Feryal Clark

The Government are confident that the duties to tackle illegal content and, where relevant, protect children from harmful content will have a meaningful impact on the small but risky services to which the hon. Gentleman refers. Ofcom has created a dedicated supervision taskforce for small but high-risk services, recognising the need for a bespoke approach to securing compliance. The team will focus on high-priority risks, such as CSAM, suicide and hate offences directed at women and girls. Where services do not engage with Ofcom and where there is evidence of non-compliance, Ofcom will move quickly to enforcement action, starting with illegal harm duties from 17 March, so work is being done on that. The comprehensive legal safety duties will be applied to all user-to-user forums, and child safety duties will be applied to all user-to-user forums likely to be accessed by children, including the small but high-risk sites. These duties will have the most impact in holding the services to account. Because of the deep concerns about these forums, Ofcom has, as I said, created the small but risky supervision taskforce. For example, Ofcom will be asking an initial set of firms that pose a particular risk, including smaller sites, to disclose their illegal content risk assessment by 31 March. The Government have been clear that we will act where there is evidence that harm is not being adequately addressed despite the duties being in effect, and we have been clear to Ofcom that it has the Government’s and Parliament’s backing to be bold in the implementation of the Online Safety Act. We are in clear agreement that the Act is not the end of the road, and Ofcom has already committed to iterating on the codes of practice, with the first consultation on further measures being launched this spring. The Government remain open minded as to how we ensure that users are kept safe online, and where we need to act, we will. To do so, we must ensure that the actions we take are carefully considered and rooted in evidence.