Digital Economy

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Margot James

Monday 17th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Margot James]

I am sorry that I am taking a long time to answer my right hon. Friend’s point, but it is an important one. I will finish with the last intervention before I take more interventions.

The Government are keeping a weather eye on the availability of pornography on social media platforms. I shall talk more about that, but I reassure my right hon. Friend that we will introduce further measures. My right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who is in the Chamber, has a duty to report back on the impact of the regulations 12 to 18 months after their commencement and he will look at just the issues my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has raised. I will make a little progress before taking further interventions.

There is no doubt, going back to the work of the Women and Equalities Committee, that the large amount of pornography available on the internet in the UK, often for free and with no protections to ensure that those accessing it are old enough to do so, is leading to a change in the way that young people understand healthy relationships, sex and consent. I know that that is a major issue of concern to everybody across the House. A 2016 report commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children made that absolutely clear. More than half of the children sampled had been exposed to online pornography by the age of 15, nearly half of the boys thought that the pornography they had seen was realistic, and just under half wished to emulate what they had seen.

The introduction of a requirement for age-verification controls is a necessary step in tackling those issues and it contributes towards our commitment to make the UK a safer place to be online, particularly for children and young people.

[Margot James]

I very much agree that, if children see hardcore pornography when they are too young to understand it, it can have long-lasting and very negative impacts on their development and future relationships. My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

The draft Online Pornography (Commercial Basis) Regulations set out the basis on which pornographic material is to be regarded as

“made available on a commercial basis”.

The regulations cover material on websites and applications that charge for access. They also cover circumstances where a person makes available pornographic material on the internet for free, but then receives payment or reward for doing so, for example, through advertising revenue.

It was clear from the debates in this House during the passage of the Digital Economy Act that it was not Parliament’s intention that social media sites on which pornography is only a small part of the overall content should be required to have age verification.

[Neil O’Brien]

As a member of the Science and Technology Committee, I have been involved in our ongoing report on smartphones, social media and young people’s mental health. Absolutely central to that report is the whole issue of age verification for access not just to pornography but to gambling, violent material and things like that. Does the Minister share my strong view that many large social media companies—some of the world’s largest companies, with almost unbelievably sophisticated granular data on their users—have to be raising their game? In the run-up to the online harms White Paper, which goes beyond what we are talking about today, companies in the industry absolutely need to raise their game, because they are allowing their own terms of use to be violated, and they know that is happening but are doing nothing about it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

I would like to reassure my hon. Friend that I certainly think it has the experience, expertise and resources to undertake this role. It has more than a century of experience in the control of film content. It has additional resources and moneys with which it can hold to account age-verification providers and, most importantly, the websites that are providing the pornographic content.

In addition to the criteria that the BBFC will use to verify the effective control of age-verification arrangements, it has provided typical examples of features that it would regard as non-compliant in the arena of age verification.

The second piece of guidance provides a non-exhaustive list of ancillary service providers that the BBFC will consider. That list is not exhaustive, to ensure that the policy remains flexible to future developments. The BBFC has published draft versions of both pieces of guidance and has run a public consultation for four weeks on their content. The draft guidance laid before the House takes account of comments received from affected companies, age-verification providers and other interested parties.

I have been clear that age verification is not a silver bullet, and we know that what we are doing is difficult. Indeed, we are the first country in the world to introduce such a measure. I am aware of the concerns expressed by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments about the drafting of the Online Pornography (Commercial Basis) Regulations 2018. I have considered its concerns carefully, and we are grateful for its work, but we do not believe that the variation in the legislation between the terms “met” and “applied” will be difficult for a court to interpret.

The Committee expressed concerns about the content threshold because it anticipates difficulty with the application and interpretation of the regulation. As I have said, the regulation will not apply in a case where it is reasonable for the age-verification regulator to assume that pornographic material makes up less than one third of the content of such a site. As stated in the BBFC guidance, the BBFC will seek to engage and work with a person or company who may be in contravention of the requirement in advance of commencing enforcement action.

I am aware that the Committee has also drawn the special attention of both Houses to these draft pieces of guidance because, in its view, they fail to contain the guidance required by section 25(1) of the 2017 Act and contain material that should not have been included. Section 3, paragraph 5, of the age-verification guidance sets out the criteria that the regulator will treat as complying with age verification. The guidance goes on in paragraph 6 to give examples of features that, in isolation, do not comply with the age-verification requirements. That approach ensures fairness and is product-neutral. Rather than recommending a particular solution, the guidance sets out principles that will encourage further innovation.

[Neil O’Brien]

I wonder whether I could press the Minister on the robustness of age verification, which is of interest to the wider debate. It seems that certain types of checks, such as those that run off a credit card, are extremely robust, but younger people do not have access to credit cards, so that becomes more difficult, although we can layer up different types of information to give a best guess. Of the long list of checks that she has mentioned, which is favourable in terms of robustness and quality?

[Margot James]

Age-verification providers will have to demonstrate that they have a foolproof system of identifying whether somebody is aged 18 or over. The sort of effective control mechanisms they are considering are credit cards, passports and driving licences—items that a lot of 18-year-olds will have at least one of. My hon. Friend rightly points out that a great deal of work is going on to improve age-verification systems. That is precisely because the sorts of items I have mentioned are, in general, only held by people who are aged 18 or over—with the exception of driving licences, which can be obtained at the age of 17.

For those reasons, it is much more difficult to ascertain how we can require age verification in other areas. For example, in the Data Protection Bill, we set the qualifying age at which someone can consent to a contract with a social media platform as 13, but it is very difficult for someone to prove that they are 13, because those items are normally held by people aged 18 or over.