It is the simple requests that always seem to evade the easy solutions. I will not go back over the very good introductory speech from the noble Baroness, which said it all; the figures are appalling and the range of fraud-inspired criminality is extraordinary. It plays back to a point we have been hammering today: if this Bill is about anything, it is the way the internet amplifies that which would be unpleasant anyway but will now reach epidemic proportions.
I wonder whether that is the clue to the problem the noble Baroness was commenting on—I think more in hope than in having any way to resolve it. It is great news that three Bills are doing all the stuff we want. We have talked a bit about three-legged stools; this is another one that might crash over. If we are not careful, it will slip through the cracks. I am mixing my metaphors again.
If the Minister would not mind a bit of advice, it seems to me that this Bill could do certain things and do them well. It should not hold back and wait for the others to catch up or do things differently. The noble Baroness made the point about the extraordinarily difficult to understand gap, in that what is happening to priority illegal content elsewhere in the Bill does not apply to this, even though it is clearly illegal activity. I understand that there is a logical line that it is not quite the same thing—that the Bill is primarily about certain restricted types of activity on social media and not the generality of fraud—but surely the scale of the problem and our difficulty in cracking down on it, by whatever routes and whatever size of stool we choose, suggest that we should do what we can in this Bill and do it hard, deeply and properly.
Secondly, we have amendments later in Committee on the role of the regulators and the possibility recommended by the Communications and Digital Committee that we should seek statutory backing for regulation in this area. Here is a classic example of more than two regulators working to achieve the same end that will probably bump into each other on the way. There is no doubt that the FCA has primary
responsibility in this area, but the reality is that the damage is being done by the amplification effect within the social media companies.
6.45 pm
It may or may not be correct, in terms of what we are doing, to restrict what the Bill does to those aspects of user-to-user content and other areas. If something is illegal, surely the Bill should be quite clear that it should not be happening and Ofcom should have the necessary powers, however we frame them, to make sure we follow this through to the logical conclusion. The most-needed powers are the ability for Ofcom to take the lead, if required, in relation to the other regulators who have an impact on this world—can we be sure that is in the Bill and can be exercised?—and to make sure that the transparency, the user reporting and the complaints issues that are so vital to cracking this in the medium term get sorted. I leave that with the Minister to take forward.