Dame Caroline Dinenage

I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), who made really powerful and impactful comments, as have all those who have spoken today. I join her tribute to the bereaved families who have done such incredible work to campaign on this vital issue. I should, before anything else, direct everybody to the work of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who was the architect—the genesis—behind the Online Safety Act. I was one of the many Ministers who took over that baton for a couple of years and pulled the Act together. As the hon. Member for Darlington said, only when we meet families who have been deeply impacted by online dangers and online harms does the impact of this really land with us. For me, meeting Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 as a result of the content that she had seen online, underlined how incredibly disastrous for young and vulnerable people the harms of the internet can be. As the hon. Lady said, it is not just about the sites that are hosting inappropriate content; it is about the algorithms that take someone’s fears and anxieties and put them into an echo chamber where they are normalised and reinforced, which is the most dangerous part of this. Unfortunately, it is the algorithms that social media companies prize above everything else; they are the most jealously guarded parts of their organisations. Molly was one example resulting from that, but there are so many other examples of suicide, self-harm, anxiety, eating disorders and body image issues that come out of that world. A year on from the Online Safety Act, it is interesting to see how it is fully implemented, particularly against the backdrop of the speed at which technology is evolving. It is frightening because, virtually every week in our constituencies, we see examples of the harms that are out there. In my constituency, just in the last couple of weeks, junior-age children were using the online world to bully and harass each other. That is something that used to stay within the school gates. Bullying still happened—I am so elderly, and it happened when I was at school—but it was something that was left behind at the school gates; it did not follow you home. Also, 27% of children have seen pornography by the age of 11, which brings a very toxic view of sex and relationships. The Online Safety Act will hopefully encourage providers to do what they say they are doing when it comes to protecting children online, but the Minister has a huge responsibility to make sure that that happens, and to hold not just them but Ofcom to account to make sure that it is robustly implementing the guidelines that it is setting up. There are some amazing champions of that—Baroness Kidron has made incredible strides in the other place—but we need to make sure that Ofcom has not only the powers but the capacity. It has a huge amount under its jurisdiction and there is a huge amount of pressure. I know that the Minister will work very hard to ensure that it is held to account and equipped with what it needs.