Media Bill

Debate between Miriam Cates and Damian Green

Report stage
Tuesday 30th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates]

That is precisely what the Bill will do: it will introduce a different system. At present Ofcom is responsible for regulating the public service broadcasters, which it does through the watershed, and the BBFC is responsible for DVDs and cinema. We now have a completely new landscape which resembles the DVD landscape much more closely because it is available on demand. It is therefore sensible to introduce an age-rating system based roughly on what the BBFC does, because the BBFC, not Ofcom, is the expert in that field.

[Damian Green]

I fear that we may go down a rabbit hole. Ofcom is the expert in that field, but the system is based on film classification. The age-rating system is designed for a situation where a person goes through a door and someone makes a guess whether that person was 16 or 18 or 12, for instance.

[Miriam Cates]

Will my right hon. Friend give way again?

[Damian Green]

I will give my hon. Friend one more go.

[Miriam Cates]

I take my right hon. Friend’s point. However, the BBFC classifies not just films but items that are streamed directly and never released in cinemas by tagging every rateable incident, such as a swear word or an episode of violence, and uses that system to come up with a verifiable, standardised rating that everyone understands. It is exactly the same process as the one that is used to verify a video on demand, and it is what Netflix already uses to rate its own videos.

[Damian Green]

Netflix uses it, but, as my hon. Friend herself said earlier, Disney does not. There will of course be differences. I think that overregulating will just lead to disadvantages for people who are trying to produce content, and that insisting on one system that is partly designed for one mode of operation may well not work for another operation. If Ofcom does its job effectively it will achieve what we all want to see, which is age-inappropriate content not being available to children. As I have said, involving more than one regulator normally leads to confusion and worse regulation than would have existed otherwise.