I would simply make the point that it would probably be more accurate to say that the departments treat it with “due disregard”;
This has been a wide ranging debate and I am not going to go through all the different bits and pieces. I recommend that noble Lords read United Nations general comment 25 as it goes, in great detail, right to the heart of the issues we are talking about. For example —this is very pertinent to the next group of amendments—it explicitly protects children from pornography, so I absolutely recommend that it be mentioned in the next group of amendments.
As I expected, the Minister said, “We are very sympathetic but this is not really necessary”. He said that children’s rights are effectively baked into the Bill already. But what is baked into something that children—for whom this is particularly relevant—or even adults might decide to consume is not always immediately obvious. There are problems with an approach whereby one says, “It’s fine because, if you really understood this rather complicated legislation, it would become completely clear to you what it means”. That is a very accurate and compelling demonstration of exactly why some of us have concerns about this well-intentioned Bill. We fear that it will become a sort of feast, enabling company lawyers and regulators to engage in occasionally rather arcane discourse at great expense, demonstrating that what the Government claim is clearly baked in is not so clearly baked in.
7.15 pm
A common theme in many of these amendments on children’s rights is that it is important that these rights are not implicitly covered in the Bill, as they are in myriad cases, but that it should be stated more clearly in key places in the Bill that it explicitly is about helping children and protecting their rights. It should be about protecting their right to be online, but also their right not to be abused or suffer harm online. That is at the heart of what we are trying to do. I suspect there is rich room for further discussion to see if we can make some of this slightly less “baked in” and find some form of legislative icing, with hundreds and thousands, which makes it completely clear which children’s rights are being protected and how they will be protected. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.