ONLINE SAFETY BILL (Third sitting)

Nick Fletcher Excerpts

Committee stage (re-committed clauses and schedules)
Thursday 15th December 2022 Public Bill Committees

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Angela. If you will allow, I want to apologise for comments made on the promotion of suicide and self-harm to adults. I believed that to be illegal, but apparently it is not. I am a free speech champion, but I do not agree with the promotion of this sort of information. I hope that the three shields will do much to stop those topics being shared.

I turn to new clause 9. I have done much while in this position to try to protect children, and that is why I followed the Bill as much as I could all the way through. Harmful content online is having tragic consequences for children. Cases such as that of Molly Russell demonstrate the incredible power of harmful material and dangerous algorithms. We know that the proliferation of online pornography is rewiring children’s brains and leading to horrendous consequences, such as child-on-child sexual abuse. This issue is of immense importance for the safety and protection of children, and for the future of our whole society.

Under the Bill, senior managers will not be personally liable for breaching the safety duties, and instead are liable only where they fail to comply with information requests or willingly seek to mislead the regulator. The Government must hardwire the safety duties to deliver a culture of compliance in regulated firms. The Bill must be strengthened to actively promote cultural change in companies and embed compliance with online safety regulations at board level.

We need a robust corporate and senior management liability scheme that imposes personal liability on directors whose actions consistently and significantly put children at risk. The Bill must learn lessons from other regulated sectors, principally financial services, where regulation imposes specific duties on the directors and senior managers of financial institutions, and those responsible individuals face regulatory enforcement if they act in breach of such duties.

The Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill, which conducted pre-legislative scrutiny, recommended that a senior manager at or reporting to board level

“should be designated the ‘Safety Controller’ and made liable for a new offence: the failure to comply with their obligations as regulated service providers when there is clear evidence of repeated and systemic failings that result in a significant risk of serious harm to users.”

Some 82% of UK adults would support the appointment of a senior manager to be held liable for children’s safety on social media sites, and I believe that the measure is also backed by the NSPCC.

There is no direct relationship in the Bill between senior management liability and the discharge by a platform of its safety duties. The Government have repeatedly argued against the designation of a specific individual as a safety controller for some understandable reasons: an offence could be committed by the company without the knowledge of the named individual, and the arrangement would allow many senior managers and directors to face no consequences. However, new clause 9 would take a different approach by deeming any senior employee or manager at the company to be a director for the purposes of the Bill

The concept of consent or connivance is already used in other Acts of Parliament, such as the Theft Act 1968 and the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. In other words, if a tech platform is found to be in breach of the Online Safety Bill—once it has become an Act—with regard to its duties to children, and it can be proven that this breach occurred with the knowledge or consent of a senior person, that person could be held criminally liable for the breach.

I have been a director in the construction industry for many years. There is a phrase in the industry that the company can pay the fine, but it cannot do the time. I genuinely believe that holding directors criminally liable will ensure that the Bill, which is good legislation, will really be taken seriously. I hope the Minister will agree to meet me to discuss this further.

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For the reasons that I have given, I strongly believe that the Bill’s approach to enforcement will be effective. It will protect users without introducing incentives for managers to remove swathes of content out of fear of prosecution. I want to make sure that the legislation gets on the books and is proportionate, and that we do not start gold-plating it with these sorts of measures now, because we risk disrupting the balance that I think we have achieved in the Bill as amended.

[Nick Fletcher]

I appreciate the Minister’s comments, but from what my hon. Friends the Members for Folkestone and Hythe, for Eastbourne, and for Redditch said this morning about TikTok—these sorts of images get to children within two and a half minutes—it seems that there is a cultural issue, which the hon. Member for Pontypridd mentioned. Including new clause 9 in the Bill would really ram home the message that we are taking this seriously, that the culture needs to change, and that we need to do all that we can. I hope that the Minister will speak to his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice to see what, if anything, can be done.

[Paul Scully]

I forgot to respond to my hon. Friend’s question about whether I would meet him. I will happily meet him.

[Nick Fletcher]

I appreciate that. We will come back to this issue on Report, but I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Question proposed, That the Chair do report the Bill, as amended, to the House.

[The Chair]

It is usual at this juncture for there to be a few thanks and niceties, if people wish to give them.