Baroness Kidron (CB)

My Lords, I support the amendment in the name of the Minister, to which I have added my name, and welcome his words from the Dispatch Box. As he said, this new duty provides a direct and unequivocal legal duty on all information society services likely to be accessed by a child and acknowledges in the Bill that services outside the definition of ISS must also consider children—indeed, they must consider children’s specific protections when determining how to process their data. For the last decade, I and others have fought to establish minimum standards to ensure the safety and privacy of children in the UK and, over time, we have learned that we cannot assume a trajectory of progress. Standards can go down as well as up, and we cannot be sure that the intentions of Parliament will always be interpreted as robustly as promised. I am concerned about the impact of tech lobbying on this Bill, the regulator and the Government’s wider digital strategy. I hope that the companies represented by those lobbyists will take note of this amendment as a sign that, when it comes to children, they have absolute responsibilities under the law. The Bill team has persuaded me that the child-specific duties on the ICO in the Bill, in combination with its new reporting duties, mean that the ICO will report separately about steps it has taken and will take to uphold children’s heightened data rights. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that that is also the Government’s expectation.