My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing this group, and we certainly welcome this tranche of government amendments. We know that there are more to come both in Committee and as we proceed to Report, and we look forward to seeing them.
The amendments in this group, as other noble Lords have said, amount to a very sensible series of changes to services’ risk-assessment duties. This perhaps begs the question of why they were not included in earlier drafts of the Bill, but we are glad to see them now.
There is, of course, the issue of precisely where some of the information will appear, as well as the wider status of terms of service. I am sure those issues will be discussed in later debates. It is certainly welcome that the department is introducing stronger requirements around the information that must be made available to users; it will all help to make this a stronger and more practical Bill.
We all know that users need to be able to make informed decisions, and it will not be possible if they are required to view multiple statements and various documents. It seems that the requirements for information to be provided to Ofcom go to the very heart of the Bill, and I suggest that the proposed system will work best if there is trust and transparency between the regulator and those who are regulated. I am sure that there will be further debate on the scope of risk assessments, particularly on issues that were dropped from previous iterations of the Bill, and certainly this is a reasonable starting point today.
I will try to be as swift as possible as I raise a few key issues. One is about avoiding warnings that are at such a high level of generality that they get put on to everything. Perhaps the Minister could indicate how Ofcom will ensure that the summaries are useful and accessible to the reader. The test, of course, should be that a summary is suitable and sufficient for a prospective user to form an assessment of the likely risk they would encounter when using the service, taking into account any special vulnerabilities that they might have. That needs to be the test; perhaps the Minister could confirm that.
Is the terms of service section the correct place to put a summary of the illegal content risk assessment? Research suggests, unsurprisingly, that only 3% of people read terms before signing up—although I recall that, in an earlier debate, the Minister confessed that he had read all the terms and conditions of his mobile phone contract, so he may be one of the 3%. It is without doubt that any individual should be supported in their ability to make choices, and the duty should perhaps instead be to display a summary of the risks with due prominence, to ensure that anyone who is considering signing up to a service is really able to read it.
I also ask the Minister to confirm that, despite the changes to Clause 19 in Amendment 16B, the duty to keep records of risk assessments will continue to apply to all companies, but with an enhanced responsibility for category 1 companies.