My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 177A. Along with other speakers, I was not at all reassured by the Minister’s letter in which she confirmed the central concern that many noble Lords set out on Second Reading; namely, that unlike Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which equally engaged user-generated and non-user-generated content on pornographic websites, the online safety Bill will narrow its concern to user-generated content. I also thought the Government’s response rather missed the point that I and other noble Lords sought to make on Second Reading. What the Minister wrote was couched in the terms of the original Digital Economy Bill debate. Those concerns are of course important, but are not the presiding context of this debate.
The point made at Second Reading and, indeed, today is very much about the fact that much online pornography depicts sexual violence, including the rough sex practice that is the subject of Clause 65. In this context, the key point is that if Part 3 is not implemented, under-18s will be exposed to pornographic material on pornographic websites, including depictions of rough sex, and this will foster the thought that sexual violence is just part of the norm of sexual relationships. Moreover, and crucially, this will not only impact on under-18s as under-18s, but shape their thoughts and attitudes as they move into adulthood, making sexual violence and domestic abuse more likely.
In this context, the key problem with the Government saying that we should abandon Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act in favour of an online safety Bill that will target only user-generated content is the fact that depictions of sexual violence occur in non-user-generated pornography as well as in user-generated pornography. We must target, as Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act does, both user-generated and non-user-generated content on pornographic websites.
In this regard, it is interesting to note that Savanta ComRes polling from last September showed that 81.5% of people in Northern Ireland thought that the Government should implement Part 3 immediately and simply add additional protections in relation to other online harms when the online safety Bill is passed. The UK figure was 74% if the “don’t knows” were removed. It is not hard to imagine what would happen if that polling was repeated today, presenting people with the fact that the Government are seeking not only needlessly to delay the provision of protection for children from pornographic websites, but to narrow that protection down to pornographic websites with user-generated content.
My concern at the Government’s failure to engage with Part 3 from the perspective of the presenting issue in this Bill is greatly compounded by the fact that the letter inexplicably makes no reference to the two reports that the Government published on 15 January that highlight the connection between pornography consumption and behaviour, including male sexual violence. I very much hope that when the Minister responds to this debate she engages with Amendment 177A and Part 3 from the perspective of the domestic violence concern that informs our discussions today.
There are two other things about the Minister’s letter that cause me real concern. First, it contains the statement:
“Under our proposals, we expect companies to use age assurance or age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services which pose the highest risk of harm to children, such as online pornography.”
This is a very clear shift from the previous language “we will require”, which is the essence of legal compulsion. Why the change?
Secondly, the letter’s final paragraph states that the online harms Bill will be more robust than the DEA because it will cover not only extreme pornography. Part 3 of the DEA was never just about protecting under-18s from extreme pornography or pornographic websites. It was about protecting them from all pornography on pornographic websites, that which is
legal as well as that which, like extreme pornography, is illegal. If I have misunderstood what the Minister means by the final paragraph of the letter dealing with pornography, will she please explain when she responds to the debate?
One of the other concerns that I have about the idea that the online safety Bill would be better than Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act at protecting children from material that normalises sexual violence relates to enforcement. When the Digital Economy Bill was introduced, the primary means of enforcement was through fines. However, Parliament pointed out that of the 50 most popular pornographic websites in the UK, none was based in the UK and that enforcing fines in other jurisdictions would be impractical.
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An amendment was then proposed and agreed to accept IP blocking, which enables the regulator to contact a non-compliant site from any country, accessed in the UK, to inform it that it must either introduce robust age verification within a set timeframe or be blocked. However, the Government’s statement about the online safety Bill suggests a reversal of policy, returning to a focus primarily on fines. Again, please can the Minister explain why the Government seek to reverse the change and emphasis that Parliament introduced in relation to Part 3? This might work for some other online harms if the source of the difficulty is based in the UK, but it will not work for pornographic websites.
In closing, I observe that this matter raises important constitutional questions. In this House we are governed by the Salisbury convention, which rightly states that we cannot reject a Bill giving effect to a proposal in the manifesto of the winning party at a general election. The undergirding principle is that in a democracy Parliament should not stand in the way of what the public have voted for. I wonder whether the same should not apply to other actors in the constitution. It is not just the House of Lords that could stand in the way of a legislative initiative mandated in a general election coming into effect; the Government could do the same if they were determined not to implement such legislation.
I can see an argument that if a new Prime Minister has been elected expressly on the basis of a manifesto commitment not to implement a provision in the manifesto of the previous Administration that had been through Parliament but had not yet implemented, the new Prime Minister would have a basis for acting in this manner. However, I do not believe that our present Prime Minister has such a basis, or indeed that he has such a basis in this case.
I very much hope that today the Minister will announce the Government’s intention to move immediately to implement Part 3. If they do not, I very much hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, will bring Amendment 177A back on Report.