Online Safety Bill

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The last Back-Bench speaker is Miriam Cates.

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I think you are the third person to take the Chair during the debate. It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris); I agree with everything that she said, and my comments will be similar.

This has been a long but fascinating debate. We have discussed only a small part of the Bill today, and just a few amendments, but the wide range of the debate reflects the enormous complexity of what the Bill is intended to do, which is to regulate the online world so that it is subject to rules, regulations, obligations and protective measures equivalent to those in the offline world. We must do this, because the internet is now an essential part of our infrastructure. I think that we see the costs of our high-speed broadband as being in the same category as our energy and water costs, because we could not live without it. Like all essential infrastructure, the internet must be regulated. We must ensure that providers are working in the best interests of consumers, within the law and with democratic accountability.

Regulating the internet through the Bill is not a one-off project. As many Members have said, it will take years to get it right, but we must begin now. I think the process can be compared with the regulation of roads. A century ago there were hardly any private motor cars on the roads. There were no rules; people did not even have to drive on a particular side of the road. There have been more than 100 years of frequent changes to rules and regulations to get it right. It seems crazy now to think there was a time when there were no speed limits and no seat belts. The death rates on the roads, even in the 1940s, were 13 times higher than they are now. Over time, however, with regulation, we have more or less solved the complex problems of road regulation. Similarly, it will take time to get this Bill right, but we must get it on to the statute book and give it time to evolve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dean Russell]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the work of charities such as Dignify in Watford, where Helen Roberts does incredible work in raising awareness of this issue, is essential to ensuring that people are aware of the harm that can be done?

[Miriam Cates]

I completely agree. Other charities, such as CEASE—the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation —and Barnardo’s have been mentioned in the debate, and I think it so important to raise awareness. There are many harms in the internet, but pornography is an epidemic. It makes up a third of the material on the internet, and its impact on children cannot be overstated. Many boys who watch porn say that it gives them ideas about the kind of sex that they want to try. It is not surprising that a third of child sexual abuse is committed by other children. During puberty—that very important period of development—boys in particular are subject to an erotic imprint. The kind of sex that they see and the sexual ideas that they have during that time determine what they see as normal behaviour for the rest of their lives. It is crucial for children to be protected from harmful pornography that encourages the objectification and abuse of—almost always—women.

[Neale Hanvey]

I thank—in this context—my hon. Friend for giving way.

The lawsuits are coming. There can certainly be no more harmful act than encouraging a young person to mutilate their body with so-called gender-affirming surgery with no therapeutic intervention beforehand. In Scotland, the United Nations special rapporteur for violence against women and girls has criticised the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is time to establish who is a feminist, and who is a fake to their fingertips?

[Miriam Cates]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is absolutely right: inciting a child to harm their body, whatever that harm is, should be criminalised, and I support the sentiment of new clause 16, which seeks to do that. Sadly, lots of children, particularly girls, go online and type in “I don’t like my body”. Maybe they are drawn to eating disorder sites, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) has mentioned, but often they are drawn into sites that glorify transition, often with adult men that they do not even know in other countries posting pictures of double mastectomies on teenage girls.

[John Nicolson (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady must realise that this is fantasy land. It is incredibly difficult to get gender reassignment surgery. The “they’re just confused” stuff is exactly what was said to me as a young gay man. She must realise that this really simplifies a complicated issue and patronises people going through difficult choices.

[Miriam Cates]

I really wish it was fantasy land, but I am in contact with parents each and every day who tell me stories of their children being drawn into this. Yes, in this country it is thankfully very difficult to get a double mastectomy when you are under 18, but it is incredibly easy to buy testosterone illegally online and to inject it, egged on by adults in other countries. Once a girl has injected testosterone during puberty, she will have a deep voice and facial hair for life and male-pattern baldness, and she will be infertile. That is a permanent change, it is self-harm and it should be criminalised under this Bill, whether through this clause or through the Government’s new plans. The hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey) is absolutely right: this is happening every day and it should be classed as self-harm.

Going back to my comments about the effect on children of viewing pornography, I absolutely support the idea of putting children’s experience at the heart of the Bill but it needs to be about children’s welfare and not about what children want. One impact of the internet has been to blur the boundary between adults and children. As adults, we need to be able to say, “This is the evidence of what is harmful to children, and this is what children should not be seeing.” Of course children will say that they want free access to all content, just like they want unlimited sweets and unlimited chocolate, but as adults we need to be able to say what is harmful for children and to protect them from seeing it.

This bring me to Government new clause 11, which deals with making sure that child sexual abuse material is taken offline. There is a clear link between the epidemic of pornography and the epidemic of child sexual abuse material. The way the algorithms on porn sites work is to draw users deeper and deeper into more and more extreme content—other Members have mentioned this in relation to other areas of the internet—so someone might go on to what they think is a mainstream pornography site and be drawn into more and more explicit, extreme and violent criminal pornography. At the end of this, normal people are drawn into watching children being abused, often in real time and often in other countries. There is a clear link between the epidemic of porn and the child sexual abuse material that is so prevalent online.

Last week in the Home Affairs Committee we heard from Professor Alexis Jay, who led the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Her report is harrowing, and it has been written over seven years. Sadly, its conclusion is that seven years later, there are now even more opportunities for people to abuse children because of the internet, so making sure that providers have a duty to remove any child sexual abuse material that they find is crucial. Many Members have referred to the Internet Watch Foundation. One incredibly terrifying statistic is that in 2021, the IWF removed 252,194 web pages containing child sexual abuse material and an unknown number of images. New clause 11 is really important, because it would put the onus on the tech platforms to remove those images when they are found.

It is right to put the onus on the tech companies. All the way through the writing of this Bill, at all the consultation meetings we have been to, we have heard the tech companies say, “It’s too hard; it’s not possible because of privacy, data, security and cost.” I am sure that is what the mine owners said in the 19th century when they were told by the Government to stop sending children down the mines. It is not good enough. These are the richest, most powerful companies in the world. They are more powerful than an awful lot of countries, yet they have no democratic accountability. If they can employ real-time facial recognition at airports, they can find a way to remove child abuse images from the internet.

This leads me on to new clause 17, tabled by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), which would introduce individual director liability for non-compliance. I completely support that sentiment and I agree that this is likely to be the only way we will inject some urgency into the process of compliance. Why should directors who are profiting from the platforms not be responsible if children suffer harm as a result of using their products? That is certainly the case in many other industries. The right hon. Lady used the example of the building trade. Of course there will always be accidents, but if individual directors face the prospect of personal liability, they will act to address the systemic issues, the problems with the processes and the malevolent algorithms that deliberately draw users towards harm.

[Sir William Cash]

My hon. Friend knows that I too take a great interest in this, and I am glad that the Government have agreed to continue discussions on this question. Is she aware that the personal criminal liability for directors flows from the corporate criminal liability in the company of which they are a director, and that their link to the criminal act itself, even if the company has not been or is not being prosecuted, means that the matter has to be made clear in the legislation, so that we do not have any uncertainty about the relationship of the company director and the company of which he is a director?

[Miriam Cates]

I was not aware of that, but I am now. I thank my hon. Friend for that information. This is a crucial point. We need the accountability of the named director associated with the company, the platform and the product in order to introduce the necessary accountability. I do not know whether the Minister will accept this new clause today, but I very much hope that we will look further at how we can make this possible, perhaps in another place.

I very much support the Bill. We need to get it on the statute book, although it will probably need further work, and I support the Government amendments. However, given the link between children viewing pornography and child sexual abuse, I hope that when the Bill goes through the other place, their lordships will consider how regulations around pornographic content can be strengthened, in order to drastically reduce the number of children viewing porn and eventually being drawn into criminal activities themselves. In particular, I would like their lordships to look at tightening and accelerating the age verification and giving equal treatment to all pornography, whether it is on a porn site or a user-to-user service and whether it is online or offline. Porn is harmful to children in whatever form it comes, so the liability on directors and the criminality must be exactly the same. I support the Bill and the amendments in the Government’s name, but it needs to go further when it goes to the other place.

[Paul Scully]

I thank Members for their contributions during today’s debate and for their ongoing engagement with such a crucial piece of legislation. I will try to respond to as many of the issues raised as possible.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not in his place, proposed adding in promoting self-harm as a criminal offence. The Government are sympathetic to the intention behind that proposal; indeed, we asked the Law Commission to consider how the criminal law might address that, and have agreed in principle to create a new offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm. The form of the offence recommended by the Law Commission is based on the broadly comparable offence of encouraging or assisting suicide. Like that offence, it covers the encouragement of, or assisting in, self-harm by means of communication and in other ways. When a similar amendment was tabled by the hon. Members for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) and for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) in Committee, limiting the offence to encouragement or assistance by means of sending a message, the then Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, said it would give only partial effect to the Law Commission’s recommendation. It remains the Government’s intention to give full effect to the Law Commission’s recommend-ations in due course.

Online Safety Bill

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

No. I call Miriam Cates.

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

I too rise to speak to new clause 2, which seeks to introduce senior manager criminal liability to the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) set out, we will not push it to a vote as a result of the very welcome commitments that the Minister has made to introduce a similar amendment in the other place.

Protecting children is not just the role of parents but the responsibility of the whole of society, including our institutions and businesses that wish to trade here. That is the primary aim of this Bill, which I wholeheartedly support: to keep children safe online from horrendous and unspeakable harms, many of which were mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom).

We look back in horror at children being forced to work down mines or neglected in Victorian orphanages, but I believe we will look back with similar outrage at online harms. What greater violation could there be of childhood than to entice a child to collaborate in their own sexual abuse in the privacy and supposed safety of their own bedroom? Yet this is one of the many crimes that are occurring on an industrial scale every day. Past horrors such as children down mines were tackled by robust legislation, and the Online Safety Bill must continue our Parliament’s proud tradition of taking on vested interests to defend the welfare of children.

The Bill must succeed in its mission, but in its present form, it does not have sufficient teeth to drive the determination that is needed in tech boardrooms to tackle the systemic issue of the malevolent algorithms that drive this sickening content to our children. There is no doubt that the potential fines in the Bill are significant, but many of these companies have deep pockets, and the only criminal sanctions are for failure to share data with Ofcom. The inquest following the tragic death of Molly Russell was an example of this, as no one could be held personally responsible for what happened to her. I pay tribute to Ian Russell, Molly’s father, whose courage in the face of such personal tragedy has made an enormous difference in bringing to light the extent of online harms.

Only personal criminal liability will drive proactive change, and we have seen this in other areas such as the financial services industry and the construction industry. I am delighted that the Government have recognised the necessity of senior manager liability for tech bosses, after much campaigning across the House, and committed to introducing it in the other place. I thank the Secretary of State and her team for the very constructive and positive way in which they have engaged with supporters of this measure.

[Sir William Cash]

Would my hon. Friend not also like to say that the NSPCC has been magnificent in supporting us?

[Miriam Cates]

I was coming on to that—absolutely.

The advantage of introducing this measure in the other place is that we can widen the scope to all appropriate child safety duties beyond clause 11 and perhaps tackle pornography and child sexual abuse material as well. We will have a groundbreaking Bill that will hold to account powerful executives who knowingly allow our children to be harmed.

There are those who say—not least the tech companies —that we should not be seeking to criminalise tech directors. There are those who worry that this will reduce tech investment, but that has not happened in Ireland. There are those who say that the senior manager liability amendment will put a great burden on tech companies to comply, to which I say, “Great!” There are those who are worried that this will set an international precedent, to which I say, “Even better!”

Nothing should cause greater outrage in our society than the harming of innocent children. In a just society founded on the rule of law, those who harm children or allow children to be harmed should expect to be punished by the law. That is what new clause 2 seeks to do, and I look forward to working with the Secretary of State and others to bring forward a suitable amendment in the other place.

I offer my sincere thanks to the NSPCC, especially Rich Collard, and the outstanding Charles Hymas of The Telegraph, who have so effectively supported this campaign. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash); without his determination, knowledge and experience, it would not have been possible to achieve this change. He has been known as Mr Brexit, but as he said, even before he was Mr Brexit, he was Mr Child Protection, having been involved with the Protection of Children Act 1978. It is certainly advantageous in negotiations to work with someone who knows vastly more about legislation than pretty much anyone else involved. He sat through the debate in December on the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), and while the vote was taking place, he said, “I think we can do this.” He spent the next week in the Public Bill Office and most of his recess buried in legislation. I pay tribute to him for his outstanding work. Once again, I thank the Secretary of State for her commitment to this, and I think this will continue our Parliament’s proud history of protecting children.

[Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)]

I fully support the Bill and pay tribute to the work that Members have done over months and years to get us to where we are. I support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Dover (Mrs Elphicke), for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) and for Stone (Sir William Cash), because these are the right things to do. We cannot have—effectively—illegal advertising for illegal activities on platforms. We would not allow it on television, so why would we allow it on other easily accessible platforms? With regard to content that is harmful to children, why should we not focus the minds of senior managers in those hugely rich organisations on the idea that, “If I do not do my job properly and protect children, I may go to prison.” I think that threat will focus those individuals’ minds.

Online Safety Bill

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

There is much more I could say but I do not need to say any more, except to say thank you to everybody in this House and in the other place, and to officials for the advice we have received from the Department and for the co-operation we have had. I believe that this will be a groundbreaking Bill when it is applied in practice. It is not enough just to pass pieces of legislation; the question is how we manage to implement them. That, to my mind, is the most important thing. I thank everybody concerned for the work they have done to make sure the Bill will eventually reach the statute book.

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

I will follow on from the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), who talked powerfully about the impact of online pornography, particularly on children who see it.

Sadly, online pornography is increasingly violent. Many videos depict graphic and degrading abuse of women, sickening acts of rape and incest, and many underage participants. I also want to refer to the excellent study by the Children’s Commissioner, which revealed that the average age at which children first encounter pornography online is just 13 years old, and that there are 1.4 million visits to pornography sites by British children each and every month. As my right hon. Friend said, that is rewiring children’s brains in respect of what they think about sex, what they expect during sex and what they think girls want during sex. I think we will all look back on this widespread child exposure to pornography in a similar way to how we look back on children working down mines or being condemned to the poor house. Future generations will wonder how on earth we abandoned our children to online pornography.

Ending the ready availability of pornographic content to children and criminalising those who fail to protect them should surely be the most important goal of the Online Safety Bill. Indeed, that was most of the aim of part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which was never enacted. Without the Government amendments tabled in the Lords last week, which I strongly support, the Online Safety Bill would have been in danger of missing this opportunity. As my colleagues have done, I want to thank the Secretary of State and Ministers for their engagement in what has been a cross-party campaign both in this place and the other place, with Baroness Kidron and Lord Bethell leading the way, along with charities and the campaigning journalist Charles Hymas at The Daily Telegraph, who did a fantastic job of reporting it all so powerfully. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has taught me all I ever needed to know about how to negotiate with Government.

We now have these brilliantly strengthening amendments, including, significantly, an amendment that will criminalise directors and managers if they do not comply with Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to specific child safety duties. That is really important, because we are talking about the wealthiest companies in the world. Just having fines will not be enough to generate the kind of culture change at board level that we need. Only potential jail terms, which have worked in the construction industry and the financial services industry, will do what it takes.

Lords amendments 141 and 142 make pornography a primary priority harm for children. Importantly, user-to-user providers, as well as dedicated adult sites, will now be explicitly required to use highly effective age verification tools to prevent children accessing them. The wording “highly effective” is crucial, because porn is porn wherever it is found, whether on Twitter, which as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said is the most likely place for children to find pornography, or on dedicated adult sites. It has the same effect and causes the same harm. It is therefore vital that tech companies will actually have to prevent children from going on their sites, and not just try hard. That is an incredibly important amendment.

[Sir William Cash]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what has really put their teeth on edge most of all is the idea that they might go to prison?

[Miriam Cates]

My hon. Friend is completely right. The impact of not taking responsibility for protecting children has to go to the very top.

Lords amendment 105 would compel Ofcom to submit its draft codes of practice within 18 months. That is an improvement on the previously lax timescale, which I welcome—along with the other significant improvements that have been made—and I repeat my gratitude to the Minister and the Secretary of State. Let us not pretend, however, that on Royal Assent our children will suddenly be safe from online pornography or any other online harms. There are serious questions to be asked about Ofcom’s capabilities to enforce against non-compliant porn sites, and I think we should look again at part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which would have allowed the British Board of Film Classification to act as the regulator.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on the excellent efforts she has made over a long period to highlight these matters. Does she agree that this is not the end but only the beginning of the first days of ensuring that we have proper digital access protection for not only children but adults who have access to digital devices?

[Miriam Cates]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his support. What he says is entirely correct.

The key to this does, of course, lie in the implementation. One of the capabilities of the BBFC is to disrupt the business model and the payment provision of the adult online industry. I ask the Minister to consider whether he can direct Ofcom to examine the way in which the BBFC deals with offline and streamed pornography, and whether Ofcom could learn some lessons from that. There is still a disparity between the kind of pornography that is allowed offline, on DVD or streamed services, and the kind that appears online. Offline, certain acts are illegal and the BBFC will not classify the content: any act that looks non-consensual, for example, is illegal and the material cannot be distributed, whereas online it proliferates.

The Bill should have been the perfect vehicle to expand those rules to all online services offering pornographic content. Sadly, we have missed that opportunity, but I nevertheless welcome the Government’s recently announced porn review. I hope it can be used to close the online/offline gap, to insert verification checks for people appearing in pornographic videos and to deal with related offences. Many of those people did not consent and do not know that they are in the videos.

We also need to take account of the complete lack of moderation on some of the sites. It was recently revealed in a court case in the United States that 700,000 Pornhub sites had been flagged for illegal content, but had not been checked. Pornhub has managed to check just 50 videos a day, and has acknowledged that unless a video has been flagged more than 15 times for potential criminal content, such as child rape, it will not even join the queue to be moderated and potentially taken down. The children and the trafficked women who appear in those videos are seeing their abuse repeated millions of times with no ability to pull it down.

The Bill has been controversial, and many of the arguments have concerned issues of free speech. I am a supporter of free speech, but violent pornography is not free speech. Drawing children into addiction is not free speech. Knowingly allowing children to view horrific sex crimes is not free speech. Publishing and profiting from videos of children being raped is not free speech. It is sickening, it is evil, it is destructive and it is a crime, and it is a crime from which too many profit with impunity. A third of the internet consists of pornography. The global porn industry’s revenue is estimated to be as much as $97 billion. The Bill is an important step forward, but we would be naive to expect this Goliath of an industry to roll over and keep children safe. There is much more to be done which will require international co-operation, co-operation from financial institutions, and Governments who are prepared to stand their ground against the might of these vested interests. I very much hope that this one will.

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

I want to speak briefly about Lords amendments 195 and 153, which would allow Ofcom, coroners and bereaved parents to acquire information and support relating to a child’s use of social media in the event of that child’s tragic death. Specifically, I want to speak about Archie Battersbee, who lived in my constituency but lost his life tragically last year, aged only 12. Archie’s mum, Hollie, was in the Public Gallery at the beginning of the debate, and I hope that she is still present. Hollie found Archie unconscious on the stairs with a ligature around his neck. The brain injury Archie suffered put him into a four-month coma from which, sadly, doctors were unable to save him.

To this day, Hollie believes that Archie may have been taking part in some form of highly dangerous online challenge, but, unable to access Archie’s online data beyond 90 days of his search history, she has been unable to put this devastating question to rest. Like the parents of Molly, Breck, Isaac, Frankie and Sophia, for the last year Hollie has been engaged in a cruel uphill struggle against faceless corporations in her attempt to determine whether her child’s engagement with a digital service contributed to his death. Despite knowing that Archie viewed seven minutes of content and received online messages in the hour and a half prior to his death, she has no way of knowing what may have been said or exactly what he may have viewed, and the question of his online engagement and its potential role in his death remains unsolved.

Lords amendment 195, which will bolster Ofcom’s information-gathering powers, will I hope require a much more humane response from providers in such tragic cases as this. This is vital and much-needed legislation. Had it been in place a year ago, it is highly likely that Hollie could have laid her concerns to rest and perhaps received a pocket of peace in what has been the most traumatic time any parent could possibly imagine.

I also welcome Lords amendment 153, which will mandate the largest providers to put in place a dedicated helpline so that parents who suffer these tragic events will have a direct line and a better way of communicating with social media providers, but the proof of the pudding will obviously be in the eating. I very much hope that social media providers will man that helpline with real people who have the appropriate experience to deal with parents at that tragic time in their lives. I believe that Hollie and the parents of many other children in similar tragic cases will welcome the Government’s amendments that allow Ofcom, coroners and bereaved parents to access their children’s online data via the coroner directing Ofcom.

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness Kidron, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) and to the Bereaved Families for Online Safety group, who have done so much fantastic work in sharing their heartrending stories and opening our eyes to what has been necessary to improve the Online Safety Bill. I also, of course, pay tribute to Ian Russell, to Hollie and to all the other bereaved parents for their dedication to raising awareness of this hugely important issue.

If I could just say one last thing, I have been slipped from the Education Committee to attend this debate today and I would like to give an advert for the Committee’s new inquiry, which was launched on Monday, into the effects of screen time on education and wellbeing. This Bill is not the end of the matter—in many ways it is just the beginning—and I urge all Members please to engage with this incredibly important inquiry by the Education Committee.