My Lords, I associate myself with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. We are in Committee and it is a probing amendment. When we discussed it with colleagues the feeling was that 13 might be the right age but, as the noble Baroness indicated, it needs probing and some thinking about.
There is a danger, particularly in a House with our age group, that we assume these technologies are understood by the young—even the very young. We all hear anecdotes of parents or grandparents who have to consult their eight year-olds on how to make various gadgets work, but that misses the point. A frightening amount of information is being freely given. I mentioned at Second Reading that my generation and my parents’ generation had thoughts of personal privacy that my daughter and her contemporaries seem to have no thought of. They are very happy to exchange information about themselves, what they do and where they are with gay abandon.
When we get to the very young it is very important to make sure—we will discuss this in later amendments, if not tonight—that there is sufficient understanding and information to make informed choices, otherwise we get into very dangerous territory indeed. Therefore we are, not for the first time, in the noble Baroness’s debt for raising these questions. Late as it is, it is right that we put on record that these things, along with the amendments that will follow in the next couple of groupings, need to be taken as a whole before we make a final judgment as to the right age.