Age-verification providers will have to demonstrate that they have a foolproof system of identifying whether somebody is aged 18 or over. The sort of effective control mechanisms they are considering are credit cards, passports and driving licences—items that a lot of 18-year-olds will have at least one of. My hon. Friend rightly points out that a great deal of work is going on to improve age-verification systems. That is precisely because the sorts of items I have mentioned are, in general, only held by people who are aged 18 or over—with the exception of driving licences, which can be obtained at the age of 17.
For those reasons, it is much more difficult to ascertain how we can require age verification in other areas. For example, in the Data Protection Bill, we set the qualifying age at which someone can consent to a contract with a social media platform as 13, but it is very difficult for someone to prove that they are 13, because those items are normally held by people aged 18 or over.