Contribution
My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran and Lady Morgan, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for their support.
It is heartbreaking to be here again. I first raised this issue over four years ago after witnessing Senior Coroner Walker’s difficulties in obtaining data from US tech firms during his investigation into the death of Molly Russell. Senior Coroner Walker, Ian Russell—Molly’s father—and the family’s lawyers fought for years to secure data that revealed the role played by Pinterest and Meta, and this evidence was central to the coroner’s finding that both services,
“contributed to her death in a more than minimal way”.
Data is crucial. The original amendments were also recommended in the pre-legislative Joint Committee report on the draft Online Safety Bill. We debated them at length during the Bill’s proceedings. We got agreement to put them into the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, which fell when the election was called. We tried to push them through in the wash-up and finally, after years of campaigning by bereaved families, they were included in the Data (Use and Access) Act last year.
I say all this because I want the Minister, when she replies, to weigh up her words carefully, knowing that the bereaved families, who have worked so hard to pass these provisions for so many years—some of whom are in the Gallery today—are still waiting. Yesterday, I met several bereaved families, including Mia Janin’s father, Mariano, who held a photograph of his daughter as he described a recent meeting with the Secretary of State, Liz Kendall. He said, “I thought it was a good meeting until I realised it was the same meeting we had with Peter Kyle a year ago—except this year we needed a bigger room because there are more bereaved parents, more dead children”.
I also heard yesterday of a newly bereaved parent who tried to get the police to access her daughter’s data, only to be told by Gloucestershire Constabulary’s occupational health department to talk to Ellen Roome: “She knows more about the law than the entire Gloucestershire police force”. I spoke to Ellen, who is with us in the Gallery, and she told me that the police downloaded her son Jools’s data in 2022 but are only now beginning to examine it.
We have a law, but it is not working, and I want to set out three reasons why. First, although coroners can ask Ofcom to issue a data preservation notice that requires online services to retain data in advance of issuing a Schedule 5 notice, they are not routinely doing so. Although Section 101 enables Ofcom to use its information-gathering powers when it receives a Schedule 5 notice from a coroner, it is not routinely doing that either.
I have eight separate letters from the Government saying who has been written to and outlining what guidance has been sent to whom, but still bereaved parents come to my door. For some, the loss of their child is still raw and they are blindly trying to work out the system; others are heartbroken that the opportunity to preserve data is long gone because they found out about the law too late. Sometimes, the coroner does not know that the measure exists or does not understand that data disappears and wants to wait for the police investigation before even considering such a request. All these different reasons undermine the fundamental purpose of the law.
To be absolutely clear, I have no criticism of the coroners. They are not experts in digital systems and cannot reasonably be expected to know that even a brief engagement, such as hovering over a link or pausing on a piece of content, can influence how an algorithm responds. Nor are they expected to know that platforms routinely infer and group children into behavioural cohorts relating, for example, to low mood, late-night use, social isolation or identity exploration. Nor are they supposed to know that seemingly fleeting online interactions can leave persistent data traces. The measure was specifically designed for Ofcom to take that burden from the coroners, but that has not happened.