Contribution
It is a great pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Hobhouse. It has been a superb debate. I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on introducing this e-petition debate. It has been a very thoughtful debate, and rightly so, because questions about children, social media and online safety go right to the heart of family life in this country.
I have two young girls aged six and one. Although they are not yet at the stage of social media and telephones, the daily fight to get them off screens at that age requires the diplomatic skills of the UN, because screens are everywhere. As parents we probably set the worst examples. Our whole lives are on our phones now, whether we are at work or trying to do family admin. We all live in a digital age where we are more connected than ever before. Being online can bring huge benefits, from making new connections to learning new skills. I pay great tribute to Leo and his colleagues for setting up this petition and getting the issues brought into the public domain, while we highlight the trade-offs that the Government have to make to keep children safe.
I want to be absolutely clear from the start that children are at risk of real harm online. Those risks have been present for some time, and successive Governments have failed to regulate to keep children safe online. As the Secretary of State has made clear, our ambition is not simply to make the online world safer, but to enable and empower children and young people to use it safely. That requires an active Government who are prepared to step in when children are being harmed, but also to step in to give children alternative uses for both the online and offline world. We are not starting from scratch. The Online Safety Act introduces one of the most robust systems globally for protecting children from harm online. It is important to state that the Act is not perfect, but everything that we do beyond this builds on the Act. It is one of the most robust pieces of legislation globally to try to protect children from harm.
I take on board the criticisms and points made by the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) and other Members about the Ofcom analysis, which showed that over the first nine months it had not seen a major reduction in online harms among children. None the less, we can prove the counterfactual that there has not been a massive increase, so perhaps the Online Safety Act is working to the extent of not increasing the harms. However, we want to get the harms to the lowest possible level.
We have to be honest: we will never deal with 100% of harms. What we are trying to do with the Online Safety Act and all the regulations on top of that—the under-16 social media ban, features and functionalities bans, and AI chatbot restrictions—is layer on as much as we possibly can to increase the number of harms we can take out of the system. We will never get to 100%, though, and we have to be honest about that.
The Online Safety Act’s child safety duties came into effect in July 2025, requiring platforms to prevent children from encountering pornography, self-harm material and suicide and eating disorders content. Providers must also protect children from other types of harmful content such as violent content and bullying and abusive content. But we always knew we had to do much more. That is why earlier this year we launched the “Growing up in the online world” consultation to hear directly from parents, experts, stakeholders and, more important, young people themselves. The wider public also had to be involved in deciding how we can make the online world safer and more enriching for our young people.
The consultation received more than 116,000 responses. Nine in 10 parents who responded told us they support a ban on social media for their children. The analysis showed they were screaming out for help, to go to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith). Although what we heard from young people themselves was more nuanced, two thirds of children who responded to the consultation told us that they would support age restrictions for under-16s on at least some social media. Ofcom’s latest research found that almost three quarters of children aged 11 to 17 had seen or heard potentially harmful content online in a four-week period, including six in 10 who encountered bullying and five in 10 who encountered hate content directly.
We believe that social media services create unique risks for children, and while many of them have made welcome changes, they have not gone far or fast enough to keep our children safe. We think that the responsible thing to do is ban social media companies from offering services to children under 16, but it does not stop there. This is not about stopping children from going online altogether; it is about making sure that the services they use are safe and suitable. To make these changes work, companies will be required to use highly effective age assurance that is backed by Ofcom’s robust enforcement powers.