Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Nigel Huddleston and Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard

Wednesday 26th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak today, because, as in the case of my friend the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr)—I call him my friend with sincerity—you, Madam Deputy Speaker, were in the Chair when I gave my maiden speech. You will also be in the Chair while I make my final speech of this Parliament.

I support the Bill wholeheartedly as it is consumer-friendly from beginning to end. That will be of extreme benefit to my constituents; it will improve their lives and enable them to grow their businesses and have more fulfilling careers. In particular, I want to highlight the points made about the universal service obligation, switching mobile phones—this has been an ongoing debate for a while and it is good to see resolution on it—and all the initiatives with digital government. I also appreciate the intent of many of the suggested amendments, if not their exact wording, and agree with the Minister that those that have been accepted are there to improve the Bill.

I would also like to echo the comments of many other Members by saying that in the development of the Bill and in Committee—we almost have an alumni network of Committee members in the Chamber today—it has been very nice for me, as a relatively new MP, to see Parliament working at its best, when we work across parties, have meetings and discussions, and disagree respectfully, but come to reasonable conclusions because we have the same intent in mind. We see the theatre of Prime Minister’s questions and other events, but Parliament does a lot of work across the parties. I echo the comments in praise of the work done by many colleagues over many years, well before I came to the House of Commons, to make significant progress on a vital Bill.

I respectfully disagree slightly with the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh). I would not like to run down the UK digital economy. We have the largest digital economy in terms of percentage of GDP in the world and this Bill will enable us to be even more successful. We need to ensure that we have an enabling Bill to continue that success. We should not take our digital leadership for granted, and measures in this Bill will therefore be a huge advantage.

The Minister mentioned further work being required in several other areas. I agree with him, particularly on bill capping and many of the topics to do with the significant changes required in secondary ticketing. The devil will be in the detail on secondary ticketing. I completely understand the rationale for having a booking number or unique reference number for secondary ticket transactions, but we have to be very careful that that does not have the unintended consequence of opening things up to more fraud. We must be very careful about the details of that element of the Bill.

Finally, I want to comment on the internet and social platforms. I know a fair bit about this because, as many Members know, I worked for Google before I came to Parliament. It is a great company, as are all the major internet players. They do a lot of good, but they also need to take their responsibilities far more seriously than they have of late. I welcome the changes, and significant progress has been made on child exploitation images and age verification. It was alarming for me to learn that 1.4 million people under the age of 18 accessed pornography in the UK just last year.

The scale of inappropriate content online now is huge. YouTube alone has 400 hours of video uploaded every single minute of every single day. A lot of that content is perfectly acceptable—fine, fun, entertaining, newsworthy and so on—but some of it is inappropriate and the scale of the inappropriate material is shocking, and this comes from someone who worked in the sector for a while. Every single day, Google removes 200,000 videos that have been flagged as inappropriate. Last year, Google removed 92 million videos from YouTube for being inappropriate, up from 14 million the year before. Clearly, Google are being active and other social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, are being somewhat active, but we need to send a message loudly and clearly, particularly when we consider the social media code of conduct, that although they are doing something they are not doing enough.

If that means that they have to spend millions, tens of millions or billions working on making sure that we, our children and our families are protected and can operate online in safety, so be it. I would prefer the companies to do this of their own volition and to take appropriate action by investing considerably in technology and human resources—bodies to make judgments and assessments on the appropriateness of content online—but I hope that I can work with colleagues across the parties when we come back to Parliament, as I hope we will, to ensure that if they do not act we will take action for them.

[Tom Elliott (Fermanagh and South Tyrone) (UUP)]

I hate to be someone who repeats things, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I think that you were also in the Chair when I made my maiden speech. I hope that that is not a bad omen.

To get back to the Bill, I am at a slight disadvantage compared with other Members who served on the Committee and have a better insight into the Bill. I want to restrict my speech mainly to Lords amendment 1. I found myself somewhat in agreement with the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr)—we come from rural areas, although his is in Scotland and mine in Northern Ireland, and we find ourselves in fairly similar places on this matter. At one stage, the Minister said that the Bill was unfinished business and I think that he will find that as time goes forward it will continue to be unfinished business. Technology is moving on so fast that we will see more demands, no matter what area that is in. That is my one concern about the Bill; it might not be future-proof. I accept that there is movement in reducing the proposal from 30 megabits per second down to 10 megabits for broadband.