Contribution
My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group. I will speak to my Amendments 108 and 110A, and briefly to Amendment 91 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I start by thanking the hundreds of thousands of mums, dads, grandparents, single parents, teachers, et cetera, who have kick-started this campaign. While politicians have not been able to get action, they have swung into action.
If noble Lords talk to any MP of any party in this Parliament, they will tell you that they receive hundreds of thousands of emails and letters. I was talking to our digital lead MP, Victoria Collins, and she told me that, in the last three days alone, she has received 1,500 pieces of paper about this. Why? It is because parents do not trust us to do anything. Of course, with the Online Safety Act, they were promised that we would see a new world, but when they look around they see that nothing has changed. Frighteningly, when I asked the Minister a few weeks ago how many companies have been fined or prosecuted for what they have put online, he did not know the answer. That does not fill us with confidence.
Creating a safer future for our children and grandchildren is at a critical crossroads. Our parents, teachers, experts and even young people themselves are calling for action. I hear from real teenagers talking about their experiences online. One teenager said:
“I look at my younger brother and I’m so worried about how much he seems addicted to screens, we have to do something”.
Another said:
“Help, I just can’t stop”.
When doctors discovered that smoking kills, and when research showed that seatbelts saved lives, we acted. Today presents an opportunity to take a similar life-saving action.
It is clear that everyone here is strongly committed to this end goal—to safeguarding children and protecting them from the risks of the online world. Parents and children are both telling us that they feel powerless in the face of platforms designed to maximise engagement at any cost. We see the evidence mounting in our schools, with rising rates of anxiety and depression among young people. Consultations that kick the can down the road are not enough when we face a public health crisis.
So the question before us is not whether or not we must act but how effectively and how quickly we can act. One approach, that of the the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is a blanket ban on social media for under-16s, as well as on many other areas of the internet. I fully support the intent of this approach. Again, we are all here in the name of children’s well-being and the decisive action that is needed. But, as we have heard, we have heard from over 42 charities and experts, including the Molly Rose Foundation, the NSPCC, the Internet Watch Foundation, the Centre for Protecting Women Online, and 5rights, and they all have major concerns about this approach. These are the experts—I am not an expert, noble Lords are not the experts, but they are and they deal with this every day, and yet they have concerns about this approach.
We can look to Australia and see why. When Australia banned social media for young people, it took an approach similar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, creating a specific list of prohibited platforms. What was the result? Within 24 hours of TikTok’s ban, the company launched a new platform under a different name, one not on the banned list. More fundamentally, this list-based approach ignores the broader digital landscape: the harms presented in online gaming, which the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, does nothing about; AI-generated content; and countless other platforms that fall outside these narrow definitions.