Lord Pack (LD)

My Lords, I have one amendment on its own in splendid isolation in this group. It is, as I hope noble Lords will agree, on an important topic: the use of social media in local government. This is an important topic for several reasons. One is that social media is so central to how local government and mayors may or may not choose to communicate with residents. It is also a crucial part of how elected public officials, whether they are councillors or mayors or, indeed, at the national level, experience politics. Often, that is an unhappy experience in terms of harassment and threats, but it can also be a very positive experience in terms of being able to engage more effectively with members of the public. Of course, social media is important in many respects for its wider impact on society. That is why it comes up so often in debates and Questions on other topics in our House. In that respect, local authorities and local government in general have an important leadership role in setting some of the practical realities of how the social media landscape plays out. Sometimes, we are all collectively a bit too passive in assuming that the social media landscape is set by a combination of tech bros in California and Ofcom getting to grips with the Online Safety Act, but there is a practical degree of leadership at all levels of government that can encourage and help bring out the best of social media while downplaying the worst of social media. There is an important role at local government level, in particular, because local government is the original source of information on so many topics that people love discussing, debating and sharing information about, whether it is which days you should put your bins out or which days schools are being closed due to snow in the winter or often controversial issues regarding, say, planning applications. Local government can make decisions on how and where to share information on all those things. Even if, in a sense, people think that they are not making those decisions but are simply following by default the social media channels that they have always used or that other parts of government use, that in itself is a decision. The intention behind my amendment is absolutely to respect the discretion and flexibility that there should be—different places will wish to make different decisions, as appropriate—but also to show that there are two benefits to giving an explicit strategy a bit of a nudge. One is making sure that people are thinking through these issues sensibly and appropriately, and the other is enabling democratic accountability for the decisions that are being taken. Many of us probably have a wide range of views on how appropriate or not it is for people at any level of government to use Elon Musk’s social media channels, but, crucially, for the democratic accountability element to play out effectively, it is important to know what decisions are being made, how they are being made and what the rationale for them is. Different voters in different places may come to different decisions about which approach they prefer, but having a social media strategy that is explicitly published will make that democratic process much more effective. Of course, I appreciate that if the Minister were to kindly accept my amendment, all the issues that it mentions, such as disinformation and public trust, would not suddenly be solved by it. On the other hand, they are difficult issues that we need to try to tackle, using all the different levers available to us. In that sense, I hope that the amendment would be a small contribution to that overall challenge, and therefore I beg to move.