Julia Lopez

Conservative — Hornchurch and Upminster

Speaking in the House of Commons on 15 December 2025

Debate

Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal

Contribution

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) on introducing the debate. He made a particularly excellent contribution to last week’s petition debate on mandatory digital identification; although his party’s leadership may not have thanked him, I am sure his constituents did. He is right that the internet allows unprecedented connection, which is for good, but also for ill. Our job is to balance that inherent tension, while recognising that sometimes there is no balance to be found and that we have to make a choice when it comes to children being served a toxic online diet of extreme content. When we were in government, that choice was the Online Safety Act, about which thousands of petitioners have raised concerns, believing that its breadth and scope are having too restrictive an effect. I have some sympathy with those concerns, because the Act is large and very complex; although it is proving effective in protecting children in many ways, the implementation undoubtedly comes with challenges, whether that is VPN usage or the inadvertent capturing of no to low-risk sites in compliance duties.

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