Patrick Hurley

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I will set out some facts and figures before moving on to the substance of my speech. Seventy-one per cent of children report having experienced harm online. Twenty-one per cent of children report having been contacted online by adults they do not know. Vulnerable children are twice as likely as their peers to encounter online bullying. Fifty-seven per cent of parents report that their children’s sleep patterns are being negatively affected by online activity. And here is the killer stat: despite the age limit of 13, 85% of 9 to 12-year-olds are reported to use social media. It is obvious that a mere increase in the threshold to 16 years of age is insufficient; the measure needs to go hand in hand with enforcement. Many Members in this debate have, rightly, concentrated on the harms to children. My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) somewhat stole my thunder by so eloquently drawing an analogy with smoking in the 1950s. I have truncated my speech accordingly, but the analogy is accurate: we are now at the stage where social media usage is analogous to smoking in the 1950s. Obvious harm is being done, but we are not yet at a stage where we can accurately quantify it, categorise it or come to a settled conclusion on how to deal with it. Evidence continues to emerge around harmful content, disrupted sleep patterns, damage to the mental health of children, addictiveness and more, but we as a society, a Government, a Parliament and politicians do not yet know how to adequately deal with all of that. As a starting point, I support an increase in age restrictions, in line with the petition, but we need to learn more about the causes of the problems affecting our younger generations and find out how to prevent them for future generations. In addition to an increase in the age limit, I want stronger enforcement of age limits by Ofcom and through self-regulation by social media companies. We also need more high-quality, robust research to prove causality beyond any doubt. I finish with an aspect that has not been touched on in the debate. Last week in the House, I noted how there is increasingly a political element, where social media companies reflect the national interests of the host countries in which they are situated. There are national interest considerations for the UK in regulation of social media. We do not want foreign agents and foreign actors to influence our democratic process in relation to adults and we certainly do not want them to influence the formation of the politics of our children.