Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of ensuring there is an effective child-use test to protect children from harmful content in the Online Safety Bill; and if she will make a statement.

The Online Safety Bill protects children from harmful and inappropriate content on any service in scope which children are likely to access. Such services will need to protect children from both illegal content and content which is harmful or inappropriate for children.

Services who do not consider they need to implement the higher level of protection for children will need to provide robust evidence to the regulator that children are not accessing their service, and keep this under review. Ofcom may take enforcement action where providers do not carry out an assessment on children’s access and keep it up to date.