Online Safety Bill

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

If I may, I will prevail upon the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to wait just another few seconds before beginning his winding-up speech. I have found this an extremely interesting and worthwhile debate, and there seems to be an enormous amount of consensus that the amendment is a good thing to try to achieve. It is also true that this is a very complex Bill. My only point in rising is to say to the Minister—who is himself about to speak, telling us why the Government are not going to accept Amendment 1—that, as a result of the very long series of debates we are going to have on this Bill over a number of days, perhaps the Government might still be able, at the end of this very long process, to rethink the benefits of an having amendment of this kind at the beginning of the Bill. I hope that, just because he is going to ask us that the amendment be withdrawn today, he will not lose sight of the benefits of such an amendment.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, just before the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones gets to wind up, I wanted to ask a question and make a point of clarification. I am grateful for the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti; that was a helpful point to make.

My question, which I was going to direct to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson—although it may be one that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, wants to respond to if the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is not coming back—is about the use of the word “purpose” versus “objective”. The point I was trying to make in referring to the Joint Committee’s report was that, when it set out the limbs of this amendment, it was referring to them as objectives for Ofcom. What we have here is an amendment that is talking about purposes of the Bill, and in the course of this debate we have been talking about the need for clarity of purpose. The point I was trying to make was not that I object to the contents of this amendment, but that if we are looking for clarity of purpose to inform the way we want people to behave as a result of this legislation, I would make it much shorter and simpler, which is why I pointed to subsection (g) of the proposed clause.

It may be that the content of this amendment—and this is where I pick up the point the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, was making—is not objectionable, although I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is right: at the moment, let us worry less about the specifics. Then, we can be clearer about what bits of the amendment are meant to be doing what, rather than trying to get all of them to offer clarity of purpose. That is my problem with it: there are purposes, which, as I say, are helpful structurally in terms of how an organisation might go about its work, and there is then the clarity of purpose that should be driving everything. The shorter, simpler and more to the point we can make that, the better.