Smartphones and Social Media: Children

Vicky Ford Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) for securing this really important debate. I agree with much of what hon. Members have said about teenagers and adolescents, but I want to focus on very young children. Ninety per cent of the brain is developed before the age of five. That is when we learn to communicate and think, and develop problem-solving and resilience skills. The brain is wired in those early years.

Last week, I visited one of my primary schools and spoke to the headteacher Faye White. She explained that the way she sees children using their devices today is completely different to plonking a child down in front of “Balamory” or “Postman Pat” like I used to do. Children are scrolling rapidly—they watch, scroll, watch, scroll and move on to the next thing. She sees that that is making many children lose their ability to concentrate. They do not develop the ability to concentrate for anything but short periods of time. She spoke to me about her deep concern that that is driving some of the increase in more children having ADHD and other needs. Young children are being impacted.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the most vile of content: child sexual abuse. Children are being groomed to perform sexual acts in their bedrooms, directed from afar by hideous online perpetrators and often filmed without their knowledge. The content is so disgusting. At its most basic, it is sexual posing, but it goes on into sadism, degradation and even performing sexual acts with animals. My hon. Friend mentioned the work that IWF does to identify that content and take it off the internet. What she did not mention was that last year 2,401 of those images were identified by IWF as involving children in the age range of three to six. The question is not whether that is okay, but what we as legislators do about it. The Online Safety Act 2023 will make a big difference, but we must not think that the job is finished.

Like many others, I was deeply moved by Brianna’s mum’s call for child phones. We have child-safe car seats and child locks on medicine bottles and on cupboards that contain our household cleaning products. Why cannot we build child safety by design into phones for children? The Monday after Brianna’s mum spoke about the need for a child-safe phone, I put my name down on the list to introduce a ten-minute rule Bill in this place. I will get a chance to present the Bill before the summer recess, and I hope to use it to get people thinking.

My Bill would introduce point-of-sale controls so that if a phone is bought for a child or if someone is passing on a phone to a child, the parents would be given access to and provided information on parental controls. The Bill would introduce app store controls, similar to those proposed in France, so that age-inappropriate apps could not be downloaded if a child is using the phone. To protect children from paedophiles in their bedrooms, the Bill would introduce new system-level controls, so that iOS and Android would stop a child from uploading that content.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Chris Bryant]

It needs to be UK-wide, but it also needs to recognise devolution. We have been talking about schools, for instance, and some of those issues are devolved responsibilities in Scotland, Northen Ireland and Wales, so we need to work across the whole UK. Of course, some of these issues are not just national, but international, because in many cases we are dealing with companies whose profits may be made in this country but who may not be taxed in this country and are headquartered elsewhere.

Let me state some first principles. First, obviously the primary duty of any Government is to keep its citizens safe. We say that endlessly and repeatedly, but we seem to always think that it means national security and policing. Actually, it is also about online safety for children, as has been said by several Members today.

Secondly, mental health is just as important as physical health. To anybody who thinks it is just about people pulling up their socks or whatever, I say that that just does not meet the need. We should all have understood that better by now. I will say this gently: it was a misstep and a mistake for some to refer to the Online Safety Act as “legislating for hurt feelings.” Hurt feelings can lead to very serious physical harm. We know the story of Brianna Ghey. I will not rehearse it, but I pay enormous tribute to her mother, who has shown extraordinary levels of humanity.

[Vicky Ford]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

I will not, if the right hon. Lady does not mind, because I have several points to make— I am terribly sorry.

Physical and personal interaction with others is vital to humanity. I apologise for the casual sexism of the early 17th century, but John Donne said:

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

…

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.”

We are fundamentally social beings, and sometimes social media can enable that. Grandparents FaceTime with their grandchildren, and they would of course never have dreamed of being able to do so 30 years ago. That is wonderful, but where social media replaces social interaction, we have long-term problems.

Of course, social media and the internet can be enormously valuable. As the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge said, she gets lost if she does not have Google Maps working—sometimes I cannot get it to work properly. I do not know how anybody ever managed to meet up back in the 1960s and 1970s. These are all wonderful innovations, and they are great for kids, too. They have a place in education: I want lots of kids to learn how to create apps and be part of the vibrant UK economy by creating video games and all the rest of it. That is part of the issue, but we cannot just bow down before that altar and surrender everything.

My other fundamental principle is that no executive is above the law, which is why I believe that swift and full implementation of the Online Safety Act is so important. I echo the points that have already been made. The Minister probably agrees that it has taken us too long to get to this point with the Online Safety Act. I will not make partisan points about all the ups and downs and ins and outs, but it has taken too long, and I worry about whether the next processes will happen anywhere near fast enough.

There are some things that Labour is keen to do. First, we need better mental health support for young people. It is shocking that one in four 17 to 19-year-olds in England now have a mental health problem. That is up from one in 10 in 2017, which is a dramatic increase. That may be partly to do with covid, but it is a significant problem. We want to put many more specialist mental health professionals into schools. I have family members who work in this field, and they desperately need more support. Early support is really important in preventing escalation. The problem of brain injuries in schools has hardly been recognised, and the Government will not even be able to give us proper numbers on how many kids in schools have had a brain injury and needed support. Also, creative education can be an important part of fostering better self-confidence, self-understanding, socialisation, and team working, and one of the problems over recent years is that that has fallen away.

Age guidelines must be truly effective, and it is worrying that Ofcom’s early research on stopping children using social media finds that it is almost impossible to do so even for children as young as five. That is highly problematic, and much more work needs to be done. For all sorts of economic reasons of their own, social media companies have failed to regulate themselves. They have sometimes not told the full truth about what their algorithms do, or about their economic model. The divide between those who argue, “No nanny state,” and those who argue, “Protect our children,” is a false dichotomy. The question is not “What legislation?” but, “How do we make sure that we have the right legislation?”

--- Later in debate ---

[Vicky Ford]

Will the Minister give way?

[Saqib Bhatti]

I am going to make some progress. To be clear, that does not rule out taking a precautionary approach. We need to consider the impacts carefully before taking action. As the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said before this debate, it is important to strike the right balance between protecting children from harm and allowing them to reap the benefits of safe internet use. We will continue to explore options in this space. I welcome further engagement, research and evidence in this area to inform our policies.

[Saqib Bhatti]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Let me say clearly that there is no reason why the tech companies could not have acted over the past few years. There is no reason for them to wait for Ofcom’s code of practice; they should be getting on with the job. I said that as a Back Bencher, and I mean it. The Online Safety Act is what we consider to be technology-agnostic. It covers a lot of the incidences of AI, but we obviously continue to monitor the situation.

[Vicky Ford]

I am so glad that my hon. Friend says he is looking at all options to keep children safe. On the issue of preventing children from being able to upload sexual content or from being groomed into uploading sexual images, will he look at the suggestion put to me by the national police lead and others of putting controls at systems level, so that a phone cannot upload that content when the upload is by a child?

[Saqib Bhatti]

I will limit further interventions due the time I have, but I will write to my right hon. Friend on that issue.