Sir Jeremy Wright

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) not just on securing this debate but on the way in which she made her case. I want to focus on a couple of the more technical aspects of the Online Safety Act, which are important in fulfilling the objectives that we all share this afternoon, which, as she rightly said, are to make sure that the vehicle that we now have in the OSA delivers the right outcomes for the safety of children online. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage); she is right that I had ministerial responsibility for the Act. I think, frankly, it is harder to find Conservative Ministers who did not have responsibility for it at some point or another, but what we all tried to do was make sure that the structure of the Act would support the objectives that, again, we all share. I will mention two specific things, which I should be grateful if the Minister would consider. I do not expect her to respond to them this afternoon, but if she would consider them and write to me, I should be very grateful. It seems to me that we need to make sure that as responsibility for implementing the Act moves from us as legislators to Ofcom as the regulator, Government and Parliament and the regulator are on the same page. There are two areas where I am concerned that that might not be the case. The first is the question whether harm to children is all about content. I do not think it is. We have heard this afternoon that many aspects of risk and harm to children online have nothing to do with the specific nature of an individual piece of content. The Act is important, and I believe it does support Ofcom’s ability to act in relation to harms beyond specific matters of content. For the Minister’s benefit, I have in mind section 11 of the Act on risk assessment—as she will know, because she knows it off by heart. For everybody else here, section 11 deals with risk assessment, and on that a great deal hangs. If we do a risk assessment, the obligation is to do something about risks, and that hangs on what risks are identified in the assessment. So the risk assessment matters. As I read the Act, section 11 says that, yes, we must risk-assess for individual harmful pieces of content, but under section 11(6)(f) we also must risk-assess for the different ways that the service is used, including functionalities or other features of the service that affect how much children use the service—which goes back to a point made earlier. Those are the sorts of things it is important to underline that we expect Ofcom to attend to. I am grateful for the Government’s statement of strategic priorities, but the point made about this being a fast-moving landscape is fundamental. Again in the Act, the codes of practice are vital, because they set out the things that platforms ought to do to keep children safe. If the platforms do the things set out in the codes, they are broadly invulnerable from further regulatory intervention. We need to act urgently to ensure that the codes of practice say what we want them to say. At the moment my concern is that Ofcom may simply talk about current good practice and not urge advancements in good practice to be maintained by the platforms. Those are the two areas that I hope the Minister will think about in relation to the draft codes and the need for an ongoing relationship between us in Parliament and Government and Ofcom to ensure that the Act continues to deliver as we want it to.