My Lords, I beg the forbearance of the Committee because, despite the best efforts of the Whips, this group includes two major issues that I must tackle.
Starting with senior management liability, I thank the Minister and the entire ministerial team for their engagement on this big and important subject. I am enormously proud of the technology sector and the enormous benefits that it has brought to the economy and to society. I remain a massive champion of innovation and technology in the round. However, senior executives in the technology sphere have had a long-standing blind spot. Their manifesto is that the internet is somehow different from the rest of the real world and that nothing must stand on its way. My noble friend Lord Moylan gave that pony quite a generous trot round the arena, so I will not go through it again, but when it comes to children, they have consistently failed to take seriously their safeguarding responsibilities.
I spoke in Committee last week of my experience at the Ministry of Sound. When I saw the internet in the late 1990s, I immediately saw a wonderful opportunity to target children, to sell to them, to get past their parents and normal regulation, and to get into their homes and their wallets. Lots of other people had the same thought, and for a long time we have let them do what they like. This dereliction of their duty of care has led to significant consequences, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, spoke very movingly about that. Those consequences are increasing all the time because of the take-up of mobile phones and computers by ever younger children. That has got to stop, and it is why we are here. That is why we have this Bill—to stop those consequences.
To change this, we cannot rely just on rhetoric, fines and self-regulation. We tried that, the experiment has failed, and we must try a different approach. We found that exhortations and a playing-it-nicely approach failed in the financial sector before the financial crisis. We remember the massive economic and societal costs of that failure. Likewise, in the tech sector, senior managers of firms big and small must be properly incentivised and held accountable for identifying and mitigating risks to children in a systematic way. That is why introducing senior management liability for child safety transgressions is critical. Senior management must be accountable for ensuring that child safety permeates the company and be held responsible when
risks of serious harm arise or gross failures take place. Just think how the banks have changed their attitude since the financial crisis because of senior liability.
I am pleased that the Government have laid their own amendment, Amendment 200A. I commend the Minister for bringing that forward and am extremely grateful to him and to the whole team for their engagement around this issue. The government amendment creates a new offence, holding senior managers accountable for failure to comply with confirmation decisions from Ofcom relating to protecting children from harmful content. I hope that my noble friend will agree that it is making Ofcom’s job easier by providing clear consequences for the non-enforcement of such decisions.
It is a very good amendment, but there are some gaps, and I would like to address those. It is worrying that the government amendment does not cover duties related to tackling child sexual exploitation and abuse. As it stands, this amendment is a half-measure which fails to hold senior managers liable for the most severe abuse online. Child sexual abuse and exploitation offences are at a record high, as we heard earlier. NSPCC research shows that there has been an 84% rise in online grooming since 2017-18. Tech companies must be held accountable for playing their role in tackling this.
That is why the amendment in my name does the following: first, it increases the scope of the Government’s amendment to make individuals also responsible for confirmation decisions on illegal safety duties related to child sexual abuse and exploitation. Secondly, it brings search services into scope, including both categories of service providers, which is critical for ensuring that a culture of compliance is adopted throughout the sector.
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I ask my noble friend the Minister: first, what is the Government’s rationale for not holding senior managers accountable for acting on confirmation decisions related to child sexual abuse offences in their amendment? Secondly, will he commit to discussing this further to ensure that the amendment covers these offences?
I would also like to speak to probing Amendments 220A to 220C in my name. Without effective enforcement, the many words and hours we spend in this House and in the other place talking about the need for robust online safety will come to nothing. Unless we get the enforcement provisions of this Bill right, the aims of the Bill will fail. We know that other content providers will not implement the Bill unless they know that there will be significant penalties for non-compliance. Often companies need to know that the penalty for the consequences of what they do will outweigh doing nothing. For instance, research on the gambling industry has found that unless companies fear the consequences of ineffective enforcement, they simply will not invest in robust technologies.
The amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry, in this group are clearly aimed at this very issue, and I express enormous thanks to the noble Lord. Those amendments seek to remove discretion from the regulator and ensure that enforcement action takes place.
As to the amendments to Clause 138, as your Lordships are aware, Ofcom is required to produce guidance on how it intends to enforce the duties and
requirements of the Bill. Ofcom has already set out its road map for enforcement, which gives a start to its framework. But these amendments seek to put some flesh on the bones. Amendment 220A states that guidance must cover four important topics. The first is how ancillary services such as payment providers will be used in the enforcement process if the service provider is either free or uses cryptocurrency or other virtual currency. This is absolutely critical for users and providers. It simply cannot be the case that sites which are free or use alternative payment methods could find themselves able to avoid enforcement.
Secondly, guidance should be produced which shows how internet service providers will be used in access restriction orders. The Government have previously suggested that ISPs are less willing to be involved in policing than previously suggested, but without the ability to block sites in contravention of the measures in the Bill, it seems there is a significant gap in the enforcement toolbox. Blocking content is something ISPs already do; they already block sites to protect intellectual property, such as football and other sporting rights. If you try to play a Taylor Swift song, you will find out how effective they are at that. It simply cannot be the case that ISPs would deem TV rights more important than child safety.
The third and fourth topics for guidance in the amendment set out what action Ofcom will take if an ancillary service provider, or a person who provides an access facility, fails to act on a relevant court order. We need to know what will happen when the next court action is ignored.
I hope my noble friend the Minister will be able to provide information on how he envisages enforcement will be implemented under this Bill, and I would be glad to meet him to discuss the matter further.