Lord Bethell (Con)

The Minister is quite right to point out that the Online Safety Act did not get much of a mention: maybe it is some kind of PTSD, because some of us did hard yards during that difficult passage. One of the most difficult things was the debate on age verification for porn, which started with all the same arguments we have just heard: it is not technically possible; maybe children can learn by watching pornography; the moral rules around telling children what to do are not crystal clear; the science of whether porn is good for children is not cast in stone, and does not have the longitudinal studies that we need to make decisions on it. All that was heard. At the end of next month, Ofcom will finally bring in a deadline so that all websites that carry a risk of children seeing porn will have to put in age-verification software. Who in this Chamber now genuinely thinks that was a bad decision? Yet it was fought tooth and nail from that Bench by the previous Government, who had to be dragged to that decision by rebellion in the Commons and a four corners of the Chamber effort here. The Minister faces a similar storm brewing on social media use by under-16s. Could she, with her multidimensional approach to this problem, help us understand the metrics she will use to judge whether it is right to revisit this issue? How many hours a day do children have to spend on social media? How many predators have to get through? How many grooming gangs have to recruit children in order to abuse them? What metrics will she apply to reviewing this decision?