Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)

My Lords, often in this House one is tempted to wander down memory lane and is filled with wonderful memories of good times and shared experiences, but none so present as the one that was referred to by the noble Baroness when she spoke earlier about the Online Safety Bill. I felt resonances up and down my back as I remembered the moment at which I decided that there was no point in reading my speech at Second Reading, which was full of sound and fury, full of anger, full of things that I was determined to see in the Bill, but realised that we all agreed about it and that the best thing was to say simply that we would work together to get the best Bill that we could out of the resources available across the House—and they are significant. As we have heard today, that worked—or it did until today. I am very sad that I feel I will have to support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in only my second appearance against my party. I felt very strongly that we had an agreement in the last Parliament, signed, sealed and signified by both Houses and agreed to by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, who is in his place. It bound any successor Government to operate within the terms of that Act. I find it egregious that the Government are seeking a way of not doing that, for reasons that I can only guess at but seem to be more about winning friends in strange places across the Atlantic than seeing the best for our people, particularly our children, in the United Kingdom. There is an irony in that there would have been a way of avoiding this. I do not want to embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, again, but we adopted towards the end of the Bill what I called the Parkinson rule, and rightly so because I felt that he was brave in proposing it. It was not the convention of the time, nor a structure or system that fit well within our current procedures in this House. The intention was to recognise the complexity and difficulty in the Online Safety Bill, now Act, and to invite the Government to share with the Select Committees of both Houses —the SIT Committee in the Commons and the Communications and Digital Committee in the Lords—draft material relating to the Online Safety Bill because we had a hunch that there would be issues that would need to be hammered out more clearly and more effectively than the arrangements for dealing with secondary legislation in this House currently allow. That might change, but until it does there is no way in which we can debate and discuss except through a regret amendment—or, as one might have been tempted to do on this occasion, through a fatal Motion—to an instrument which clearly has come out wrong, does not reflect the wishes of the House and may do damage which ultimately will end up in people’s lives. The responsibility will lie with the Government if they do not listen to what we are saying today. The Parkinson rule was accepted by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. I quote from Hansard, although not entirely because there are some reservations which I want to skip over, though I am sure that they can be checked out. He said that the Government would “ensure that the relevant committees have every chance to play a part in that consultation by informing them that the process is open”— which is good—and that they would “where possible, share draft statutory instruments directly with the relevant committees ahead of the formal laying process … on a case-by-case basis, considering what is appropriate and reasonably practical”.—[Official Report, 19/7/23; cols. 2351-52.] That system has not been implemented by the Government. I wrote to my noble friend the Minister while she was ill, and she has very kindly responded to me. She says she feels that the spirit of the agreement has been carried out in how the Government told both committees that there were statutory instruments on the way and that this was sufficient to meet the implications of the Parkinson rule. Given that three days’ notice was given before they were laid, that does not meet the requirement.