Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)

My Lords, I support Amendments 3, 8 and 13 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, to which I have added my name. I will not repeat too much all her comments on our learning from the Online Safety Act that small does not mean low risk. However, it should not be a surprise that those of us who championed that amendment to the then Online Safety Bill have again put our names to it. We have learned the hard way that, in online safety, risk can come from the smallest providers. I have learned it personally. I retired from TalkTalk 10 years ago and I remember, what must have been 11 years ago—I promise this is not a cyber attack story—a mapping exercise across all the telcos, mobile and fixed, looking at our even then incredibly complex data centre networks across Europe. I am sure this has all changed and is much more complex, but I remember discovering, as a result of that exercise, that all of us were routing traffic through the same small data centre in central Europe and none of us was aware that we were doing so. These networks are expanding so fast and data centres and managed service providers are growing so fast that it is impossible for people to retain perfect knowledge 100% of the time, so a small provider really can be a node that brings down the whole network. It is not just in child safety that we have learned that small can mean very risky; it is also the case in the world of physical digital infrastructure, which we have known for some time in telecoms. That is why these amendments are so important.