My Lords, I am very glad to be here to move the Second Reading of the Online Safety Bill. I know that this is a moment which has been long awaited in your Lordships’ House and noble Lords from across the House share the Government’s determination to make the online realm safer.
That is what this Bill seeks to do. As it stands, over three quarters of adults in this country express a concern about going online; similarly, the number of parents who feel the benefits outweigh the risks of their children being online has decreased rather than increased in recent years, falling from two-thirds in 2015 to barely over half in 2019. This is a terrible indictment of a means through which people of all ages are living increasing proportions of their lives, and it must change.
All of us have heard the horrific stories of children who have been exposed to dangerous and deeply harmful content online, and the tragic consequences of such experiences both for them and their families. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who arranged for a number of noble Lords, including me, to see some of the material which was pushed relentlessly at Molly Russell whose family have campaigned bravely and tirelessly to ensure that what happened to their daughter cannot happen to other young people. It is with that in mind, at the very outset of our scrutiny of this Bill, that I would like to express my gratitude to all
those families who continue to fight for change and a safer, healthier online realm. Their work has been central to the development of this Bill. I am confident that, through it, the Government’s manifesto commitment to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online will be delivered.
This legislation establishes a regulatory regime which has safety at its heart. It is intended to change the mindset of technology companies so that they are forced to consider safety and risk mitigation when they begin to design their products, rather than as an afterthought.
All companies in scope will be required to tackle criminal content and activity online. If it is illegal offline; it is illegal online. All in-scope platforms and search services will need to consider in risk assessments the likelihood of illegal content or activity taking place on their site and put in place proportionate systems and processes to mitigate those risks. Companies will also have to take proactive measures against priority offences. This means platforms will be required to take proportionate steps to prevent people from encountering such content.
Not only that, but platforms will also need to mitigate the risk of the platform being used to facilitate or commit such an offence. Priority offences include, inter alia: terrorist material, child sexual abuse and exploitation, so-called revenge pornography and material encouraging or assisting suicide. In practice, this means that all in-scope platforms will have to remove this material quickly and will not be allowed to promote it in their algorithms.
Furthermore, for non-priority illegal content, platforms must have effective systems in place for its swift removal once this content has been flagged to them. Gone will be the days of lengthy and arduous complaints processes and platforms feigning ignorance of such content. They can and will be held to account.
As I have previously mentioned, the safety of children is of paramount importance in this Bill. While all users will be protected from illegal material, some types of legal content and activity are not suitable for children and can have a deeply damaging impact on their mental health and their developing sense of the world around them.
All in-scope services which are likely to be accessed by children will therefore be required to assess the risks to children on their service and put in place safety measures to protect child users from harmful and age inappropriate content. This includes content such as that promoting suicide, self-harm or eating disorders which does not meet a criminal threshold; pornography; and damaging behaviour such as bullying.
The Bill will require providers specifically to consider a number of risk factors as part of their risk assessments. These factors include how functionalities such as algorithms could affect children’s exposure to content harmful to children on their service, as well as children’s use of higher risk features on the service such as livestreaming or private messaging. Providers will need to take robust steps to mitigate and effectively manage any risks identified.
Companies will need to use measures such as age verification to prevent children from accessing content which poses the highest risk of harm to them, such as
online pornography. Ofcom will be able to set out its expectations about the use of age assurance solutions, including age verification tools, through guidance. This guidance will also be able to refer to relevant standards. The Bill also now makes it clear that providers may need to use age assurance to identify the age of their users to meet the necessary child safety duties and effectively enforce age restrictions on their service.
The Government will set out in secondary legislation the priority categories of content harmful to children so that all companies are clear on what they need to protect children from. Our intention is to have the regime in place as soon as possible after Royal Assent, while ensuring the necessary preparations are completed effectively and service providers understand clearly what is expected. We are working closely with Ofcom and I will keep noble Lords appraised.
My ministerial colleagues in another place worked hard to strengthen these provisions and made commitments to introduce further provisions in your Lordships’ House. With regard to increased protections for children specifically, the Government will bring forward amendments at Committee stage to name the Children’s Commissioner for England as a statutory consultee for Ofcom when it is preparing a code of practice, ensuring that the experience of children and young people is accounted for during implementation.
We will also bring forward amendments to specify that category 1 companies—the largest and most risky platforms—will be required to publish a summary of their risk assessments for both illegal content and material that is harmful to children. This will increase transparency about illegal and harmful content on in-scope services and ensure that Ofcom can do its job regulating effectively.
We recognise the great suffering experienced by many families linked to children’s exposure to harmful content and the importance of this Bill in ending that. We must learn from the horrific events from the past to secure a safe future for children online.
We also understand that, unfortunately, people of any age may experience online abuse. For many adults, the internet is a positive source of entertainment and information and a way to connect with others; for some, however, it can be an arena for awful abuse. The Bill will therefore offer adult users a triple shield of protection when online, striking the right balance between protecting the right of adult users to access legal content freely, and empowering adults with the information and tools to manage their own online experience.
First, as I have outlined, all social media firms and search services will need to tackle illegal content and activity on their sites. Secondly, the Bill will require category 1 services to set clear terms of service regarding the user-generated content they prohibit and/or restrict access to, and to enforce those terms of service effectively. All the major social media platforms such as Meta, Twitter and TikTok say that they ban abuse and harassment online. They all say they ban the promotion of violence and violent threats, yet this content is still easily visible on those sites. People sign up to these platforms expecting one environment, and are presented with something completely different. This must stop.
As well as ensuring the platforms have proper systems to remove banned content, the Bill will also put an end to services arbitrarily removing legal content. The largest platform category 1 services must ensure that they remove or restrict access to content or ban or suspend users only where that is expressly allowed in their terms of service, or where they otherwise have a legal obligation to do so.
This Bill will make sure that adults have the information they need to make informed decisions about the sites they visit, and that platforms are held to their promises to users. Ofcom will have the power to hold platforms to their terms of service, creating a safer and more transparent environment for all.
Thirdly, category 1 services will have a duty to provide adults with tools they can use to reduce the likelihood that they encounter certain categories of content, if they so choose, or to alert them to the nature of that content. This includes content which encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. People will also have the ability to filter out content from unverified users if they so wish. This Bill will mean that adult users will be empowered to make more informed choices about what services they use, and to have greater control over whom and what they engage with online.
It is impossible to speak about the aspects of the Bill which protect adults without, of course, mentioning freedom of expression. The Bill needs to strike a careful balance between protecting users online, while maintaining adults’ ability to have robust—even uncomfortable or unpleasant—conversations within the law if they so choose. Freedom of expression within the law is fundamental to our democracy, and it would not be right for the Government to interfere with what legal speech is permitted on private platforms. Instead, we have developed an approach based on choice and transparency for adult users, bounded by major platforms’ clear commercial incentives to provide a positive experience for their users.
Of course, we cannot have robust debate without being accurately informed of the current global and national landscape. That is why the Bill includes particular protections for recognised news publishers, content of democratic importance, and journalistic content. We have been clear that sanctioned news outlets such as RT, formerly Russia Today, must not benefit from these protections. We will therefore bring forward an amendment in your Lordships’ House explicitly to exclude entities subject to sanctions from the definition of a recognised news publisher.
Alongside the safety duties for children and the empowerment tools for adults, platforms must also have effective reporting and redress mechanisms in place. They will need to provide accessible and effective mechanisms for users to report content which is illegal or harmful, or where it breaches terms and conditions. Users will need to be given access to effective mechanisms to complain if content is removed without good reason.
The Bill will place a duty on platforms to ensure that those reporting mechanisms are backed up by timely and appropriate redress mechanisms. Currently, internet users often do not bother to report harmful
content they encounter online, because they do not feel that their reports will be followed up. That too must change. If content has been unfairly removed, it should be reinstated. If content should not have been on the site in question, it should be taken down. If a complaint is not upheld, the reasons should be made clear to the person who made the report.
There have been calls—including from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, with whom I look forward to working constructively, as we have done heretofore—to use the Bill to create an online safety ombudsman. We will listen to all suggestions put forward to improve the Bill and the regime it ushers in with an open mind, but as he knows from our discussions, of this suggestion we are presently unconvinced. Ombudsman services in other sectors are expensive, often underused and primarily relate to complaints which result in financial compensation. We find it difficult to envisage how an ombudsman service could function in this area, where user complaints are likely to be complex and, in many cases, do not have the impetus of financial compensation behind them. Instead, the Bill ensures that, where providers’ user-reporting and redress mechanisms are not sufficient, Ofcom will have the power to take enforcement action and require the provider to improve its user-redress provisions to meet the standard required of them. I look forward to probing elements of the Bill such as this in Committee.
This regulatory framework could not be effective if Ofcom, as the independent regulator, did not have a robust suite of powers to take enforcement actions against companies which do not comply with their new duties, and if it failed to take the appropriate steps to protect people from harm. I believe the chairman of Ofcom, the noble Lord, Lord Grade of Yarmouth, is in his place. I am glad that he has been and will be following our debates on this important matter.
Through the Bill, Ofcom will have wide-ranging information-gathering powers to request any information from companies which is relevant to its safety functions. Where necessary, it will be able to ask a suitably skilled person to undertake a report on a company’s activity—for example, on its use of algorithms. If Ofcom decides to take enforcement action, it can require companies to take specific steps to come back into compliance.
Ofcom will also have the power to impose substantial fines of up to £18 million, or 10% of annual qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is higher. For the biggest technology companies, this could easily amount to billions of pounds. These are significant measures, and we have heard directly from companies that are already changing their safety procedures to ensure they comply with these regulations.
If fines are not sufficient, or not deemed appropriate because of the severity of the breach, Ofcom will be able to apply for a court order allowing it to undertake business disruption measures. This could be blocking access to a website or preventing it making money via payment or advertising services. Of course, Ofcom will be able to take enforcement action against any company that provides services to people in the UK, wherever that company is located. This is important, given the global nature of the internet.
As the Bill stands, individual senior managers can be held criminally liable and face a fine for failing to ensure their platform complies with Ofcom’s information notice. Further, individual senior managers can face jail, a fine or both for failing to prevent the platform committing the offences of providing false information, encrypting information or destroying information in response to an information notice.
The Government have also listened to and acknowledged the need for senior managers to be made personally liable for a wider range of failures of compliance. We have therefore committed to tabling an amendment in your Lordships’ House which will be carefully designed to capture instances where senior managers have consented to or connived in ignoring enforceable requirements, risking serious harm to children. We are carefully designing this amendment to ensure that it can hold senior managers to account for their actions regarding the safety of children, without jeopardising the UK’s attractiveness as a place for technology companies to invest in and grow. We intend to base our offence on similar legislation recently passed in the Republic of Ireland, as well as looking carefully at relevant precedent in other sectors in the United Kingdom.
I have discussed the safety of children, adults, and everyone’s right to free speech. It is not possible to talk about this Bill without also discussing its protections for women and girls, who we know are disproportionately affected by online abuse. As I mentioned, all services in scope will need to seek out and remove priority illegal content proactively. There are a number of offences which disproportionately affect women and girls, such as revenge pornography and cyberstalking, which the Bill requires companies to tackle as a priority.
To strengthen protections for women in particular, we will be listing controlling or coercive behaviour as a priority offence. Companies will have to take proactive measures to tackle this type of illegal content. We will also bring forward an amendment to name the Victims’ Commissioner and the domestic abuse commissioner as statutory consultees for the codes of practice. This means there will be a requirement for Ofcom to consult both commissioners ahead of drafting and amending the codes of practice, ensuring that victims, particularly victims and survivors of domestic abuse, are better protected. The Secretary of State and our colleagues have been clear that women’s and girls’ voices must be heard clearly in developing this legislation.
I also want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the concerns voiced over the powers for the Secretary of State regarding direction in relation to codes of practice that currently appear in the Bill. That is a matter on which my honourable friend Paul Scully and I were pressed by your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee when we appeared before it last week. As we explained then, we remain committed to ensuring that Ofcom maintains its regulatory independence, which is vital to the success of this framework. As we are introducing ground-breaking regulation, our aim is to balance the need for the regulator’s independence with appropriate oversight by Parliament and the elected Government.
We intend to bring forward two changes to the existing power: first, replacing the “public policy” wording with a defined list of reasons that a direction can be made;
and secondly, making it clear that this element of the power can only be used in exceptional circumstances. I would like to reassure noble Lords—as I sought to reassure the Select Committee—that the framework ensures that Parliament will always have the final say on codes of practice, and that strong safeguards are in place to ensure that the use of this power is transparent and proportionate.
Before we begin our scrutiny in earnest, it is also necessary to recognise that this Bill is not just establishing a regulatory framework. It also updates the criminal law concerning communication offences. I want to thank the Law Commission for its important work in helping to strengthen criminal law for victims. The inclusion of the new offences for false and threatening communications offers further necessary protections for those who need it most. In addition, the Bill includes new offences to criminalise cyberflashing and epilepsy trolling. We firmly believe that these new offences will make a substantive difference to the victims of such behaviour. The Government have also committed to adding an additional offence to address the encouragement or assistance of self-harm communications and offences addressing intimate image abuse online, including deep- fake pornography. Once these offences are introduced, all companies will need to treat this content as illegal under the framework and take action to prevent users from encountering it. These new offences will apply in respect of all victims of such activity, children as well as adults.
This Bill has been years in the making. I am proud to be standing here today as the debate begins in your Lordships’ House. I realise that noble Lords have been waiting long and patiently for this moment, but I know that they also appreciate that considerable work has already been done to ensure that this Bill is proportionate and fair, and that it provides the change that is needed.
A key part of that work was conducted by the Joint Committee, which conducted pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, drawing on expertise from across both Houses of Parliament, from all parties and none. I am very glad that all the Members of your Lordships’ House who served on that committee are speaking in today’s debate: the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron; the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Knight of Weymouth, who have very helpfully been called to service on the Opposition Front Bench; the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who speaks for the Liberal Democrats; as well as my noble friends Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Gilbert of Panteg.
While I look forward to the contributions of all Members of your Lordships’ House, and will continue the open-minded, collaborative approach established by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and her predecessors—listening to all ideas which are advanced to make this Bill as effective as it can be—I urge noble Lords who are not yet so well-versed in its many clauses and provisions, or who might be disinclined to accept at first utterance the points I make from this Dispatch Box, to consult those noble Lords before bringing forward their amendments in later stages of the Bill. I say that not to discourage noble Lords from doing so, but in the spirit of ensuring that what they do bring forward, and our deliberations on them, will
be pithy, focused, and conducive to making this Bill law as swiftly as possible. In that spirit, I shall draw my already too lengthy remarks to a close. I beg to move.
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