Read Bill Ministerial Extracts
Online Safety Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateWilliam Cash
Main Page: William Cash (Conservative - Stone)Department Debates - View all William Cash's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
(2 years ago)
Commons ChamberMany years ago, in the 1970s, I was much involved in the Protection of Children Bill, which was one of the first steps in condemning and making illegal explicit imagery of children and their involvement in the making of such films. We then had the broadcasting Acts and the video Acts, and I was very much involved at that time in saying that we ought to prohibit such things in videos and so on. I got an enormous amount of flack for that. We have now moved right the way forward and it is tremendous to see not only the Government but the Opposition co-operating together on this theme. I very much sympathise with not only what my right hon. Friend has just said—I am very inclined to support his new clause for that reason— but with what the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) said. I was deeply impressed by the way in which she presented the argument about the personal liability of directors. We cannot distinguish between a company and the people who run it, and I am interested to hear what the Government have to say in reply to that.
I very much agree with my hon. Friend on that. He and I have been allies in the past—and sometimes opponents—and he has often been far ahead of other people. I am afraid that I do not remember the example from the 1970s, as that was before even my time here, but I remember the intervention he made in the 1990s and the fuss it caused. From that point of view, I absolutely agree with him. My new clause is clearly worded and I hope the House will give it proper consideration. It is important that we put something in the Bill on this issue, even if the Government, quite properly, amend it later.
I wish to raise one last point, which has come up as we have talked through these issues. I refer to the question of individual responsibility. One or two hon. Ladies on the Opposition Benches have cited algorithmic outcomes. As I said to the right hon. Member for Barking, I am worried about how we place the responsibility, and how it would lead the courts to behave, and so on. We will debate that in the next few days and when the Bill comes back again.
There is one other issue that nothing in this Bill covers, and I am not entirely sure why. Much of the behaviour pattern is algorithmic and it is algorithmic with an explicit design. As a number of people have said, it is designed as clickbait; it is designed to bring people back. We may get to a point, particularly if we come back to this year after year, of saying, “There are going to be rules about your algorithms, so you have to write it into the algorithm. You will not use certain sorts of content, pornographic content and so on, as clickbait.” We need to think about that in a sophisticated and subtle way. I am looking at my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), the ex-Chairman of the Select Committee, on this issue. If we are going to be the innovators—and we are the digital world innovators— we have to get this right.
I really wish it was fantasy land, but I am in contact with parents each and every day who tell me stories of their children being drawn into this. Yes, in this country it is thankfully very difficult to get a double mastectomy when you are under 18, but it is incredibly easy to buy testosterone illegally online and to inject it, egged on by adults in other countries. Once a girl has injected testosterone during puberty, she will have a deep voice and facial hair for life and male-pattern baldness, and she will be infertile. That is a permanent change, it is self-harm and it should be criminalised under this Bill, whether through this clause or through the Government’s new plans. The hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey) is absolutely right: this is happening every day and it should be classed as self-harm.
Going back to my comments about the effect on children of viewing pornography, I absolutely support the idea of putting children’s experience at the heart of the Bill but it needs to be about children’s welfare and not about what children want. One impact of the internet has been to blur the boundary between adults and children. As adults, we need to be able to say, “This is the evidence of what is harmful to children, and this is what children should not be seeing.” Of course children will say that they want free access to all content, just like they want unlimited sweets and unlimited chocolate, but as adults we need to be able to say what is harmful for children and to protect them from seeing it.
This bring me to Government new clause 11, which deals with making sure that child sexual abuse material is taken offline. There is a clear link between the epidemic of pornography and the epidemic of child sexual abuse material. The way the algorithms on porn sites work is to draw users deeper and deeper into more and more extreme content—other Members have mentioned this in relation to other areas of the internet—so someone might go on to what they think is a mainstream pornography site and be drawn into more and more explicit, extreme and violent criminal pornography. At the end of this, normal people are drawn into watching children being abused, often in real time and often in other countries. There is a clear link between the epidemic of porn and the child sexual abuse material that is so prevalent online.
Last week in the Home Affairs Committee we heard from Professor Alexis Jay, who led the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Her report is harrowing, and it has been written over seven years. Sadly, its conclusion is that seven years later, there are now even more opportunities for people to abuse children because of the internet, so making sure that providers have a duty to remove any child sexual abuse material that they find is crucial. Many Members have referred to the Internet Watch Foundation. One incredibly terrifying statistic is that in 2021, the IWF removed 252,194 web pages containing child sexual abuse material and an unknown number of images. New clause 11 is really important, because it would put the onus on the tech platforms to remove those images when they are found.
It is right to put the onus on the tech companies. All the way through the writing of this Bill, at all the consultation meetings we have been to, we have heard the tech companies say, “It’s too hard; it’s not possible because of privacy, data, security and cost.” I am sure that is what the mine owners said in the 19th century when they were told by the Government to stop sending children down the mines. It is not good enough. These are the richest, most powerful companies in the world. They are more powerful than an awful lot of countries, yet they have no democratic accountability. If they can employ real-time facial recognition at airports, they can find a way to remove child abuse images from the internet.
This leads me on to new clause 17, tabled by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), which would introduce individual director liability for non-compliance. I completely support that sentiment and I agree that this is likely to be the only way we will inject some urgency into the process of compliance. Why should directors who are profiting from the platforms not be responsible if children suffer harm as a result of using their products? That is certainly the case in many other industries. The right hon. Lady used the example of the building trade. Of course there will always be accidents, but if individual directors face the prospect of personal liability, they will act to address the systemic issues, the problems with the processes and the malevolent algorithms that deliberately draw users towards harm.
My hon. Friend knows that I too take a great interest in this, and I am glad that the Government have agreed to continue discussions on this question. Is she aware that the personal criminal liability for directors flows from the corporate criminal liability in the company of which they are a director, and that their link to the criminal act itself, even if the company has not been or is not being prosecuted, means that the matter has to be made clear in the legislation, so that we do not have any uncertainty about the relationship of the company director and the company of which he is a director?
I was not aware of that, but I am now. I thank my hon. Friend for that information. This is a crucial point. We need the accountability of the named director associated with the company, the platform and the product in order to introduce the necessary accountability. I do not know whether the Minister will accept this new clause today, but I very much hope that we will look further at how we can make this possible, perhaps in another place.
I very much support the Bill. We need to get it on the statute book, although it will probably need further work, and I support the Government amendments. However, given the link between children viewing pornography and child sexual abuse, I hope that when the Bill goes through the other place, their lordships will consider how regulations around pornographic content can be strengthened, in order to drastically reduce the number of children viewing porn and eventually being drawn into criminal activities themselves. In particular, I would like their lordships to look at tightening and accelerating the age verification and giving equal treatment to all pornography, whether it is on a porn site or a user-to-user service and whether it is online or offline. Porn is harmful to children in whatever form it comes, so the liability on directors and the criminality must be exactly the same. I support the Bill and the amendments in the Government’s name, but it needs to go further when it goes to the other place.
I have raised this on a number of occasions in the past few hours, as have my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) and the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). Will the Minister be good enough to ensure that this matter is thoroughly looked at and, furthermore, that the needed clarification is thought through?
I was going to come to my hon. Friend in two seconds.
In the absence of clearly defined offences, the changes we are making to the Bill mean that it is likely to be almost impossible to take enforcement action against individuals. We are confident that Ofcom will have all the tools necessary to drive the necessary culture change in the sector, from the boardroom down.
This is not the last stage of the Bill. It will be considered in Committee—assuming it is recommitted today—and will come back on Report and Third Reading before going to the House of Lords, so there is plenty of time further to discuss this and to give my hon. Friend the clarification he needs.
Online Safety Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateWilliam Cash
Main Page: William Cash (Conservative - Stone)Department Debates - View all William Cash's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
(1 year, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberI thought I might mention to my right hon. and learned Friend that the written ministerial statement, which is now available to the public, makes it clear that useful and constructive discussions have taken place. Much of what he is saying is not necessarily applicable to the state of affairs we are now faced with.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I will come on to the written statement. I accept what he says. I think we are heading in the right direction, but since new clause 2 is before us at the moment, it seemed to me that I ought to address it, I hope in a helpful way.
There is nothing in the language of new clause 2 as it stands that requires a breach of the duties to be serious or even more than minimal. We should be more discriminating than that.
The second difficulty with new clause 2, which I hope the Government will pick up when they look at it again, is with prosecuting successfully the sorts of offences we may create. The more substantive and fundamental child safety duties in clause 11, which are to
“mitigate and manage the risks of harm”
and to prevent children encountering harmful content, are expressed in terms of the use of “proportionate measures” or “proportionate systems and processes”. The word “proportionate” is important and describes the need for balanced judgments to be made, including by taking into account freedom of expression and privacy as required by clause 11 itself. Aside from the challenges of obtaining evidence of what individual managers did or did not know, did or said, those balanced judgments could be very difficult for a prosecutor to assess and to demonstrate to a criminal court, to the required standard of proof, were deliberately or negligently wrong.
The consequences of that difficulty could either be that it becomes apparent that the cases are very hard to prosecute, and therefore criminal liability is not the deterrent we hoped for, or that wide criminal liability causes the sort of risk aversion and excessive take-down of material that I know worries my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and others who support new clause 2. We therefore need to calibrate criminal liability appropriately.
It is also worth saying that if we are to pursue an extension of criminal liability, I am not sure that I see the logic of limiting that further criminal liability only to breaches of the child safety duties; I can envisage some breaches of safety duties in relation to illegal content that may also be deserving of such liability.
That leads me on to consider, as has been said, exactly how we might extend criminal liability differently. I appreciate that the Government will now be doing just that. Perhaps they can consider doing so in relation to serious or persistent breaches of the safety duties, rather than in relation to all breaches of safety duties.
Alternatively, or additionally, they could look at individual criminal liability for a failure to comply with a confirmed notice of contravention from Ofcom. I welcome the direction of travel set out in the written ministerial statement, which suggests that that is where the Government may go. As the statement says, the recent Irish legislation that has been prayed in aid does something very similar, and it is an approach with several advantages: it is easier to prove, we will know whether Ofcom has issued a notice requiring action to remedy a deficient approach to the safety duties, and we will know whether Ofcom believes that it has not been responded to adequately.
As we design a new system of regulation in this new era of regulation, we should want open conversations to take place between the regulator and the regulated as to how best to counter harms. Anything that discourages platforms and their directors from doing so may make the system we are designing work less well in promoting safety online. The approach that I think the Government will now consider is unlikely to do that.
Let me say one final thing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) said, I have been involved in the progress of this Bill almost from the start, and I am delighted to see present my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), at whose instruction I started doing it. It has been tortuous progress, no doubt—to some extent that was inevitable because of the difficulty of the Bill and the territory in which we seek to legislate—but the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), who speaks for the SNP and for whom I have a good deal of respect, was probably a little grudging in suggesting that as it stands the Bill does only slightly better than the status quo. It does a lot more than that.
If we send the Bill to the other place this evening, as I hope we do, and if the other place considers it again with some thoroughness and seeks to improve it further, as I know it will, we will make the internet not a safe place—I do not believe that is achievable—but a significantly safer place. If we can do that, it will be the most important thing that most of us in this place have ever done.
In a nutshell, we must be able to threaten tech bosses with jail. There is precedent for that—jail sentences for senior managers are commonplace for breaches of duties across a great range of UK legislation. That is absolutely and completely clear, and as a former shadow Attorney General, I know exactly what the law is on this subject. I can say this: we must protect our children and grandchildren from predatory platforms operating for financial gain on the internet. It is endemic throughout the world and in the UK, inducing suicide, self-harm and sexual abuse, and it is an assault on the minds of our young children and on those who are affected by it, including the families and such people as Ian Russell. He has shown great courage in coming out with the tragedy of his small child of 14 years old committing suicide as a result of such activities, as the coroner made clear. It is unthinkable that we will not deal with that. We are dealing with it now, and I thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for responding with constructive dialogue in the short space of time since we have got to grips with this issue.
The written ministerial statement is crystal clear. It says that
“where senior managers, or those purporting to act in that capacity, have consented or connived in ignoring enforceable requirements, risking serious harm to children. The criminal penalties, including imprisonment and fines, will be commensurate with similar offences.”
We can make a comparison, as the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) made clear, with financial penalties in the financial services sector, which is also international. There is also the construction industry, as my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) just said. Those penalties are already on our statute book.
I do not care what the European Union is doing in its legislation. I am glad to know that the Irish legislation, which has been passed and is an Act, has been through different permutations and examinations. The Irish have come up with something that includes similar severe penalties. It can be done. But this is our legislation in this House. We will do it the way that we want to do it to protect our children and families. I am just about fed up with listening to the mealy-mouthed remarks from those who say, “You can’t do it. It’s not quite appropriate.” To hell with that. We are talking about our children.
On past record, which I just mentioned, in 1977-78, a great friend of mine, Cyril Townsend, the Member for Bexleyheath, introduced the first Protection of Children Bill. He asked me to help him, and I did. We got it through. That was incredibly difficult at the time. You have no idea, Mr Deputy Speaker, how much resistance was put up by certain Members of this House, including Ministers. I spoke to Jim Callaghan—I have been in this House so long that I was here with him after he had been Prime Minister—and asked, “How did you give us so much time to get the Bill through?” He said, “It’s very simple. I was sitting in bed with my wife in the flat upstairs at No. 10. She wasn’t talking to me. I said, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ She replied, ‘If you don’t get that Protection of Children Bill through, I won’t speak to you for six months.’” And it went through, so there you go. There is a message there for all Secretaries of State, and even Prime Ministers.
I raised this issue with the Prime Minister in December in a question at the Liaison Committee. I invited him to consider it, and I am so glad that we have come to this point after very constructive discussion and dialogue. It needed that. It is a matter not of chariots of fire but of chariots on fire, because we have done all this in three weeks. I am extremely grateful to the 51 MPs who stood firm. I know the realities of this House, having been involved in one or two discussions in the past. As a rule, it is only when you have the numbers that the results start to come. I pay tribute to the Minister for the constructive dialogue.
The Irish legislation will provide a model, but this will be our legislation. It will be modelled on some of the things that have already enacted there, but it is not simply a matter of their legislation being transformed into ours. It will be our legislation. In the European Parliament—
I too rise to speak to new clause 2, which seeks to introduce senior manager criminal liability to the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) set out, we will not push it to a vote as a result of the very welcome commitments that the Minister has made to introduce a similar amendment in the other place.
Protecting children is not just the role of parents but the responsibility of the whole of society, including our institutions and businesses that wish to trade here. That is the primary aim of this Bill, which I wholeheartedly support: to keep children safe online from horrendous and unspeakable harms, many of which were mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom).
We look back in horror at children being forced to work down mines or neglected in Victorian orphanages, but I believe we will look back with similar outrage at online harms. What greater violation could there be of childhood than to entice a child to collaborate in their own sexual abuse in the privacy and supposed safety of their own bedroom? Yet this is one of the many crimes that are occurring on an industrial scale every day. Past horrors such as children down mines were tackled by robust legislation, and the Online Safety Bill must continue our Parliament’s proud tradition of taking on vested interests to defend the welfare of children.
The Bill must succeed in its mission, but in its present form, it does not have sufficient teeth to drive the determination that is needed in tech boardrooms to tackle the systemic issue of the malevolent algorithms that drive this sickening content to our children. There is no doubt that the potential fines in the Bill are significant, but many of these companies have deep pockets, and the only criminal sanctions are for failure to share data with Ofcom. The inquest following the tragic death of Molly Russell was an example of this, as no one could be held personally responsible for what happened to her. I pay tribute to Ian Russell, Molly’s father, whose courage in the face of such personal tragedy has made an enormous difference in bringing to light the extent of online harms.
Only personal criminal liability will drive proactive change, and we have seen this in other areas such as the financial services industry and the construction industry. I am delighted that the Government have recognised the necessity of senior manager liability for tech bosses, after much campaigning across the House, and committed to introducing it in the other place. I thank the Secretary of State and her team for the very constructive and positive way in which they have engaged with supporters of this measure.
Would my hon. Friend not also like to say that the NSPCC has been magnificent in supporting us?
I was coming on to that—absolutely.
The advantage of introducing this measure in the other place is that we can widen the scope to all appropriate child safety duties beyond clause 11 and perhaps tackle pornography and child sexual abuse material as well. We will have a groundbreaking Bill that will hold to account powerful executives who knowingly allow our children to be harmed.
There are those who say—not least the tech companies —that we should not be seeking to criminalise tech directors. There are those who worry that this will reduce tech investment, but that has not happened in Ireland. There are those who say that the senior manager liability amendment will put a great burden on tech companies to comply, to which I say, “Great!” There are those who are worried that this will set an international precedent, to which I say, “Even better!”
Nothing should cause greater outrage in our society than the harming of innocent children. In a just society founded on the rule of law, those who harm children or allow children to be harmed should expect to be punished by the law. That is what new clause 2 seeks to do, and I look forward to working with the Secretary of State and others to bring forward a suitable amendment in the other place.
I offer my sincere thanks to the NSPCC, especially Rich Collard, and the outstanding Charles Hymas of The Telegraph, who have so effectively supported this campaign. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash); without his determination, knowledge and experience, it would not have been possible to achieve this change. He has been known as Mr Brexit, but as he said, even before he was Mr Brexit, he was Mr Child Protection, having been involved with the Protection of Children Act 1978. It is certainly advantageous in negotiations to work with someone who knows vastly more about legislation than pretty much anyone else involved. He sat through the debate in December on the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), and while the vote was taking place, he said, “I think we can do this.” He spent the next week in the Public Bill Office and most of his recess buried in legislation. I pay tribute to him for his outstanding work. Once again, I thank the Secretary of State for her commitment to this, and I think this will continue our Parliament’s proud history of protecting children.
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is an assault not just on the physical person, but on their minds? That is what is going on, and it is destroying them.
I rise to talk broadly about new clause 2, which I am pleased that the Government are engaging on. My right hon. and hon. Friends have done incredible work to make that happen. I share their elation. As—I think—the only Member who was on the Joint Committee under the fantastic Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), and on both Committees, I have seen the Bill’s passage over the past year or so and been happy with how the Government have engaged with it. That includes on Zach’s law, which will ensure that trolls cannot send flashing images to people with epilepsy. I shared my colleagues’ elation with my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Suzanne Webb) when we were successful in convincing the Government to make that happen.
May I reiterate the learnings from the Joint Committee and from the Committee earlier last year? When we took evidence from the tech giants—they are giants—it was clear that, as giants do, they could not see the damage underfoot and the harm that they were doing because they are so big. They were also blind to the damage they were doing because they chose not to see it. I remember challenging a witness from one of the big tech giants about whether they had followed the Committee on the harms that they were causing to vulnerable children and adults. I was fascinated by how the witnesses just did not care. Their responses were, “Well, we are doing enough already. We are already trying. We are putting billions of pounds into supporting people who are being harmed.” They did not see the reality on the ground of young people being damaged.
When I interviewed my namesake, Ian Russell, I was heartbroken because we had children of a similar age. I just could not imagine having the conversations he must have had with his family and friends throughout that terrible tragedy.
Is my hon. Friend aware that Ian Russell has pointed out that 26% of young people who present at hospital with self-harm and suicide attempts have accessed such predatory, irresponsible and wilful online content?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One of the real horrors is that, as I understand it, Facebook was not going to release—I do not want to break any rules here—the content that his daughter had being viewing, to help with the process of healing.
If I may, I want to touch on another point that has not been raised today, which is the role of a future Committee. I appreciate that is not part of the Bill, but I feel strongly that this House should have a separate new Committee for the Online Safety Bill. The internet and the world of social media is changing dramatically. The metaverse is approaching very rapidly, and we are seeing the rise of virtual reality and augmented reality. Artificial intelligence is even changing the way we believe what we see online and at a rate that we cannot imagine. I have a few predictions. I anticipate that in the next few years we will probably have the first No. 1 book and song written by AI. We can now hear online fake voices and impersonations of people by AI. We will have songs and so on created in ways that fool us and fool children even more. I have no doubt that in the coming months and years we will see the rise of children suing their parents for sharing content of them when they were younger without permission. We will see a changing dynamic in the way that young people engage with new content and what they anticipate from it.
Online Safety Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateWilliam Cash
Main Page: William Cash (Conservative - Stone)Department Debates - View all William Cash's debates with the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology
(1 year, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberAs I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) will agree, may I say how much we appreciate what the Government have done in relation to the matter just referred to? As the Minister knows, we withdrew our amendment in the House of Commons after discussion, and we had amazingly constructive discussions with the Government right the way through, and also in the House of Lords. I shall refer to that if I am called to speak later, but I simply wanted to put on record our thanks, because this will save so many children’s lives.
I thank my hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) for all their work on this. I hope that this debate will show that we have listened and tried to work with everybody, including on this important part of the Bill. We have not been able to capture absolutely everything that everybody wants, but we are all determined to ensure that the Bill gets on the statute book as quickly as possible, to ensure that we start the important work of implementing it.
We have amended the Bill to bolster its provisions. A number of topics have been of particular interest in the other place. Following engagement with colleagues on those issues, we have bolstered the Bill’s protections for children, including a significant package of changes relating to age assurance. We have also enhanced protections for adult users.
I commend my hon. Friend for her remarks. May I point out that there is a provision in European legislation—I speak as Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee—called the data services protection arrangements? They have nothing to compare with what we have in the Bill. That demonstrates the fact that when we legislate for ourselves we can get it right. That is something people ought to bear in mind.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point that out. Much of the European legislation on this was taken from our own draft legislation, but has not gone anywhere near as far in the protections it offers.
We know that the internet is magnificent and life changing in so many ways, but that the dark corners present such a serious concern for children and scores of other vulnerable people. I associate myself with the comments of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) on the child protection campaigners who have worked so incredibly hard on this issue, particularly those who have experienced the unimaginable tragedy of losing children as a result of what they have seen in the online world. To turn an unspeakable tragedy of that nature into a campaign to save the lives of others is the ultimate thing to do, and they deserve our massive thanks and gratitude.
I am also grateful to so many of our noble colleagues who have shaped the Bill using their unique knowledge and expertise. I would like to mention a few of them and welcome the changes they brought, but also thank the Minister and the Government for accepting so many of the challenges they brought forward and adapting them into the Bill. We all owe a massive debt of gratitude to Baroness Kidron for her tireless campaign for children’s protections. A children’s safety stalwart and pioneer for many years, virtually no one else knows more about this vital issue. It is absolutely right that the cornerstone and priority of the Bill must be to protect children. The Minister mentioned that the statistics are absolutely horrible and disturbing. That is why it is important that the Secretary of State will now be able to require providers to retain data relating to child sexual exploitation and abuse, ensuring that law enforcement does not have one hand tied behind its back when it comes to investigating these terrible crimes.
I also welcome the commitment to the new powers given to Ofcom and the expectations of providers regarding access to content and information in the terrible event of the death of a child. The tragic suicide of Molly Russell, the long and valiant battle of her dad, Ian, to get access to the social media content that played such a key role in it, and the delay that brought to the inquest, is the only example we need of why this is absolutely the right thing to do. I know Baroness Kidron played a big part in that, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid).
I am still concerned that there are not enough protections for vulnerable adults or for when people reach the cliff-edge of the age of 18. People of all ages need protection from extremely harmful content online. I am still not 100% convinced that user empowerment tools will provide that, but I look forward to being proved wrong.
I welcome the news that Ofcom is now required to produce guidance setting out how companies can tackle online violence against women and girls and demonstrate best practice. I am thankful to the former Equalities Minister, Baroness Morgan of Cotes, for her work on that. It is a vital piece of the puzzle that was missing from the original Bill, which did not specifically mention women or girls at all as far as I can remember.
It is important to stay faithful to the original thread of the Bill. To futureproof it, it has to be about systems and processes, rather than specific threats, but the simple fact is that the online world is so much more hostile for women. For black women, it is even worse. Illegal activity such as stalking and harassment is a daily occurrence for so many women and girls online. Over one in 10 women in England have experienced online violence and three in 10 have witnessed it. We also know that women and girls are disproportionately affected by the abuse of intimate images and the sharing of deepfakes, so it is welcome that those will become an offence. I also welcome that controlling and coercive behaviour, which has been made a recognised offence in real life, will now be listed as a priority offence online. That is something else the Government should take pride in.
I thank Baroness Merron for bringing animal welfare into the scope of the Bill. All in-scope platforms will have proactive duties to tackle content amounting to the offence of causing unnecessary suffering of animals. I thank Ministers for taking that on board. Anyone who victimises beings smaller and weaker than themselves, whether children or animals, is the most despicable kind of coward. It shows the level of depravity in parts of the online world that the act of hurting animals for pleasure is even a thing. A recent BBC story uncovered the torture of baby monkeys in Indonesia. The fact that individuals in the UK and the US are profiting from that, and that it was shared on platforms like Facebook is horrifying.
In the brief time left available to me, I must admit to still being a bit confused over the Government’s stance on end-to-end encryption. It sounds like the Minister has acknowledged that there is no sufficiently accurate and privacy-preserving technology currently in existence, and that the last resort power would only come into effect once the technology was there. Technically, that means the Government have not moved on the requirement of Ofcom to use last resort powers. Many security experts believe it could be many years before any such technology is developed, if ever, and that worries me. I am, of course, very supportive of protecting user privacy, but it is also fundamentally right that terrorism or child sexual exploitation rings should not be able to proliferate unhindered on these channels. The right to privacy must be trumped by the need to stop events that could lead to mass death and the harm of innocent adults and children. As my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said, that is also against their terms of service. I would therefore welcome it if the Minister were to make a couple of comments on that.
I also welcome the changes brought forward by Baroness Morgan of Cotes on the categorisation of harm. I, too, have been one of the long-standing voices over successive stages of the Bill saying that a platform’s size should not be the only measure of harm. Clearly, massive platforms, by definition of their reach, have huge potential to spread harmful content, but we know that online platforms can go viral overnight. We know there are some small but incredibly pernicious platforms out there. Surely the harmful content on a site should be the definer of how harmful it is, not just its size. I welcome the increased flexibility for the Secretary of State to set a threshold based on the number of users, or the functionality offered, or both. I would love to know a little more about how that would work in practice.
We were the first country in the world to set out the ambitious target of comprehensive online safety legislation. Since then, so much time has passed. Other countries and the EU have legislated while we have refined and in the meantime so much harm has been able to proliferate. We now need to get this done. We are so close to getting this legislation over the finish line. Can the Minister assure me that we are sending out a very clear message to providers that they must start their work now? They must not necessarily wait for this legislation to be in place because people are suffering while the delays happen.
I put on record my thanks to Members of this House and the other place who have worked so hard to get the legislation into such a great state, and to Ministers who have listened very carefully to all their suggestions and expertise. Finally, I put on record my thanks to the incredible Government officials. I was responsible for shepherding the Bill for a mere 19 months. It nearly finished me off, but some officials have been involved in it right from the beginning. They deserve our enormous gratitude for everything they have done.
The length of the process we have gone through on this Bill is a good thing, because we have ended up with probably the most comprehensive legislation in the world. We have a regulator with more power, and more power to sanction, than anywhere else. It is important to get that right.
A lot of the regulation is principle-based. It is about the regulation of user-to-user services, whereby people share things with each other through an intermediary service. Technology will develop, but those principles will underpin a lot of it. There will be specific cases where we need to think about whether the regulatory oversight works in a metaverse environment in which we are dealing with harms created by speech that has no footprint. How do we monitor and scrutinise that?
One of the hardest challenges could be making sure that companies continue to use appropriate technology to identify and mitigate harms on their platforms. The problem we have had with the regime to date is that we have relied on self-reporting from the technology companies on what is or is not possible. Indeed, the debate about end-to-end encryption is another example. The companies are saying that, if they share too much data, there is a danger that it will break encryption, but they will not say what data they gather or how they use it. For example, they will not say how they identify illegal use of their platform. Can they see the messages that people have sent after they have sent them? They will not publicly acknowledge it, and they will not say what data they gather and what triggers they could use to intervene, but the regulator will now have the right to see them. That principle of accountability and the power of the regulator to scrutinise are the two things that make me confident that this will work, but we may need to make amendments because of new things that we have not yet thought about.
In addition to the idea of annual scrutiny raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), does my hon. Friend think it would be a reasonably good idea for the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport to set up a Sub-Committee under its Standing Orders to keep any eye on this stuff? My hon. Friend was a great Chairman of that Select Committee, and such a Sub-Committee would allow the annual monitoring of all the things that could go wrong, and it could also try to keep up with the pace of change.
When I chaired the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, we set up a Sub-Committee to consider these issues and internet regulation. Of course, the Sub-Committee has the same members. It is up to the Select Committee to determine how it structures itself and spends its time, but there is only so much that any one departmental Select Committee can do among its huge range of other responsibilities. It might be worth thinking about a special Committee, drawing on the powers and knowledge of both Houses, but that is not a matter for the Bill. As my hon. Friend knows, it is a matter of amending the Standing Orders of the House, and the House must decide that it wants to create such a Committee. I think it is something we should consider.
We must make sure that encrypted services have proper transparency and accountability, and we must bring in skilled experts. Members have talked about researcher access to the companies’ data and information, and it cannot be a free-for-all; there has to be a process by which a researcher applies to get privileged access to a company’s information. Indeed, as part of responding to Ofcom’s risk registers, a company could say that allowing researchers access is one of the ways it seeks to ensure safe use of its platform, by seeking the help of others to identify harm.
There is nothing to stop Ofcom appointing many researchers. The Bill gives Ofcom the power to delegate its authority and its powers to outside expert researchers to investigate matters on its behalf. In my view, that would be a good thing for Ofcom to do, because it will not have all the expertise in-house. The power to appoint a skilled person to use the powers of Ofcom exists within the Bill, and Ofcom should say that it intends to use that power widely. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that Ofcom has that power in the Bill.
As we reflect on the Bill today, it is important to say that it has been improved as it has progressed through the Parliament. That is due in no small measure to Members from across the parties—both here and in the other place—who have engaged very collegiately, and to individuals and groups outside this place, particularly the Samaritans and those who have lived experience of the consequences of the dangers of the internet.
People from my constituency have also been involved, including the family of Joe Nihill, whom I have mentioned previously. At the age of 23, Joe took his own life after accessing dangerous suicide-related online content. His mother, Catherine, and sister-in-law, Melanie, have bravely campaigned to use the Online Safety Bill as an opportunity to ensure that what happened to Joe so tragically does not happen to others. I thank the Minister and his team for meeting Joe’s mother, his sister-in-law and me, and for listening to what we had to say. I recognise that, as a result, the Bill has improved, in particular with the Government’s acceptance of Lords amendment 391, which was first tabled by Baroness Morgan of Cotes. It is welcome that the Government have accepted the amendment, which will enable platforms to be placed in category 1 based on their functionality, even if they do not have a large reach. That is important, because some of the worst and most dangerous online suicide and self-harm related material appears on smaller platforms rather than the larger ones.
I also welcome the fact that the Bill creates a new communications offence of encouraging or assisting self-harm and makes such content a further priority for action, which is important. The Bill provides an historic opportunity to ensure that tackling suicide and self-harm related online content does not end with this Bill becoming law. I urge the Government to listen very carefully to what the Samaritans have said. As my hon. Friend the shadow Minister asked, will the Government commit to a review of the legislation to ensure that it has met the objective of making our country the safest place in the world in which to go online? Importantly, can the Government confirm when the consultation on the new offence of encouraging or assisting self-harm will take place?
As I mentioned in an intervention, it is clear that the Government want to tackle harmful suicide and self-harm related content with the Bill, but, as we have heard throughout our discussions, the measures do not go far enough. The Samaritans were correct to say that the Bill represents a welcome advance and that it has improved recently, but it still does not go far enough in relation to dangerous suicide and self-harm online content. How will the Government engage with people who have lived experience—people such as Melanie and Catherine—to ensure that the new laws make things better? Nobody wants the implementation of the Bill to be the end of the matter. We must redouble our efforts to make the internet as safe a place as possible, reflect on the experiences of my constituents, Joe Nihill and his family, and understand that there is a lot of dangerous suicide and self-harm related content out there. We are talking about people who exploit the vulnerable, regardless of their age.
I urge all those who are following the progress of the Bill and who look at this issue not to make the mistake of thinking that when we talk about dangerous online suicide and self-harm related content, it is somehow about freedom of speech. It is about protecting people. When we talk about dangerous online material relating to suicide and self-harm, it is not a freedom of speech issue; it is an issue of protecting people.
Has the hon. Gentleman noted, I hope with satisfaction, that the Government yesterday and today have made statements on a strategy for preventing suicide nationally, and that what he is saying—which I agree with—will be implemented? It has just been announced, it is very important and it is related to the Bill.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is important that the Government have announced a strategy: it is part and parcel of the ongoing work that is so necessary when we consider the prevalence of suicide as the leading cause of death among young men and women. It is a scourge across society. People should not make the mistake of thinking that the internet merely showcases awful things. The internet has been used as a tool by exploitative and sometimes disturbed individuals to create more misery and more instances of awful things happening, and to lead others down a dangerous path that sometimes ends, sadly, in them taking their own lives.
I thank the Minister for his engagement with my constituents, and the shadow Minister for what she has done. I also thank Baroness Kidron, Baroness Morgan and hon. Members who have engaged with this issue. I urge the Government to see the Bill not as the end when it comes to tackling dangerous online content related to suicide and self-harm, but as part of an important ongoing journey that we all work on together.
As others have done, I welcome the considerable progress made on the Bill in the other place, both in the detailed scrutiny that it has received from noble Lords, who have taken a consistent and expert interest in it, and in the positive and consensual tone adopted by Opposition Front Benchers and, crucially, by Ministers.
It seems that there are very few Members of this House who have not had ministerial responsibility for the Bill at some point in what has been an extraordinarily extensive relay race as it has moved through its legislative stages. The anchor leg—the hardest bit in such a Bill—has been run with dedication and skill by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who deserves all the praise that she will get for holding the baton as we cross the parliamentary finish line, as I hope we are close to doing.
I have been an advocate of humility in the way in which we all approach this legislation. It is genuinely difficult and novel territory. In general, I think that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and her Ministers—the noble Lord Parkinson and, of course, the Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully)—have been willing to change their minds when it was right to do so, and the Bill is better for it. Like others who have dealt with them, I also thank the officials, some of whom sit in the Box, some of whom do not. They have dedicated—as I suspect they would see it—most of their lives to the generation of the Bill, and we are grateful to them for their commitment.
Of course, as others have said, none of this means that the Bill is perfect; frankly, it was never going to be. Nor does it mean that when we pass the Bill, the job is done. We will then pass the baton to Ofcom, which will have a large amount of further work to do. However, we now need to finalise the legislative phase of this work after many years of consideration. For that reason, I welcome in particular what I think are sensible compromises on two significant issues that had yet to be resolved: first, the content of children’s risk assessments, and secondly, the categorisation process. I hope that the House will bear with me while I consider those in detail, which we have not yet done, starting with Lords amendments 17, 20 and 22, and Lords amendment 81 in relation to search, as well as the Government amendments in lieu of them.
Those Lords amendments insert harmful “features, functionalities or behaviours” into the list of matters that should be considered in the children’s risk assessment process and in the meeting of the safety duties, to add to the harms arising from the intrinsic nature of content itself—that is an important change. As others have done, I pay great tribute to the noble Baroness Kidron, who has invariably been the driving force behind so many of the positive enhancements to children’s online safety that the Bill will bring. She has promoted this enhancement, too. As she said, it is right to recognise and reflect in the legislation that a child’s online experience can be harmful not just as a result of the harm an individual piece of content can cause, but in the way that content is selected and presented to that child—in other words, the way in which the service is designed to operate. As she knows, however, I part company with the Lords amendments in the breadth of the language used, particularly the word “behaviours”.
Throughout our consideration of the Bill, I have taken the view that we should be less interested in passing legislation that sounds good and more interested in passing legislation that works. We need the regulator to be able to encourage and enforce improvements in online safety effectively. That means asking the online platforms to address the harms that it is within their power to address, and to relate clearly the design or operation of the systems that they have put in place.
The difficulty with the wording of the Lords amendments is that they bring into the ambit of the legislation behaviours that are not necessarily enabled or created by the design or operation of the service. The language used is
“features, functionalities or behaviours (including those enabled or created by the design or operation of the service) that are harmful to children”—
in other words, not limited to those that are enabled or created by the service. It is a step too far to make platforms accountable for all behaviours that are harmful to children without the clarity of that link to what the platform has itself done. For that reason, I cannot support those Lords amendments.
However, the Government have proposed a sensible alternative approach in their amendments in lieu, particularly in relation to Lords amendments 17 and Lords amendment 81, which relates to search services. The Government amendments in lieu capture the central point that design of a service can lead to harm and require a service to assess that as part of the children’s risk assessment process. That is a significant expansion of a service’s responsibilities in the risk assessment process which reflects not just ongoing concern about types of harm that were not adequately captured in the Bill so far but the positive moves we have all sought to make towards safety by design as an important preventive concept in online safety.
I also think it is important, given the potential scale of this expanded responsibility, to make clear that the concept of proportionality applies to a service’s approach to this element of assessment and mitigation of risk, as it does throughout the Bill, and I hope the Minister will be able to do that when he winds up the debate.
My right hon. and learned Friend has mentioned Ofcom several times. I would like to ask his opinion as to whether there should be, if there is not already, a special provision for a report by Ofcom on its own involvement in these processes during the course of its annual report every year, to be sure that we know that Ofcom is doing its job. In Parliament, we know what Select Committees are doing. The question is, what is Ofcom doing on a continuous basis?
I have three more speakers. I ask that colleagues bear that in mind so that I can bring in the Minister.
I would like to mention a very long journey in relation to the protection of children, because to my mind that is right at the heart of the Bill’s social value. I think it was Disraeli who said:
“The youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity.”
If we get it right in the early stages of their lives and we provide legislation that enables them to be properly protected, we are likely to get things right for the future. The Bill does that in a very good way.
The Bill also reflects some of the things in which I found myself involved in 1977—just over 45 years ago—with the Protection of Children Bill when Cyril Townsend came top of the private Member’s Bill ballot. I mention that because at that time we received resistance from Government Ministers and others—I am afraid I must say that it was a Labour Minister—but we got the Bill through as the then Prime Minister James Callaghan eventually ensured it did so. His wife insisted on it, as a matter of fact.
I pay tribute to the House of Lords. Others have repeatedly mentioned the work of Baroness Kidron, but I would also like to mention Lord Bethell, Baroness Morgan and others, because it has been a combined effort. It has been Parliament at its best. I have heard others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), make that point. It has been a remarkably lengthy but none the less essential process, and I pay tribute to those people for what they have done.
In retrospect, I would like to mention Baroness Lucy Faithfull, because back in 1977-78 I would not have known what to do if she had not worked relentlessly in the House of Lords to secure the measures necessary to protect children from sexual images and pornographic photography—it was about assault, and I do not need to go into the detail. The bottom line is that it was the first piece of legislation that swung the pendulum towards common sense and proportionality in matters that, 45 years later, have culminated in what has been discussed in the Bill and the amendments today.
I pay tribute to Ian Russell and to the others here whose children have been caught up in this terrible business. I pay specific tribute to the Secretary of State and the Minister, and also the Health Secretary for his statement yesterday about a national suicide strategy, in which he referenced amendments to the Bill. Because I have had a lot to do with him, I would like to pay tribute to Richard Collard of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who has not been mentioned yet, for working so hard and effectively.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) for her work to help get the amendments through. The written ministerial statement came after some interesting discussions with the Minister, who was a bit surprised by our vehemence and determination. It was not chariots of fire but chariots on fire, and within three weeks, by the time the Bill got to the House of Lords, we had a written ministerial statement that set the tone for the part of the Bill that I discussed just now, to protect children because they need protection at the right time in their lives.
The NSPCC tells us that 86% of UK adults want companies to understand how groomers and child abusers use their sites to harm children, and want action to prevent it by law. I came up with the idea, although the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) gave us a lot of support in a debate in this House at the time, and I am grateful to her for that. The fact that we are able to come forward with this legislation owes a great deal to a lot of people from different parts of the House.
I very much accept that continuing review is necessary. Many ideas have been put forward in this debate, and I am sure that the Minister is taking them all on board and will ensure that the review happens and that Ofcom acts accordingly, which I am sure it will want to. It is important that that is done.
I must mention that the fact we have left the European Union has enabled us to produce legislation to protect children that is very significantly stronger than European Union legislation. The Digital Services Act falls very far short of what we are doing here. I pay tribute to the Government for promoting ideas based on our self-government to protect our voters’ children and our society. That step could only have been taken now that we have left the European Union.
Research by the NSPCC demonstrates that four in five victims of online grooming offences are girls. It is worth mentioning that, because it is a significant piece of research. That means that there has to be clear guidance about the types of design that will be incorporated by virtue of the discussions to be had about how to make all this legislation work properly.
The only other thing I would like to say is that the £10-million suicide prevention grant fund announced yesterday complements the Bill very well. It is important that we have a degree of symmetry between legislation to prevent suicide and to ensure that children are kept safe.
I will follow on from the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), who talked powerfully about the impact of online pornography, particularly on children who see it.
Sadly, online pornography is increasingly violent. Many videos depict graphic and degrading abuse of women, sickening acts of rape and incest, and many underage participants. I also want to refer to the excellent study by the Children’s Commissioner, which revealed that the average age at which children first encounter pornography online is just 13 years old, and that there are 1.4 million visits to pornography sites by British children each and every month. As my right hon. Friend said, that is rewiring children’s brains in respect of what they think about sex, what they expect during sex and what they think girls want during sex. I think we will all look back on this widespread child exposure to pornography in a similar way to how we look back on children working down mines or being condemned to the poor house. Future generations will wonder how on earth we abandoned our children to online pornography.
Ending the ready availability of pornographic content to children and criminalising those who fail to protect them should surely be the most important goal of the Online Safety Bill. Indeed, that was most of the aim of part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which was never enacted. Without the Government amendments tabled in the Lords last week, which I strongly support, the Online Safety Bill would have been in danger of missing this opportunity. As my colleagues have done, I want to thank the Secretary of State and Ministers for their engagement in what has been a cross-party campaign both in this place and the other place, with Baroness Kidron and Lord Bethell leading the way, along with charities and the campaigning journalist Charles Hymas at The Daily Telegraph, who did a fantastic job of reporting it all so powerfully. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has taught me all I ever needed to know about how to negotiate with Government.
We now have these brilliantly strengthening amendments, including, significantly, an amendment that will criminalise directors and managers if they do not comply with Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to specific child safety duties. That is really important, because we are talking about the wealthiest companies in the world. Just having fines will not be enough to generate the kind of culture change at board level that we need. Only potential jail terms, which have worked in the construction industry and the financial services industry, will do what it takes.
Lords amendments 141 and 142 make pornography a primary priority harm for children. Importantly, user-to-user providers, as well as dedicated adult sites, will now be explicitly required to use highly effective age verification tools to prevent children accessing them. The wording “highly effective” is crucial, because porn is porn wherever it is found, whether on Twitter, which as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford said is the most likely place for children to find pornography, or on dedicated adult sites. It has the same effect and causes the same harm. It is therefore vital that tech companies will actually have to prevent children from going on their sites, and not just try hard. That is an incredibly important amendment.
Does my hon. Friend agree that what has really put their teeth on edge most of all is the idea that they might go to prison?
My hon. Friend is completely right. The impact of not taking responsibility for protecting children has to go to the very top.
Lords amendment 105 would compel Ofcom to submit its draft codes of practice within 18 months. That is an improvement on the previously lax timescale, which I welcome—along with the other significant improvements that have been made—and I repeat my gratitude to the Minister and the Secretary of State. Let us not pretend, however, that on Royal Assent our children will suddenly be safe from online pornography or any other online harms. There are serious questions to be asked about Ofcom’s capabilities to enforce against non-compliant porn sites, and I think we should look again at part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which would have allowed the British Board of Film Classification to act as the regulator.