My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and I join her in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for introducing this group very clearly.
In taking part in this debate, I declare a joint interest with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in that I was for a number of years a judge in the Debating Matters events to which she referred. Indeed, the noble Baroness was responsible for me ending up in Birmingham jail, during the time that such a debate was conducted with the inmates of Birmingham jail. We have a common interest there.
I want to pick up a couple of additional points. Before I joined your Lordships’ Committee today I was involved in the final stages of the Committee debate on the economic crime Bill, where the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, provided a powerful argument—probably unintentionally—for the amendments we are debating here now. We were talking, as we have at great length in the economic crime Bill, about the issue of fraud. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, highlighted, in the context of online harms fraud is a huge aspect of people’s lives today and one that has been under-covered in this Committee, although it has very much been picked up in the economic crime Bill Committee. As we were talking about online fraud, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, said that consumers have to be “appropriately savvy”. I think that is a description of the need for education and critical thinking online, equipping people with the tools to be, as he said, appropriately savvy when facing the risks of fraud and scams, and all the other risks that people face online.
I have attached my name to two amendments here: Amendment 91, which concerns the providers of category 1 and 2A services having a duty, and Amendment 236, which concerns an Ofcom duty. This joins together two aspects. The providers are making money out of the services they provide, which gives them a duty to make some contribution to combatting the potential harms that their services present to people. Ofcom as a regulator obviously has a role. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who said that the education system also has a role, and there is some reference in here to Ofsted having a role.
What we need is a cross-society, cross-systems approach. This is where I also make the point that we need to think outside the scope of the Bill—it is part of the whole package—about how the education system works, because media literacy is not a stand-alone thing that you can separate out from the issues of critical thinking more broadly. We need to think about our education system, which is far too often, for schools in particular, where we get pupils to learn and regurgitate a whole set of facts and then reward them for that. We need to think about how our education system prepares children for the modern online world.
There is a great deal we can learn from the example—often cited but worth referring to—of Finland, which by various tests has been ranked as the country most
resistant to fake news. A very clearly built-in idea of questioning, scrutiny and challenge is being encouraged among pupils, starting from the age of seven. That is something we need to transform our education system to achieve. However, of course, many people using the internet now are not part of our education system, so this needs to be across our society. A focus on the responsibilities of Ofcom and the providers has to be in the Bill.