Online Safety

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. Category 1, in the way that the Bill was ultimately approved, was for large sites with many users. The possibility remains that this threshold can be amended. It is worth remembering that category 1 imposes two additional duties: a duty that the company must apply its service agreements properly and a duty that users can make it possible for themselves not to see certain things. For many of the small and harmful sites, those things would not apply anyway, because users have gone there deliberately to see what is there, but the full force of the Act applies to those small companies, which is why there is a special task force to make sure that that is applied properly.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, Ofcom’s illegal harms code states that it has removed some of the code’s measures from smaller sites, due to evidence that they were not proportionate, but it is not clear which measures have been removed and why. Can the Minister provide further detail on which small sites are impacted and what measures they will not be required to follow?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

My understanding of this is that the Online Safety Act applies to all small companies and nobody is exempt. The things that would not apply would be the specific things in category 1, or indeed in category 2A and 2B, which are to do with the ability to apply and monitor a service contract, and the ability to ensure that users can exempt themselves from seeing certain activities. Those would not apply, but everything else does apply, including all the force of the Act in terms of the application to illegal content and the priority harms that have been identified.