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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking to prevent children accessing adult applications on tablets and phones.

The strongest protections within the draft Online Safety Bill are for children. Services which are likely to be accessed by or attract a significant number of children will be required to conduct a child safety risk assessment and provide safety measures for child users. This includes services which are not targeted at children, but which they are accessing.

Ofcom will set out the steps companies can take to protect children from harm on their service. Companies will have to ensure that only users who are old enough are able to access services which have age restrictions or risk causing them harm. We expect companies to use age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services which pose the highest risk of harm to children, such as online pornography or dating sites.