Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

My Lords, I put my name to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for a very simple reason. An awful lot of what we have been discussing today, and in recent days in Committee, is about trying to make this Bill as child-centric and school-centric as possible. There is a common theme running through many of these amendments. Given the pace at which the world is changing and the challenges that parents, schools, teachers and children have, to allow each individual entity to try to navigate their way through these changes in a wonderfully sort or British laissez-faire way will be wholly unrealistic and will not produce good outcomes. Whether or not one likes to compare this country to them, examples of countries that have very centralised approaches to identifying what is safe and what is not safe for children include the People’s Republic of China—which, I remind noble Lords, has the only parliamentary assembly larger than your Lordships’ House—and France, to which some hereditary Peers perhaps have some antipathy for ancestral reasons. In both cases, those countries take it upon themselves systematically to proactively try to identify what is safe and what is not safe. As an example that I think I may have mentioned in Committee of what can go wrong, and is going wrong, one of the best known technologies in classrooms now is Google Classroom. Let us say that you are on Google Classroom, provided through the school, you are being asked to use that to do a project, and that project is something to do with geography. To complete your project, you naturally go to Google Maps, which is conveniently there on the screen as part of the cluster of products linked into Google Classroom. The minute you leave Google Classroom and go on to Google Maps, you as a child and you as a school lose every protection you previously had for your data. Everything suddenly becomes visible to Google, and the data becomes saleable. It is making money out of the schoolchildren who are using the apps linked to Google Classroom. One has to understand the financial model that these very successful companies use. We cannot expect individual schools and the data-processing officers within schools, who will be teachers who probably have multiple other responsibilities, to be on top of all the changes taking place in the products being sold in a very alluring way to schools. The companies will often say that this is being done with the overt or tacit approval and backing of His Majesty’s Government, which may or may not be true. It is extraordinarily difficult for these schools to identify what is safe and not safe, and what is effective in terms of outcome and what is less effective, because there is no moderating body at the moment that is trying to make sense of this on behalf of these schools, which are being assailed on all sides by multiple pressures. On the one hand, we have a Government who are implying that this is good and we need more of it. Simultaneously, there is all the debate we are having about the amount of time we are spending on screens and the way we are using screens possibly having very unfortunate side-effects. To have all of this going on at the same time without any clear guidance and sense of direction from His Majesty’s Government is distinctly unhelpful. All these amendments are simply asking the Government to take a lead, to provide in a totally apolitical way some clarity about what is safe and what is not safe, to put processes in place to ascribe responsibility to those bodies capable of doing this, to do it in a co-ordinated way and, above all, to remember that we are talking about are the short, medium, and long-term interests of children.