Lord Nash (Con)

My Lords, I too welcome the Minister back to her place, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, for his remarks. I will speak to my Motion A2. For anyone who has studied them, the verdicts in the two US cases are clearly game-changers. The evidence from the social media companies themselves is damning. I have a treasure-trove of these documents, if any noble Lord would like them. Immediately following these cases, the Prime Minister made some very strong statements about protecting children from the harm of social media, and the right honourable Liz Kendall spoke only yesterday about the importance of highly effective age verification to ensure that children cannot access the harmful features of social media. This is exactly what my proposal does. I listened very carefully to what she said yesterday and, if you can get a fag paper between us, it is a pretty thin one indeed—so I have decided to take the Prime Minister at his word and, instead of batting my amendment back again, to lay an amendment to the Government’s amendments to the effect that they must, rather than just may, raise the age for access to those harmful social media sites to 16 within 12 months. Those sites would be chosen very selectively and, I am sure, would be very few in number—definitely not an outright or blanket ban—and this would be stated in the Bill. I have also proposed in the amendment a sunset clause of two years on the Henry VIII element of the powers that the Government are proposing to take.