon. Members’ interventions, we expect those platforms to enforce their own terms and conditions and to protect children from harmful content. Indeed, the Government have been clear that online platforms must do more to protect users from such harmful content.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

How do the Government intend to ensure that these regulations can keep up with technological advancements and developments within these markets so that the legislation and regulations this place passes are not obsolete by the time they come into force?

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend raises a very important point. The principal way in which we are future-proofing these regulations is by making the specificities that the BBFC operates by and the guidance sufficiently flexible and not too prescriptive. As technology advances, it will be able to adapt such regulations and guidance without the need for this House continually to bring in further legislation.

Before I conclude, I would add in response to my hon. Friend that, as I have said, this is not a silver bullet and it is only one of the measures we are taking. We are working on the online harms Bill to tackle issues and concerns in the area of the provision of pornography that are not captured by these regulations. I trust that my hon. Friend is reassured.

As I have said, I recognise that the age-verification regulations are not a panacea, but I am proud that we are leading the way internationally in the action we are taking to give far more protection to children and young people than is currently available.