Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2026 Lords Chamber

The tobacco industry, which I know all about as a public health fanatic, played exactly the same game for 60 years. We banned smoking for children in 1908, and today 13% of the country still smokes. That is what we are looking at if we do not take the opportunity today to protect our children. We need to acknowledge the problem and create clear guardrails to protect our children. For that reason, I urge noble Lords to send a clear message to the Government by sending my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment to the Commons with a clear vote.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I support many of the amendments in this group, but I also want to express my concerns about Amendment 94A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I have listened carefully to his arguments and those of other noble Lords who support the amendment. I too am appalled by the many stories that we have heard. I too want to stop children being exposed to harms online. I hope my record in the debates on the Online Safety Act and other digital legislation show my support for measures to increase safety for children in the digital space. I, like all noble Lords, recognise that there are many harms online.

However, I do not think that an outright ban on social media for the under-16s will be effective in protecting children. I hesitate to disagree with my noble friend Lady Kidron, who I normally always agree with, but we should put all the pressure we possibly can directly on Ofcom to make sure we realise the hopes and dreams of the Online Safety Act.

Early this morning, I had an interesting conversation with Jason Trethowan, who runs headspace, Australia’s national youth mental health charity, which last year was accessed by 170,000 young people aged between 12 and 25 in 170 locations across the country. His organisation is at the sharp end of the social media ban in Australia. His main message was that we all want to stop online harms to children, but he called on the Government and legislators to listen to children as well as parents.

The noble Lord, Lord Nash, has quite rightly highlighted the harms that exist for young people on social media. However, noble Lords also need to be aware of the crucial role that social media plays for young people in communicating with each other, getting information about the world and, very importantly, getting help and advice from like-minded people.

Jason said that we all need to understand that young people see the online world as their world. It is a central part of their existence, and no amount of bans will remove them from online space. headspace told me that the ban in Australia, which started on 10 December 2025, was a massive shock for many young people. They had been warned of its arrival for months but still were not prepared for the severing of their contacts on social media. Most did not have the phone numbers to continue communicating with their contacts and suddenly found themselves isolated from their peer groups. Many noble Lords will dismiss these severances as youthful folly, but the charity told me that of 3,000 young people who have been seen since the ban was introduced, 10% included social media bans among the reasons for their mental health deteriorating.

One young person on an isolated farm in rural Australia had used an LGBT group on social media to find like-minded young people. He lived in a household he regarded as homophobic, and was geographically far away from many of his online contacts. Suddenly, he found his support network taken away from him. The schools in Australia are on their summer break until the end of this month, so the full extent of the disruption to the lives of young people is not known.

The young LGBT person will not be able to renew his social media contacts, but rest assured he will find advice somewhere else on the internet. Young people who are banned from social media will find other ways online to assuage their appetites for communication, information and problem-solving.

In Australia, Headspace is already seeing this happening. Young people who can no longer use the 10 major sites, which include Snapchat, X, YouTube, Instagram and Kik, are now migrating to AI sites. Noble Lords have already had debates over concerns about AI as a form of gathering information. Many will be aware of what the West Coast techies call “hallucinations” —the rest of us call them “lies”—appearing in AI research.

Young people are using AI to resolve their problems. On 27 November last year, this House had a debate about banning AI companions, which many young people use for advice. They can be dangerous—my noble friend Lady Kidron told how this led to one young man committing suicide on the advice of an AI companion. Surely, noble Lords do not want to encourage young people to use these AI replacements for social media.

The tech companies will feed that appetite. I know that built into Amendment 94A there is a flexibility for which apps will be used. However, they found in Australia that new platforms are opening all the time. The Australian Government’s original Act banned 10 social media platforms, but already they have had to come up with another list of platforms to ban. This is a game of whack-a-mole, just as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said. It will not be solved by ban on social media platforms. The media will always outpace the legislation.

There are so many harms online, on social media and other platforms. We all agree on that. I have spoken to the charities that have been mentioned many times by noble Lords—the Molly Rose Foundation, Internet Matters, NSPCC and the Online Safety Act Network. They have all championed the development of online safety for children, as noble Lords have already mentioned, and all are against a blanket ban on social media for under-16s in this country. They suggest that instead of banning social media, the Online Safety Act should be amended. I know that my noble friend Lady Kidron has said that that is not possible to do.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I am sorry but the noble Viscount is misreading what I said. I said exactly that.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I apologise. They suggest that the Act should be amended to ensure safety by design for all users, particularly young users.

There is a need to strengthen Ofcom’s response to tech platforms that breach their risk assessments. It needs to put the onus on the platforms to mitigate the risks, instead of defining the mitigation measures and taking action only when there is evidence that these measures actually work. This needs to be combined with the definition of “safety by design”.

I partially support Amendment 108 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. Children’s safety charities have long been calling for age-appropriate content requirements to be introduced for content on social media and across the internet. However, age-appropriate design should be introduced not just for 18 year-olds but for 16 year-olds and even 13 year-olds.

I completely support Amendment 109. I am glad the Government are having a consultation on this issue. I sincerely hope that noble Lords are wrong in saying that this is an attempt to kick this down the road. Addiction is a real problem. This is about engagement and economy, and it needs to be dealt with.

I support the call for Ofcom to revisit its interpretation of the Online Safety Act so that it includes addictive design as one of the harms that it needs platforms to mitigate against. I understand the powerful instinct of noble Lords and many parents to ban social media for under-16s, but I ask them to consider that young people will not be torn away from life online. It will not be possible to force them to leave the digital world, however much a majority of adults want that to happen.

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from my noble friend Lord Nash and thank all noble Lords who cosigned it. I am nervous about making this speech today because I am praying that my daughter does not read Hansard.

I speak as a member of this House, of course, but also as a mother. I have a direct and vested interest in this amendment and make no apology for that. But I also feel I have to speak for the army of parents who, like me, have watched, frankly, in disbelief as our children’s childhoods have been steadily hollowed out to varying degrees.

Obviously, lots of us are doing everything we can to keep our children safe. I am the devil incarnate at home because I have not allowed my daughter to use Snapchat. We have gone into a sort of plea-bargaining state, if I can put it that way, whereby I have not allowed Snapchat but have allowed Pinterest. I thought Pinterest was perfectly harmless. I thought it was a nice place where I picked wallpapers and had a jolly nice time going through it. What could possibly be the problem? I was delighted. I said, “Yes, of course you can have Pinterest”. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, it is quite an artistic way to operate. But in fact, Pinterest is now just pushing my daughter a whole load of consumer advertising. She has popped in that she wants a T-shirt of some make or other and, of course, now—bang, bang, bang—the notifications are coming in non-stop.

There is a big reason why we now have teenage girls—not even teenage girls; 11 year-old and 10 year-old girls—slathering their faces with hyaluronic acid and anti-ageing creams, products they should not even know about let alone be buying, not least because they are blooming expensive. It is ridiculous.

Adolescence is a period of profound emotional and neurological change— hormones, friendships, identity and insecurity playing out in a young developing brain. To then introduce the relentless comparison, exposure, validation and amplification of what social media does is to add a weapon to those brains, which are simply too young to cope. Crucially, they just should not be expected to cope.

I completely accept the arguments against a full ban. I hardly ever disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and I met with Molly Russell’s father two days ago and have huge respect for him and for the other side of the argument that perhaps it is just too black and white. But I am afraid that these companies absolutely thrive in the complication, sophistication and difficulty. Meanwhile, as a parent, there I am trying to get the parental locks on and to work out how to turn off the mind-boggling push notifications and stop the device going into the bedroom—with degrees of success. Five years ago, a partial ban or platform-led safeguards might have been defensible, had we been dealing with companies worthy of trust. That trust has now completely disintegrated.

From the work I have done on the pornography review, we know that boys aged 11 and probably younger have seen pornography. A boy, before his first kiss, aged 13, will have seen rape porn, strangulation porn and incest porn. Where did he see that porn? Mainly on X. Eight out of 10 sites are social media sites, not pornography sites. That is an outrage, and it was something they knew about and, actually, were actively pushing. It was not that the kids were necessarily looking for it; they were pushing those algorithms on to them. So, how can we possibly trust having a dialogue with these firms when we know that that is their business model, as my noble friend Lord Bethell made very clear?

At the other end of the scale, research shows that 70% of offenders who attempt to contact children do so online. This is a business model that is borderline criminal, certainly very toxic, and so sophisticated. Regardless of the amendments that say, “We’re going to have conversations with Ofcom and we’re going to do X, Y and Z”, they have already made off like bandits with our children’s innocence, and to be perfectly honest I think they will carry on doing so if we take that approach. An overall ban is essential, then afterwards we can look at which apps and sites will be suitable.