Ian Murray

Let me go through the timeline, because it is really important. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act gives us the power to make the regulations. We will make the regulations in December this year. These will come into effect in late spring, and by the time they come into effect, Ofcom will have to have done the work in terms of implementing the regulations, bringing the platforms that are in scope into scope and then starting to enforce what needs to be done. But there will have to be an implementation period after Ofcom has developed the guidance and what must be done on enforcement, so the day from which under-16s will no longer be able to access social media will be in late spring. Between December and late spring, Ofcom will develop the guidance required to implement the regulations. Throughout that process, we will be working on the features and functions, which relate to things like the stranger communications that I have already laid out. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury spoke about her own daughter and about a phone being on her Christmas list. I think the 116,000 responses to the consultation were just parents crying out for the necessary tools. The Labour party conference had many panels on online safety, and the example that was always used was alcohol licensing. Many of us will have a bottle of alcohol in the house; we know that under-18s are not allowed to drink it, but that does not stop some of them doing so. The tools cannot be foolproof, but they give parents the ability to say, “That is harmful to your health. It is harmful to children, and there are laws in place to say you can access that only when you are over the age of 18.” That gives parents the ability to draw a line in the sand, and I think a lot of them are crying out for the tools to help make those decisions. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has put a lot of thought into what is happening on offline activities at the same time. We cannot have a situation in which the online world is restricted for under-16s but there is nothing for the offline world. We have put over £500 million into the Youth Matters fund to refurbish or build 250 new facilities, as well as a £22.5 million investment over three years to support up to 400 schools to provide youth-tailored enrichment schemes. We have made a major investment in the Youth Matters national youth strategy, a 10-year plan to ensure that every young person has somewhere to go, something to do and someone who cares. I think part of having someone who cares is about the ability to open up to someone who is not a parent, which allows a young person to have some of the difficult conversations that they may have sought to have online. We heard about the nine-point plan of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who is no longer in her place. She has been right at the forefront in trying to see what a way back looks like and what it needs to be effective. I encourage Members to look at that nine-point plan and see the neuroscience event tomorrow that my hon. Friend will be part of as a member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur), demonstrated what is in his own inbox, which is probably a demonstration of what all our inboxes looked like around the country following the consultation. He highlighted a number of civil society organisations that have very strong views on this issue, one way or the other: they either support or do not support the ban, or they may reluctantly support a ban because something needs to be done. The challenge that the Government face in developing these regulations can be seen not only from this afternoon’s debate, but from what has been said by all the civil society organisations out there. I pay tribute to them all; many of them, such as the Molly Rose Foundation, have been set up on the back of tragedy and in horrendous circumstances. There is no one solution that they are proposing, and it is therefore the Government’s responsibility to find the best way forward that keeps children safe online and has the maximum benefit. I will finish by mentioning a few more of my hon. Friends who raised some really good questions. We heard about international comparisons and the EU KIDS Act from my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles). We are basing all our evidence on international comparisons. Of course, we have the Australia model, which we talk about a lot, but the Canada model is currently being developed, and there is also the EU KIDS Act, which I was in Brussels talking about just last month. Those international comparisons will certainly affect what we think about, and the Council of Europe is right on this issue. I sat on the Council of Europe many years ago, and it will do a lot of great work in developing both the right of the child and the human right of access and protection from harm, including the protection of children from harm. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth Moor View (Fred Thomas), who is a fantastic resource on this issue, and I thank him for how he has been able to help us develop some of these regulations. Being online has huge benefits for young people, such as the ability to learn the guitar, like my hon. Friend—perhaps he should have given us a little song this afternoon to see whether his YouTube tutorials actually worked. We often get questions like that—what will people do if they want to try to learn to play the guitar? Again, I emphasise that we are not banning people from being online, and we are not banning children from being online. Logged-out features can be used. If online platforms such as YouTube want to come forward with a new or redesigned platform that complies with the regulations, and wish to test whether they could be removed from scope, it is up to them to do so. In fact, we have been crying out for platforms to do that for many years. We have ended up in this position because they have not complied or had any intent to comply. They must comply with the regulations that are put in place. I will finish with why we are doing this. I talked about the grieving families. I have a whole folder of their stories in front of me, and the harm is there for all to see. There are extreme cases of child sexual exploitation, children who have had to be taken into safeguarding because of their online experiences, or children who have died. Some of the stories are unpalatable, if we think about our own children; the Government have a responsibility to act. As the Secretary of State said in the House on introducing the under-16 ban, social media companies have not done enough to keep children safe online. The Ofcom analysis shows that they are still not doing enough. The Government have to step in. We do not want to ban people from doing things. We do not want to ban under-16s from being on social media, but that is the only way in which we can protect children from its harms. We are determined to ensure that children have an enriched experience online, and that media literacy and the education system allow them that experience, but also that they have an enriched experience offline. I think the Secretary of State describes it as giving children their childhood back, which is a really good way of putting it. Let the message today to Leo and all the petitioners be a really positive one: we hear their concerns, but we back parents, we believe in young people and we are determined to make the online world work better for them. That is the task we have to do between now and December, and it is the responsibility of not just the Government, but all Members. I re-emphasise what the Secretary of State has set as the benchmark: we have to be able to look those grieving families in the eye and say that we have done all we possibly can to make the online world a safer place, so that other people’s children do not end up like their children did. If we can achieve that, we will have achieved something not just for this generation, but for future generations as well.