Ian Murray

I thank the Liberal Democrats for securing this debate, although I am slightly disappointed by the way in which that was done. I will not concentrate on procedural issues, but it seems to me that the argument is to give the Liberal Democrats the freedom of the House to introduce a piece of legislation that they want to work on while already having all the answers. The use of a procedural motion for this serious debate is rather unfortunate. I think that has been demonstrated in the strength of feeling in the debate. I am completely and utterly split. The shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez), asked us to give an opinion, but I do not really know what the best thing to do is. I have a five-year-old girl and a one-year-old girl. The jobs that they will do when they are any of our ages have probably not even been invented yet. I want them to be able to live their lives, and to exploit, experience and enjoy social media and what new tech has to offer, but I want them to do so safely. Denying them that opportunity might not be the answer, but that is why consultation is put in place. The hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), who opened the debate, mentioned her own children and the daily fight between screentime, online and doing other things. I am sure that I had the same fight with my own parents when they tried to turn the television off at night, so this is not a new battle, but it is a battle that parents will win—whether we negotiate or treat them with sweets or something else. This highlights the importance of the approach that we are taking, which allows proper consideration of a range of views—that is urgent. I have a whole stack of incredibly sobering but also very contradictory statistics here, which is why consultation and national conversation are important. Some 99% of 12 to 17-year-olds reported that they benefit from being online. One statistic suggests that half of parents think that the benefits of children being on social media outweigh the risks, while another says that just three in 10 parents think that. Looking at that data—there is a whole host of it in that context—we might think that this is a difficult issue to resolve, but then we come to the child sexual exploitation and abuse issues. There were 41,000 obscene publication offences in December 2024—an 860% increase in a decade. In September 2025, there were 42,000 obscene publication offences—a near 1,000% increase since 2013. Some 91% of child sexual abuse material found online is self-generated, often under pressure from manipulation. Let us be quite clear, because some Members do not get this: it is illegal to create, possess or distribute child sexual abuse images, including those generated by AI, regardless of whether they depict a real child. That is already against the criminal law. The Online Safety Act requires in-scope services to assess the risks to their users of child sexual abuse material. That cannot be clearer.