Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the cross-platform nature of grooming and abuse for children online; and what steps he will take in the forthcoming Bill on online safety to tackle that risk to children.

We are working across Government and engaging industry to prevent all forms of online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The Government is continuing to engage with technology companies around the Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, a framework of principles launched by the Five Country Ministerial partners in March 2020. These are a set of 11 actions tech firms should take to ensure children are not sexually exploited on their platforms. Principle 10 includes how companies should support opportunities to share relevant expertise, helpful practices, data and tools where appropriate and feasible.

The strongest protections from harmful or inappropriate content in the Online Safety Bill are for children and young people. These laws will close the gap between what companies say they do, and what they will actually do. All companies in scope will be required to fulfil the duty of care by ensuring that they take reasonably practicable steps to tackle relevant illegal content, and protect children where they are likely to access their services.This includes bearing down on the threat of livestreaming and taking necessary steps to target grooming and the proliferation of child sexual abuse material.

We have published the interim code of practice on online child sexual exploitation and abuse, the code will help to ‘bridge the gap’ between Government’s response to the Online Harms White Paper, and the establishment of the independent regulator. This will enable companies to take swift action in tackling the most serious of online harms before the regulator is established.