Contribution
My Lords, I declare an interest as the director of the Free Speech Union.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said earlier that he was looking forward to my remarks, seemingly under the impression that the Free Speech Union would be within scope of the new regulations in the Bill. But the Free Speech Union is not a think tank; nor is it regulated by the Charity Commission. So, unless there is an amendment in the flurry of government amendments we are anticipating which somehow brings campaigning membership organisations within scope but nevertheless exempts trade unions, I think the Free Speech Union is probably safe. I share the reservations of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, about that practice, and I will be voting for his amendment shortly.
I note that the party of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, received a £2.4 million donation in 2005 from a company called 5th Avenue Partners, owned by Michael Brown, who was based in Spain at the time and was later convicted of fraud. So while I do not think the Bill will affect donations to the Free Speech Union, it may well affect donations to the Liberal Democrats.
I want to talk about the impact that lowering the voting age to 16 will have on the regulations that are due to be brought before both Houses by the Secretary of State for DCMS later this year, restricting or preventing children from accessing social media. I share the same concerns as those articulated by my noble friend Lord Markham. If you are going to lower the voting age to 16, it makes a blanket ban on under-16s accessing social media less sensible. According to Ofcom, among 12 to 15 year-olds, individual social media platforms are the most used single news sources. To impose a blanket ban on under-16s accessing social media in the forthcoming regulations would make it much harder for children—when they reach the age of 16, they cannot access social media platforms before that point—to make informed decisions about who to vote for.
There is an obvious solution to this problem, which is not to restrict access for under-16s to content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. There are duties in the Online Safety Act that require social media companies and other providers designated as category 1 providers to protect all three types of content, set out in Sections 17 to 19 of the Act. But these duties have not yet been activated, despite assurances from Ofcom that they would be activated this summer. It perhaps will not surprise noble Lords to discover that all the take-down duties in the Online Safety Act have been activated, but some of the keep-up duties—the duties inserted to safeguard freedom of expression—have not yet been activated, including the duties to protect content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. My question to the Minister is: will she assure the House that, when those duties are activated, under-16s will not be restricted from accessing the kind of information they will need if they are going to make informed choices about who to vote for when they reach the new, lower voting age?
There is another, related concern: what content social media platforms are obliged to age-gate, because the content is supposedly harmful to children. These child safety duties in the Online Safety Act kicked in in July 2025, meaning that in order to access supposedly harmful content, you needed to be able to prove that you were 18 or over. But some of the content that was age-gated included a speech by Katie Lam in the House of Commons about the grooming gangs, footage of anti-immigration protests outside asylum hotels and, ironically enough, a video made by Spiked about online censorship. I ask the Minister whether she will make it clear to Ofcom that it should no longer insist that social media companies age-gate this type of content to those aged 18 and above, if the voting age is going to be lowered to 16. That is precisely the kind of content covered by Sections 17 to 19, so the simplest remedy would be to not restrict children’s access to those types of content. If that is a step too far for the Government, will the Minister at least assure the House that speeches made in here and the other place will not be restricted for 16 and 17 year-olds, as some of them are at present? To paraphrase Robert Lowe in the context of the Reform Act 1867: we must educate our masters.