I thank all the speakers. There were some magnificent speeches and I do not really want to pick out any particular ones, but I cannot help but say that the right reverend Prelate described the world without the four Cs. For me, that is what everybody in the Box and on the Front Bench should go and listen to.
I am grateful and pleased that the Minister has said that the Government are moving in this direction. I am very grateful for that but there are a couple of things that I have to come back on. First, I have swiftly read Amendment 205’s definition of harm and I do not think it says that you do not have to reach a barrier of harm; dissemination is quite enough. There is always the problem of what the end result of the harm is. The thing that the Government are not listening to is the relationship between the risk assessment and the harm. It is about making sure that we are clear that it is the functionality that can cause harm. I think we will come back to this at another point, but that is what I beg them to listen to. Secondly, I am not entirely sure that it is correct to say that the four Cs mean that you cannot have primary priority, priority and so on. That could be within the schedule of content, so those two things are not actually mutually exclusive. I would be very happy to have a think about that.
What was not addressed in the Minister’s answer was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, in supporting the proposal that we should have in the schedule: “This is what you’ve got to do; this is what you’ve got to look at; this is what we’re expecting of you; and this is what Parliament has delivered”. That is immensely important, and I was so grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for putting his marker down on this set of amendments. I am absolutely committed to working alongside him and to finding ways around this, but we need to find a way of stating it.
Ironically, that is my answer to both the noble Baronesses, Lady Ritchie and Lady Fox: we should have our arguments here and now, in this Chamber. I do not wish to leave it to the Secretary of State, whom I have great regard for, as it happens, but who knows: I have seen a lot of Secretaries of State. I do not even want to leave it to the Minister, because I have seen a lot of Ministers too—ditto Ofcom, and definitely not the tech sector. So here is the place, and we are the people, to work out the edges of this thing.
Not for the first time, my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, read out what would have been my answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. I have gone round and round, and it is like the Marx brothers’ movie: in the end, harm is defined by subsection (4)(c), but that says that harm will defined by the Secretary of State. It goes around like that through the Bill.
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There are three members of the pre-legislative committee in the Chamber. We were very clear about design features, and several members who are not present were even clearer. So I hear where we are with the Bill, but I have been following it for five years and have been saying the same thing, so if we are a little late to the party I do not think that is because of me. I do not want to delay the Bill but I want to stamp the authority of Parliament on the question of how harm happens, as well as what it is.
My last sentence has to be: let us remember our conversation about trying to measure illegal harm and then think about it at scale for children. We have to have something softer than that; we cannot do it for each piece of content. The saving grace of the Bill is its systems and processes: it will make the tsunami a trickle—that is what we want to do. It is not to say that young people should not have access to the internet. Although I spent quite a lot of time disagreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, today, I absolutely agree with her about evolving capacities, and I hope that we revisit that question later. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.