I am grateful to the noble Lord. I really wonder whether the Government realise what they are walking into here. On the one hand, yesterday the Grand Committee was debating the statutory instrument putting in place new statutory guidance for the police on how to enforce, much more sensitively than in the past, non-crime hate incidents. However, on the other hand, the next day in this Chamber we are putting an obligation on a set of mostly foreign private companies to act as a police force to go around bullying us and closing us down if we say something that engages Section 5 of the Public Order Act. I think this is something the Government are going to regret, and I would very much like to hear what my noble friend has to say about that.
Finally, I come to my third group of amendments: Amendments 274, 278, 279 and 283. They are all related and on one topic. These relate to the text of the Bill on page 145, in Clause 170. Here we are discussing what judgments providers have to make when they come to decide what material to take down. Inevitably, they will have to make judgments. That is one of the unfortunate things about this Bill. A great deal of what we do in our lives is going to have to be based on judgments made by private companies, many of which are based abroad but which we are trying to legislate for.
It makes a certain sense that the law should say what they should take account of in making those judgments. But the guidance—or rather, the mandate—given to those companies by Clause 170 is, again, very hair-trigger. Clause 170(5), which I am proposing we amend, states:
“In making such judgements, the approach to be followed is whether a provider has reasonable grounds to infer that content is … of the kind in question”.
I am suggesting that “reasonable grounds to infer” should be replaced with “sufficient evidence to infer”, so that they have to be able to produce some evidence that they are justified in taking content down. The test should be higher than simply having “reasonable grounds”, which may rest on a suspicion and little evidence at all. So one of those amendments relates to strengthening that bar so that they must have real evidence before they can take censorship action.
I add only two words to subsection (6), which talks about reasonable grounds for the inference—it defines what the reasonable grounds are—that
“exist in relation to content and an offence if, following the approach in subsection (2)”
and so on. I am saying “if and only if”—in other words, I make it clear that this is the only basis on which material can be censored using the provisions in this section, so as to limit it from going more widely. The third amendment in my group is essentially consequential to that.
3.45 pm
We are all worried in this Committee about prospect of speech being censored in a way which infringes the freedom of speech rights that we fought so hard to establish and which are also embedded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. We want to have a legal structure that does not empower providers to act as private sector censors ranging over what we do, except in circumstances where it is wholly justified and in the public interest. The language in the Bill is far too loose for this purpose. It does not give us the protection. It does not do what my noble friend said it would do when he spoke at Second Reading, which is to strike the right balance. These amendments in my third group—and indeed the one in my second group—are there to help strike the right balance. I beg to move.