Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)

My Lords, I too support Amendments 493 and 494 in the name of my noble friend Lord Holmes, and Amendments 502K and 502YI in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I am not an educationalist and this is my first contribution on the Bill. I spend my time in this House focused mainly on digital issues, hence my interest in these amendments. Like others today, I will start by being really clear that I am not anti-technology in education—quite the opposite. I see the huge potential that digital technology can bring in all sectors of our lives. It is also particularly clear today, as our Prime Minister is signing the tech prosperity deal. We should be open-eyed that technology brings the opportunity for prosperity; I am not anti it at all. But it is also really clear that technology, not just digital but all technologies for evermore, need guardrails, and those guardrails cannot be self-imposed. Among those of us who have worked on child safety online for the past 10 or 15 years, many on this side of the House began firmly believing that self-regulation was the answer. I am afraid that we been proven absolutely wrong. There is no doubt that self-regulation in social media has been a disaster, and I fear that we are doing exactly the same in digital technology in education. Companies operating in this space need guardrails in order to develop the products that really will make a positive difference and to help us all mitigate the downsides that these technologies inherently have. I am not a lover of adding regulation, so in each example of adding regulation in the digital space I ask myself a simple question: is this additional regulation an example of the red flag Act 1865? For those that do not know, that was the wonderful piece of legislation that required a man—it had to be a man—with a red flag to walk in front of every non-horse-drawn vehicle. This was clearly a very bad piece of legislation that was repealed—it took 30 years, but it was repealed. So question number one is: is this piece of additional digital regulation a red flag Act that will prevent the benefit of the technology, or is it in danger of being a seat belt? The seat belt was patented in 1885 but it became mandatory to wear one in the back seat of a car, where children tend to sit, only in 1991. So, during that century, was the world better off and was car development so much faster because there were not mandatory seat belts on the back seat, or was it just that more children died? We have to ask ourselves, with every piece of regulation in the digital world: are we in danger of creating a red flag that is slowing down the development of the technology, or are we in danger of believing that regulation will slow down economic growth while instead being culpable of doing harm for decades or even centuries? The problem with this Bill, and these amendments, is that many of us have debated the issue many times before. The age-appropriate design code came into being in the Data Protection Act 2018 and came to life in 2020. It expressly excludes technology in schools. I find it incomprehensible that, five years later, we are having to argue that it is wrong that children’s data in school is less protected than it is at home. The Minister has referenced previously that many of us have spoken on this topic before or have a track record in this. The Government, when they were not the Government, very clearly supported expanding regulation into edtech. I hope that the Minister will hear the cross-party support for these amendments and work with us to put in statute the appropriate protection for the use of children’s data and technology when they are in education.