Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of online safety protections for vulnerable residents in West Dorset.

The Online Safety Act has come into effect. As of March this year, services must remove illegal content such as child abuse material or terrorist content. As of July this year, children must also be protected from age-inappropriate content such as pornography and self-harm content. Children and others will be starting to see the effects of this.

Monitoring and evaluation are key to understanding how effective the online safety regime is. DSIT and Ofcom have developed a framework to monitor the implementation of the Act and evaluate its core outcomes.

This monitoring and evaluation work is already tracking the impact of the online safety regime and will feed into a Post Implementation Review of the Act.

We are committed to making the online world safe, particularly for children, so people can seize the opportunities it brings.