Chris Bryant

I will run through some of the contributions to the debate and then give specific answers to some of the points that have been made. First, I will probably have the unanimous support of the House in praising my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] I am slightly worried that he was referred to as a patron saint earlier, because the danger with patron saints is that they tend to be martyred at some point in their career, and I do not wish that for him. As I said earlier, I am not going to make any of the arguments that he told me not to make, because I do not subscribe to them. I am also not going to make any arguments today against action—that is an important point that the House needs to recognise. Everybody accepts that action in this sphere is inevitable. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) gave us some shocking statistics from her constituency, as have many other Members. The hon. Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul), who is no longer in her place—[Interruption.] Oh, she is here; sorry, I would not want to mislead the House. She fessed up to her own social media use, but she did not tell us how many hours a day it is, so we were watching her throughout the debate to see how much time she was spending on social media. It is absolutely true that many of us are just as addicted as many young people, and while our specific concern is about the effects on the mental health of children, there are of course issues for the whole of society. Other Members have referred to misinformation and how it is propagated, and how to access good, reliable information in a world that is profoundly chaotic, where algorithms do not necessarily subscribe to truth in the way that previous understandings of the media used to. I note that the hon. Member for Reigate said that the state must step in—we will hold her to that on many more occasions in future. My hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) made some very important points, including that it is sometimes the most vulnerable children who experience these effects. She also pointed—as did several other Members—to the desensitising effect on boys, in particular, who see versions of sex online that normalise a set of expectations about what a relationship with another person might be and what sex might involve that are wholly alien to most people’s understanding of what they should be. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) made a point that was also made in a previous Westminster Hall debate on this issue: does the burden of proof lie with those trying to prove that there is no harm, or with those trying to prove that there is harm? It is important that we look at the evidence in the round and come to a coherent, sensible, one-Government decision on how we can make progress in this field.