My Lords, the new clause to be inserted under Amendment 53ZAAB proposes, first, that we adopt a statutory foundation for internet service providers and mobile phone operator adult content default filters overseen by Ofcom. Secondly, it proposes that these are backed up with robust, statutory age verification, which must be conducted before these filters are disabled. In doing so, I wish to express my sincere thanks for the support that I have received from across the House, which can be seen through the fact that the amendment has been co-signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who had to disappear because of the lateness of the hour to give an award to a Member of your Lordships’ House, and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, of Beckenham. I am very grateful for their support. I also am particularly grateful for all the support I received from outside organisations, such as the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, which represents all the major children’s charities, including Barnardo’s, NSPCC, the Children’s Society, et cetera, and sees the pressing need for my amendment.
In embarking on this debate, I should like to put on the record my thanks to the Prime Minister for the progress he has made in enhancing child safety online on a self-regulatory basis through the code of practice being implemented by the big four internet service providers. However, I also want to argue that, while welcome as a first step, self-regulation will not be anything other than a short-term solution and that regulation should now be placed on a robust statutory footing. In a previous debate, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, set out the very important principle that if child protection is sufficiently important to merit statutory protection offline, the same must be true online.
One of the most basic principles underpinning any civilised society is that those who are vulnerable—a category that certainly includes children—should be
subject to particularly developed protections through the law. As a consequence of this, the United Kingdom very properly approaches the subject of child protection on a statutory foundation in the offline world. This can be seen, for example, with respect to accessing sex shops, and buying adult material, or purchasing 18-rated DVDs. While the law makes clear that if something is illegal offline, it is illegal online, I am convinced that the protections we put in place to prevent children accessing legal but adult content should be as robust in legal terms online as they are offline. If this were not the case, the Prime Minister would not have worked with ISPs to introduce default filters, albeit on a self- regulatory basis.
I will remind noble Lords of the sort of material we are discussing today by referring to the so-called “tube” sites, which offer hardcore video at the click of a play button, with no warnings, splash pages, or any means of restricting children’s access. If we look at some Experian Hitwise statistics for UK visits to just six “tube” sites, the figures are staggering: PornHub gets 66 million monthly UK hits; xHamster, 63 million; XNXX, 29 million; RedTube, 28 million; Xvideos, 28 million; and YouPorn, 26 million. That is a total of 240 million hits from the UK in a single month to adult sites, without any form of onsite child protection.
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We restrict children’s physical access to cinemas so that they cannot see an 18 certificate film. We do not allow a retailer to sell a child an 18-certificate DVD, and the content on television is all regulated to protect children. If it is necessary to provide all of these protections for children accessing content offline, the same level of protection really must be delivered online. It is not as if children are less vulnerable online; indeed, as noble Lords will realise, in many ways they are more so.
Given the force of this argument of principle, it is not a surprise that when one examines the practice of self-regulation, significant problems quickly become apparent. First, although the big four ISPs have a self-regulatory code that provides for default filters, this still leaves between 5% and 10% of the market—well over 1 million households, and therefore hundreds of thousands of children—unprotected. Indeed, at least one ISP, Andrews and Arnold, has publically stated that it will not introduce default filters. Its home page proudly proclaims, “Unfiltered internet for all”—including, presumably, for all children. Clearly it has no intention of introducing default filters, and will do so only if required by law. If we had a statutory approach to default filters, as set out in my amendment, all ISPs, including all those that service the remaining 5% to 10% not covered by the big four code, would have to introduce default filters.
Secondly, the level of protection pertaining to the market that is now subject to the code, is in any event limited because of the industry’s refusal to provide proper age verification. The provision of default filters can only really provide proper child protection if it is combined with robust age verification of anyone electing to disable default filters, so that they have to demonstrate that they are 18 years old or over. This provision,
which is crucially set out in my amendment, is particularly important, because although adults are the ISP account holders and pay the bills, often their more technically literate children do the set-up, which involves making the decision about whether to keep or disable adult content filters.
Indeed, instead of age-verifying those seeking to disable default filters before they are allowed to proceed, the approach the industry has adopted—called the closed loop—simply involves sending an e-mail to the account holder, an adult, after the setting has been changed to inform them of this fact. This is completely unacceptable. What happens if it takes the account holder a week to read the e-mail? During that time, their children could be downloading all kinds of inappropriate adult material. What if the account holder never opens the e-mail?
This is concerning, because polling conducted over the weekend for the charity CARE, by ComRes, demonstrated that a total of 34% of British adults— 16.3 million people—say that they would not read an e-mail from their ISP immediately; 11% said that they would probably leave the e-mail unread for up to a week; and 9% would be likely to leave it for more than a week. A staggering 14% said that they were simply unlikely to read an e-mail from their ISP. That figure rises to 18% when we look at the parents of children between five and 10 years old. These statistics demonstrate that, far from proposing an acceptable means of avoiding the need for proper age verification, the self-regulatory closed loop is no basis on which to demonstrate Britain’s commitment to child safety online.
The self-regulatory experience of mobile phones, which of course stretches back further than the much more recent ISP codes, is equally concerning. In 2010, it became apparent that mobile phones using BlackBerry were not providing adult default filters, in contravention of the code. BlackBerry was exposed in December 2010 and then agreed to change, but it is of huge concern that many children were denied default filters over the five-year period because of BlackBerry’s failure to have regard to the code.
Then just last month, Tesco Mobile was similarly exposed for flouting the code. This is particularly embarrassing for the Government, because the Prime Minister had declared in July that all mobile phones were already subject to default filters, when the reality was that you could download anything and everything through Tesco Mobile phones. Moreover, the Government had invited Tesco to sit on the UK Council for Child Internet Safety.
Of course I welcome the fact that BlackBerry has now put its house in order and I understand that Tesco has done so, too. The truth, however, is that this is par for the course if you do not consider child protection sufficiently important to warrant the necessary mobile phone legislation, which is again proposed by my amendment. If there had just been the BlackBerry case, one might be tempted to dismiss it as a one-off—but as Tesco has so eloquently demonstrated, it was not a one-off, and one wonders whether any other providers are similarly flouting the code, or indeed whether at some future date, when the media spotlight is less fixed on the subject, some providers may become less rigorous
than they are now in complying with the mobile phone operators’ code, lacking as it is, any kind of legislative sanction.
I wish again to make it absolutely clear that I am aware of and applaud the progress that has been made with respect to default filters on a self-regulatory basis. Indeed, I very much welcome it. However, while this self-regulation is certainly a step forward, it fails to cover 100% of the market, does not provide proper age verification and has not been consistently applied in relation to mobile phones. The end result of these failings, which crucially are all corrected by my amendment, is that children are much more likely to stumble on or access adult material than would be the case if statutory default filters were in place.
Most of the speeches that we have heard already today on the Children and Families Bill have shown a huge concern—and there have been excellent speeches—about the sexual dangers that today’s young people face. We have an opportunity today to take the next step forward that will move the UK beyond the weaknesses of self-regulation to a robust, statutory, properly age-verified approach to default filters. I very much hope that the House will support my amendment. I beg to move.