Online Harms

Simon Fell Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for securing this debate. It is a hackneyed phrase, but the Online Safety Bill is important and genuinely groundbreaking. There will always be a balance to strike between allowing free speech and stopping harms. I think we are on the right side of that balance, but we may need to come back to it later, because it is crucial.

I want to cover two topics in a short amount of time. The first is online harms through social media platforms, touching on the legal but harmful and small, high-harm platforms, and the second is fraud. Starting with fraud, I declare an interest, having spent a decade in that world before I came here.

[Damian Hinds]

The world of law enforcement.

[Simon Fell]

I thank my right hon. Friend for clarifying that for me—although I would be better off now had I been on the other side of the fence.

Fraud is at epidemic levels. Which? research recently found that six in 10 people who have been victims of fraud suffered significant mental health harms as a result. I use this example repeatedly in this place. In my past life I met, through a safeguarding group, an old lady who accessed the world through her landline telephone. She was scammed out of £20,000 or so through that phone, and then disconnected from the rest of the world afterwards because she simply could not trust that phone when it rang anymore.

We live in an increasingly interconnected world where we are pushing our services online. As we are doing that we cannot afford to be disconnecting people from the online world and taking away from them the services we are opening up to them. That is why it is essential to have vital protections against fraud and fraudulent adverts on some of the larger social platforms and search engines. I know it is out of the scope of this debate but, on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), that is also why it is crucial to fund the law enforcement agencies that go after the people responsible.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire is right: banks have a financial motivation to act on fraud. They are losing money. They have the incentive. Where that motivation is not there, and where there is a disincentive for organisations to act, as is especially the case with internet advertising, we have to move forward with the legislation and remove those disincentives.

On harms, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire is right to mention the harmful but legal. We have to act on this stuff and we have to do it quickly. We cannot stray away from the problems that currently exist online. I serve on the Home Affairs Committee and we have seen and examined the online hate being directed at footballers; the platforms are not acting on it, despite it being pointed out to them.

When it comes to disinformation and small, high-harm platforms—

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

Order. I call Luke Evans.